Sitecore’s SXA accelerator comes with a large library of components that help accelerate development. One of those components will no longer work after May 2023: The Social Share Component.
SXA’s social share component leveraged the AddThis service to inject social sharing buttons on your website. You could create an account on AddThis, configure what buttons and configure your site to use it pretty easily. It even gave you social sharing metrics if you logged into to view their dashboards.
AddThis has been owned by Oracle since 2016. They recently made the business decision to terminate the AddThis service effective May 31, 2023, noting:
- AddThis buttons may disappear from the user’s websites;
- The AddThis dashboard associated with the user’s registration for AddThis, and all support for AddThis services, will no longer be available;
- All features of AddThis configured to interoperate with user’s websites, any other Oracle services, or any third-party tools and plug-ins will no longer function.
I suspect many people won’t know this is happening until the buttons stop showing up in June.
Alternatives to the AddThis Social Share Component
There are currently no out of the box SXA components that replace the Social Share component. Creating a custom component to link to your social networks of choice is not difficult to implement, particularly with Scriban templates. But don’t forget about adding tracking to feed Google Analytics or whatever web analytics tool you are using, being mindful of Privacy rules and regulations.
There are also alternative services like “ShareThis,” “ShareaHolic” and plenty of others. Keep in mind some of them may not be completely free, and all of them will take some effort to wrap in a new SXA component and replace the Social Share Component on your site with a new one.
Wrapping Up
If you’re using SXA’s social share component, you have about a month to replace it with an alternative sharing solution. If you need help choosing or implementing an alternative, we’d love to help. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, Twitter or fill out our contact form.
