Title: Lost Facebook share count moving site to HTTPS
Last modified: August 24, 2016

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# Lost Facebook share count moving site to HTTPS

 *  Resolved [itmustbeboojum](https://wordpress.org/support/users/itmustbeboojum/)
 * (@itmustbeboojum)
 * [11 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/)
 * I have Twitter and Facebook sharing buttons on my site savebees.org
 * This morning I switched this site over from http: to https: using an .htaccess
   file in the root to redirect http requests to https.
 * My Twitter share count is preserved fine, but my Facebook count (which was close
   to 1000) dropped to zero as soon as I made the change.
 * I made no changes to permalink structure or any other settings in WordPress.
 * In my General settings my WordPress URL and Site Address URL are both: [https://savebees.org](https://savebees.org)
 * Why would the Twitter share count be ok, but not Facebook? Is there anything 
   I can do to restore the lost Facebook shares? My Facebook counter at this moment
   reads “3” up from zero this morning, but these shares are clearly not being added
   to my original share count 🙁
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Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

 *  Thread Starter [itmustbeboojum](https://wordpress.org/support/users/itmustbeboojum/)
 * (@itmustbeboojum)
 * [11 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/#post-6170699)
 * I fixed it! Back to my proper share count in Facebook (I lost the 5 shares in
   the interim unavoidably though). Here’s how I solved it, in case others find 
   this thread.
 * First, I queried Facebook’s API directly with the following special links. Here
   I discovered that Facebook is treating the “http” and “https” versions of my 
   site as separate entities within their sharing “graph”:
    [http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://savebees.org](http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://savebees.org)
   [http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=https://savebees.org](http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=https://savebees.org)
 * I took a quick refresher on Open Graph tags, and installed this plugin: “Facebook
   Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags (1.5.2)” I did this because I found
   out that what I wanted was to get an “og:url” meta tag on my page, which Facebook(
   and other sharing networks) see as the canonical URL for a given page. The deal
   is that one wants the og:url tag to point to the well-shared version of one’s
   site (in my case the “http” version). Then one can let the 301 redirect in the.
   htaccess (which sends all http requests to https) do its thing.
 * I then changed my WordPress General Settings back for WordPress URL and Site 
   Address URL to “http” rather than “https”, because that’s what the plugin uses
   to set the link in the meta tag “og:url”. I had originally changed them to “https”
   because I wanted to make it easy on myself in the future when uploading images
   in posts/pages for those image sources to be https rather than http (to avoid
   those mixed-content security messages). Well, I’ll just edit those in the source
   of future posts manually until I find another way to set the “og:url” tag separately
   from modifying the General Settings in WordPress. For now, I’m just happy to 
   have my many FB shares back!
 * Odd that Twitter didn’t have this issue with its share count (more sensibly seeing
   the “http” and “https” versions of my site as one and the same sharing object).
   It irritates me to change the way I wish to do something simply for Facebook.
   If only I’d setup my site to be https at the very beginning! For now this works
   though, and I’m happy to move onto other things. If anyone has a better suggestion,
   feel free to post it 🙂
 *  Thread Starter [itmustbeboojum](https://wordpress.org/support/users/itmustbeboojum/)
 * (@itmustbeboojum)
 * [10 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/#post-6170913)
 * Never mind somehow Facebook (their actual API or graph or whatever) has equalized
   the counts to 14 between http and https, losing all my many years worth of shares,
   almost 600 🙁 Oddly, when I checked the links above other day (querying their
   graph), the shares had flipped, showing 594 on https versus 14 on http (before
   it was the other way around, and I triple-checked this to make sure I wasn’t 
   going nuts). Too bad they equalized with my lowest count rather than highest,
   I’m so unhappy about losing so many years’ worth of shares data, but there’s 
   no support of course at Facebook for such a case, and I haven’t read anywhere
   else on the web of something like this happening. It strikes me as a database
   error on their part, as for all my other sites there are still more shares on
   http rather than https. Why they flipped, and then why my share count was mysteriously
   reset after so many years, I’ve no idea 🙁
 *  [Ryan C.](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ryanc413/)
 * (@ryanc413)
 * [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/#post-6170914)
 * I’m sorry to hear about the trouble! I’m afraid we don’t have control over the
   counts: they come directly from Facebook, and Facebook reports 12 shares for 
   that page at the moment:
    [http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=https://savebees.org](http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=https://savebees.org)
 * If you think it should report more shares, I’d suggest reporting the bug here:
   
   [https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/trending/](https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/trending/)
 * I hope this helps to at least clear things up! Please let me know if you have
   any other questions.
 *  Thread Starter [itmustbeboojum](https://wordpress.org/support/users/itmustbeboojum/)
 * (@itmustbeboojum)
 * [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/#post-6170915)
 * Thank you so much for posting a reply to this thread. I wish I could report the
   bug to Facebook, because it’s odd (not to mention embarrassing) to have lost 
   close to 600 shares built up over years!
 * Unfortunately I cannot appear to report the bug at the link you provided without
   a Facebook account. I’ve never been on Facebook, but people still shared my website
   link, hence my reasonable share count (before it mysteriously disappeared right
   around October 9th-ish).
 * I suppose there’s nothing to be done, other than record my experience here, in
   case it helps someone else to know that other sites suddenly lose share counts
   from years of data overnight with Facebook 🙁
 *  [Ryan C.](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ryanc413/)
 * (@ryanc413)
 * [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/#post-6170916)
 * You’re welcome! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
 *  [Rogier](https://wordpress.org/support/users/metaphysics/)
 * (@metaphysics)
 * [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/#post-6170917)
 * This article might be of use [http://goo.gl/cUapxu](http://goo.gl/cUapxu)

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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## Tags

 * [HTTPS](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/https/)
 * [sharing](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/sharing/)

 * 6 replies
 * 3 participants
 * Last reply from: [Rogier](https://wordpress.org/support/users/metaphysics/)
 * Last activity: [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/lost-facebook-share-count-moving-site-to-https/#post-6170917)
 * Status: resolved