Do having social sharing icons such as Twitter and Pinterest slow down site speed?
-
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
-
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 -
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.
-
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 -
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).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Yoast Social Accounts URL Section
Hi When you click: Social within Yoast plugin it defaults to 'Account' tab and displays a list of fields to enter your social media account urls. Sentence above list says: "To inform Google about your social profiles, we need to know their URLs. For each, pick the main account associated with this site and please enter them below" What does that mean exactly and does it effect links on the site etc or literally is just Yoast telling G ? Also if you have sub sites for different language versions (WP on Multi User setup), which in turn have their own language specific social media account versions , should you enter those urls in the sub site language version own Yoast plugin fields OR , as per "...pick the main account associated with this site and please enter them below" use the primary social account and not the language specific social account or just leave them blank ? Many Thanks Dan
Social Media | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
Which URL should I share with Facebook and google plus ?
Hi, My question is which URL should I use with the share plugins of Facebook and Google Plus.
Social Media | | Kadel
Should I use the URL of the website or of the facebook's page / google's + page? By the way , may I ask what's the source of the FB Shares that Moz present in the advanced keyword analysis report? and are those shares are of the website or of the facebook's page? Thanks,
Kadel.0 -
PINTEREST?!!!!!! What is up?! Help, please
I've read, over and over that Pinterest creates no follow links and so is good for virality, traffic and social media but does NOT help with SEO. Is this true? I had an "SEO" tell me recently that this does actually create backlinks. I don't believe them...
Social Media | | WNL0 -
Does creating a Facebook App help your social SEO factors?
We're looking to build out an event countdown widget for Facebook users to install as an App. Should we just focus on creating a useful app, or should we be trying to also optimise it for Likes, Comments, Shares etc. Having read the Searchmetrics 2012 report we're starting to ramp up our FB efforts...
Social Media | | cruiserDan0 -
Will Google+ pages be added to social tracking soon?
Google+ and YouTube are important social media networks for several of our clients. Are you planning to add them soon? Thank you.
Social Media | | pheffernan2 -
Twitter inbound link not being indexed
Hello Mozzers! I was using open site explorer to investigate inbound links to our company website and also to our competitors. The main difference being is their top links are all coming from twitter - where as ours aren't. Now our twitter account is about 10months old maybe more and it's got the standard setup with a description and the URL. We've also been tweeting with a link directly to our site. Yet no luck? Am I missing something? Thanks, Dan
Social Media | | Sparkstone0 -
Any recommendations for Social Media Submission
I came across a company one time that would sign you up and submit your username to all the social media sites. Seems like it was "knowit" or something like that. Anyway Does any one have an recommendations on companies to submit to sites instead of having to do each one individually. Thanks, Utah Tiger
Social Media | | Boodreaux0 -
Does the open site explorer crawler crawl FB?
That is to say, where there are links on public FB pages, such as those on my own company's public profile to my company's website---can the crawler detect these, or is it simply not bothering to crawl FB because so much is private? I don't see any links from FB in the crawl results, and don't believe I ever have, even for very large brands' domains.
Social Media | | jimseo0