Are Social Media Plugins Weighing You Down?

Social media is a great thing.  It allows us to communicate with each other in a whole new way.  After the rise of big name social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like came around, more and more websites began including plugins on their websites that would help increase engagement and sharing of their content.  Did you know that about 12 million domains utilize the AddThis social plugin?  Another 2 million sites use ShareThis.  Even the biggest B2B companies utilize AddThis across the entire site.

But, there could be a problem.  What problem could that be?  Well, I’ll tell ya.

Social media plugins can have a potential negative impact to your website’s loading speed.   Social media plugins can add extra kb of page load and quite a few server requests.  All this can slow down your site when somebody tries to visit that page.

Andrea Harris wrote a piece about social media plugins on Search Engine Land.  In it, she brings up the idea of if you even need a social sharing plugin, and talks about the alternatives to them.

To check it out, follow the link below:
http://searchengineland.com/social-media-plug-ins-the-great-weighin-174407