Social Sharing Buttons

Problem:

Poor site load time, affecting user experience, due to social sharing buttons

How did I measure performance:

Used an awesome tool to measure my blog’s performance from pingdom, which not only measured the load time but also other metrics such as performance insights, request types and content size.  I still wanted the UX to include the ability to share my posts/articles on a number of social platforms, so I replaced the sharing buttons (as part of the theme) with the sharing capability of the WordPress plugin from SumoMe .

What did I do:

Removed the social sharing buttons and reduced my site performance from above 8 seconds load time to below 3.

Before removing the sharing buttons:

After removing the sharing buttons (just with SumoMe sharing capability):

I can safely say, yes, sharing buttons impact your sites performance, but think carefully about the ones you choose if you want the social sharing capability on your blog, for now I will be sticking with the sharing capability of SumoMe

What’s your experience of sharing buttons and site performance?