Social share buttons: Crawl Audit check 194

Short answer: share buttons make it one click to post a page on social media or send it to a friend. They're optional, and many sites have dropped them. Check 194 is informational and always passes: it notes whether share buttons are present.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: always. It notes share buttons if it finds elements with "share" in the class, or links to X, Facebook or LinkedIn share pages.

What Nielsen Norman Group says

• "Don't go wild with sharing tools and sharing counters, because research shows people do more sharing with their own tools and methods."
• "Sharing tools frequently appear at the beginning and/or end of articles, recipes, lists, and other informational pages that people are most likely to want to share."
• It adds that some sites removed embedded Share and Like tools altogether, finding the clutter and privacy cost wasn't worth the little use they got.

What matters more

• Good preview tags, so a shared link looks right wherever it's pasted (checks 195 to 198).
• A clean, readable address to copy.
• If you add buttons, use plain links rather than social media scripts, which load trackers on every page.

On devmarde.com

We don't have share buttons; our pages rely on preview tags instead. It passes.

Sources

• Nielsen Norman Group, Utility navigation: what it is and how to design it (2015), checked 6 October 2026.