Recommendation for Social Sharing Plugin for WordPress

[Gautam]

Since everyone here keeps a very close eye on the page load times. I was hoping to get suggestions on the social sharing plugins or service for WordPress.

We have been using AddThis, but looking for a more lightweight and faster solution.

Thanks, and looking forward to your suggestions.

[KaneJamison]

The fastest social sharing buttons will always be the hardcoded ones, but that may require some Wordpress functions, server side code, or onpage javascript to be written. The easiest method is to use native links like these examples:

http://www.joshcanhelp.com/improving-website-and-wordpress-performance-with-hard-coded-share-buttons/

If you're OK with a slight speed reduction, you can use JS-based plugins. We tend to use SumoMe's share buttons because they're pretty straightforward to implement on a variety of CMSs and reasonably fast, but, you've got a lot of other options like AddThis, Wordpress plugins, and more.

[SurgeStream]

Hi Gautam,

I have installed around 5-6 different social sharing plugins for Wordpress and I found the one that had the most features and reasonable load time to be Shareaholic.  I haven't performed any benchmark tests in terms of speed with this plugin though.

A while back I was performing some speed tests and discovered that just about every social media widget/code was adding a significant amount of kb's to a webpage, Facebook in particular if I recall correctly.   This was either hand coded or using a plugin.  Once I disabled all social media widgets/plugins then my page score was fine.  Now, again, I haven't run any benchmark tests, but I am assuming that most of this code has already been cached in your visitors website browser by the time they get to your site, since they have already visited another site that has this same code, so the load time is not noticeable to them when they arrive at your site.

Once you add any 3rd party code to your site you are prone to issues beyond your control, since you are no longer hosting the code. For example, say a plugin's server is having latency issues.  This might make it appear like your website is still trying to load, even though everything appears fine, but if you check the status bar of your browser it will indicate one of your social media scripts is still loading.  This can happen with any 3rd party code added, for example, live chat.

Hope my explanation helps.  Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Kevin