MashShare: the plugin's history, closure and what to do now

The guides in this section

1. 01MashShare add-ons: what each one didA plain record of the MashShare add-ons and licences once sold on this domain, what each feature did, and where to find a current guide to the same feature.6 min read
2. 02MashShare alternatives: choosing a replacement share pluginMashShare was closed in 2025. How to choose a replacement share plugin: features to compare, questions to ask, and when plain links are the better answer.7 min read
3. 03Removing MashShare cleanly from a WordPress siteRemove MashShare from WordPress without breaking posts: find leftover shortcodes and theme calls, decide what to do with stored counts, and clean options.7 min read

What MashShare was

A share buttons plugin in the style of large news sites: a big total share count beside a row of network buttons, with a free core on the plugin directory and premium add-ons sold here through a WordPress store, an affiliate programme, a support forum and a separate documentation site. It was popular: the directory listing showed more than a thousand reviews by the time it closed.

Where the old documentation went

The documentation subdomain and the support forum are gone. The questions they answered, such as Facebook access tokens, app IDs, Bitly tokens, wrong preview images and counts not updating, are covered by independent guides on this site, and links to the old articles redirect to them.

If your site still runs it

Plan to replace it. An unmaintained plugin receives no security fixes, and features that depend on network APIs fail as those APIs change. Start with choosing a replacement, then follow removing MashShare cleanly.

What this record is built from

Three sources, and nothing else: the plugin's own files in the WordPress.org repository (the readme, the settings file and the uninstall script, which name every option, post meta key, transient and cron hook the plugin left behind), Internet Archive captures of this domain from 2014 to 2024 (the store pages, the add-on listings, the documentation site), and the link record of the 537 old addresses other sites still point at. Where those three disagree or fall silent, the guides say so. Nothing here is a review, a recommendation or a replacement download; the alternatives guide compares approaches, not products.

Where to start, by situation

The plugin still works and nothing is broken. Use the time you have: record your settings and pick a maintained replacement with MashShare alternatives: choosing a replacement share plugin, then test it on staging. Something broke after a WordPress or PHP update. Stabilise first with the plugin troubleshooting order, which covers recovery mode and disabling a plugin over SFTP, then remove the plugin with removing MashShare cleanly from a WordPress site. You followed an old link to an add-on, a licence or a download. MashShare add-ons: what each one did explains what that product was and which independent guide covers the feature now; there is nothing to buy or activate.

How this section connects to provenance

Migration keeps author and image metadata intact, provided you check one thing. A share plugin does not write bylines, author pages or the featured image, so swapping it leaves those alone. The exception is preview tags. The old core plugin had an Open Graph Meta Tags switch and an add-on that did the same job; on sites where that switch was the only source of og:title, og:image and article:author, turning the plugin off removes the tags and the next share shows a bare link with no author. Before you deactivate, confirm that an SEO plugin or theme code outputs the tags, then compare the page head before and after using the checks in authorship tags for shared links and byline schema for human authors. The image itself is untouched by a plugin change; what happens to its embedded metadata later is covered in where image metadata gets stripped.

Questions