Addthis - Bloated + Calls other sites?

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Hi

I have been using addthis for quite a while - and I do like the "recommended content".

I feel really uncomfortable about:

1. Site speed .. it seems to slow the site down considerably.
2. It calls a number of other domains - sitescout.com , tubemogul.com , crwdcntrl.com - and a number of others.

Is there a paid alternative to addthis?  Any thoughts around this? the recommended content that pops up is pretty cool.

Thanks

M

[GlobeRunner]

Unfortunately when you use other third party tools like this you are going to suffer page speed issues and it's going to link out to sites that you don't necessarily endorse. I'm not sure if they have a paid version, but you might test the removal of it on your site for a period of time to see if your site gets better rankings as a result.

You can also test to see if your users are actually using it or not, that may be an indication of whether or not you need to keep it or not. I typically don't recommend third party tools like this because they do tend to slow your site's page speed.

[KaneJamison]

Eric is correct - this is an unavoidable aspect of calling code from third party websites.

If you want to speed it up further - you can get rid of Add This and use hard coded social sharing buttons. These typically are done in PHP or JS and load custom sharing pre-filled data for the current browser URL. There are some preprogrammed JS ones (eg this list). The speed benefit would come from loading these on your own CDN - no new HTTP request for the user and speed is only limited to the filesize and quality of your hosting/CDN instead of a third party network.

I'm not sure about the Recommended Content - if that's a paid ad unit then the site speed issue is unavoidable. This is part of the general page speed bloat caused by Ad Tech and publishers. If it's not paid - then replace it with Recommended Content on your own site using a plugin or code that is generated by your own server, not their.s

[CandymanKen]

Hi

We used Addthis for a while as well, but had the same issue. At times it really slowed our page load. We wound up doing what others have suggested, manually coding in the share links.As for recommended products, we now use an extension which does a great job.

Ken