Do having social sharing icons such as Twitter and Pinterest slow down site speed?

[Pday]

We are debating a redesign of a travel site and wondering whether having social sharing buttons including Pinterest and Facebook above each image would slow down site speed and therefore have a negative impact on our rankings.  We are deciding between having the icons above each image or just in the side bar of all pages.  Many thanks, Penny

[AarcMediaGroup]

I have in fact seen a slow down in performance but it depends on how and where you're placing them. I don't think the slow down has ever been enough to have an impact on your rankings, but I've seen situations where it would annoy a visitor.

I've had better luck using the 3rd party services like AddThis or ShareThis.  Sure they have limitations, but for me at least they seem to perform a bit better in terms of speed than if you're using Facebook or Twitter's tools directly (and separately).

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Yes, the vendor you use (e.g. AddThis), the features you use (e.g. number of likes), and number of icons you use (e.g. FB, Twitter, G+) can affect the performance of your page.  FWIW, I dropped AddThis because it was much too slow.  YMMV.  I recommend testing several vendors and feature settings.  Also, you should retest the page performance periodically.

Best,
Christopher

[AarcMediaGroup]

Christopher, did you test add this against using say Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest tools all separately?  Many need to include 4 to 5 different social media tools, and loading each one of them separately in my experience has typically always been more of a burden on the cover than using even add this.

I think I myself actually moved into primarily using ShareThis, but that only had to do with liking their look and feel better for various projects.

[ChristopherGlaeser]

I did not test all combinations, but I did determine that it's faster to select the subset that your visitors will use and not to load the myriad of fluff icons.

Best,
Christopher