Why WordPress “Likes” Are Lower than Your Social Shares

As a user of WordPress, you’re used to exploring your own dashboard. You’ve probably stumbled across one part of minor analytics, something you might question, though it doesn’t seem to affect much. That something might look a little like this.

What is it? It’s a chart of your viewers, your visitors, your likes and your comments on WordPress. There’s just one oddity. What do they mean by likes? Obviously it’s a different metric than likes on your other social networks. You can check yourself! The number doesn’t match Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social network you’re actively on. Where is WordPress getting this like metric from?

The WordPress Social Experiment

Did you know that WordPress has its own social engagement system? It’s true! When you visit a WordPress site, either one of the WordPress.com domain sites or a site that uses one of the default layouts, then you’ll see an entry down by the comments.

Here’s an example from With The Grains, a WordPress-based cooking blog - this post is about making your own homemade vanilla extract. The exact topic doesn’t matter; scroll down to the bottom of the page.

At the very bottom of the page, you see the end of the post, a string of related posts, a series of social sharing buttons, and then something else.

You see a Like button with a star in it, and then a string of avatars. Those avatars are Gravatars, the avatar system WordPress uses for their accounts. Beneath that line you see something like “40 bloggers like this.”

It’s a remnant of WordPress’s attempt to be more of a social network than just a straight blogging platform. The Gravatar account, which lets you use your WordPress account on any Gravatar-enabled website for commenting, was another part of this attempt. WordPress isn’t viewed as a big social network, and while users do build communities around their blogs, the social layer has never taken off in the way the platform may have once hoped. If you’re weighing your options, see how WordPress.com Premium compares to a self-hosted WordPress blog.

You can read some of the WordPress documentation about their like system here, if you’re curious.

The Value of a WordPress Like

Here’s the thing: a like on WordPress isn’t very valuable. It’s a like from a user on their chosen platform. But that platform is WordPress.

The main conceit is that WordPress is a platform of bloggers. When you make a WordPress account, you’re usually doing it because you want to create a blog. The idea is that the likes are part of a blogger-to-blogger social experience. Trackbacks and Pingbacks are another feature of the whole system, an attempt to enable bloggers to connect with each other.

The issue here is that WordPress could not limit their commenting system to just other bloggers; that basically wouldn’t fly. That means anyone can come in and create a WordPress account with their own Gravatar. Anyone with one of these accounts can leave a like or a comment on any blog post that supports the system.

The original intent, of being a way for fellow bloggers to express their approval of your site, is largely diluted. A like from a WordPress user carries about as much weight as a like on any other minor platform, except maybe less, given how few people actively browse WordPress as a discovery tool.

There’s a common argument that a single like - a Facebook reaction, an Instagram heart, or a WordPress Like - isn’t worth a whole lot. Think about it, it’s trivial to give a like. You like a piece of content or a funny joke in passing, and you don’t think about it.

On most social networks, a like has at least some secondary value. On Facebook it can push a post toward friends of the person who liked it. On Instagram it feeds into recommendation algorithms. On WordPress, a like does basically none of that. Nobody has a main WordPress feed they’re actively browsing. Your like doesn’t share your post with anyone. People can see the number of WordPress likes a post has, but only if they’re displayed.

That’s actually one of the biggest problems with WordPress likes; they aren’t necessarily displayed. Many WordPress themes don’t have a place to display likes, and you can basically disable the display of likes on your posts entirely.

People can see the small Gravatars of the other bloggers that liked a post. But that’s about it. You can’t use those Gravatars to view the blogs of the people who liked the post, or their full profiles. All you see is a basic page with very little helpful information.

WordPress has their own discovery system, sort of. They have a page that features recent content from WordPress to power their blogs. However, it’s not ranked based on likes at all - it’s basically curated by the people who run WordPress. Otherwise something with a mere 40 likes wouldn’t make it onto the front page to be used to give you an example.

Why WordPress Likes Don’t Matter

Think about it: what is the job of a like for your website? On your website? On a social network, sure, there are some benefits to helping post visibility, which makes your page look a little more authoritative, and so on. But on your own website? A like doesn’t mean too much.

The main way a like from a social network matters on your site is through social sharing buttons. When you have a Facebook icon or an Instagram share count to the side of your posts and everyone can see your post was shared 200,000 times, they know they’re reading something with genuine viral value. People liked this post! They should probably be reading it!

By default, WordPress shows their likes way at the bottom of the page, basically in the footer - it’s above the comments. But it’s also positioned to be minimally intrusive. You just gloss over it when you’re skipping the related posts and scrolling down to read comments.

This isn’t where you see your buttons and like counts. In most cases, when you’re displaying social share counts, you’re doing it through a dedicated social sharing plugin or suite. These tools show the icon of the platform alongside a count. Many modern social sharing plugins even like to hide the numbers entirely, since some networks have restricted share count data through their APIs, and it looks cleaner without inconsistent numbers scattered across buttons.

How many of these third-party social sharing suites support WordPress as one of their social networks? Not many of them. It’s a niche inclusion, and most plugin developers have deprioritized it as engagement with the WordPress like system has remained low over the years. You might even remember older social sharing plugins that padded out their network list with WordPress likes as a way to look more feature-rich - even though almost no one was using it.

Even if you find a button that can display WordPress likes, or if you’re using the default WordPress likes interface with one of the WordPress themes that supports it, there’s still one good reason to be careful about leaning into it.

People like to associate a like button with Facebook or Instagram. You like things on Facebook, you heart things on Instagram, you repost things on Threads. People see a like box on your site, and there’s a good chance they’re going to assume it’s connected to a platform they already use. The star icon is even blue - it can add to the possible uncertainty.

You might lose out on more actual engagement when users click a WordPress like button thinking it’s something else, or when they’re prompted to log in and abandon the action entirely. The distraction can cost you comments if they meant to interact but got derailed. Your Facebook like button can run into similar issues when users expect one thing and get another.

The power of your share counts is in displaying a large, recognizable number with a platform your audience already trusts. WordPress likes are never going to produce that number. WordPress powers a giant share of the web - estimates have placed it between 30 and 50 percent of all websites - but that doesn’t translate into an active social audience browsing and liking posts the way users do on Instagram or Facebook, which has over three billion monthly active users.

When WordPress Likes Can Be Useful

It wouldn’t be a look at the issue without looking at it from the other side. WordPress likes aren’t worthless. People who use them tend to have Gravatars set up, which means they’re comparatively spam-free compared to bot activity on other platforms. You’re more or less getting real engagement - even if those likes aren’t doing much to distribute your content.

I look at it pragmatically. WordPress Likes are not harmful to your site, unless they are somehow in the way of another sharing element. Since they’re tucked away in the footer while your other sharing options live in the sidebar or inline with the content, there’s no conflict. Keeping WordPress likes around won’t hurt you.

My recommendation is to let it be as it is, a button in your footer. The people who use the WordPress like system already know where to find it and will use it as they see fit. Everyone else can ignore it and use the bigger, more prominent sharing buttons. They’re two different audiences, and you can accommodate both without them getting in each other’s way.

The WordPress sharing system is something that was never aggressively promoted, because WordPress is fundamentally a publishing platform - not a social network. You get more value out of comments, email subscribers, social links, and shares on other platforms than you ever will out of WordPress likes. They basically don’t hurt, so there’s no reason to stress about them.

You can still use WordPress likes as a relative metric to measure how well your posts resonate with WordPress users specifically - it works best as a comparative tool within your own site - a way to see which posts perform better than others in that narrow context.

The other possible use is for aggregate share totals. Some social sharing plugins will combine the numbers from your sharing buttons to give you one aggregate count. Adding WordPress likes to that pool makes the number slightly bigger, and a bigger number is usually more persuasive at a casual look - even if the underlying WordPress contribution is modest.