Page Speed and Social sharing bookmarks - how to balance

[Jborgueta]

I've been having some challenges on my page load times and am in process of addressing.  Some of the issues are my pictures(so I'm in process of condensing), but part of the issue (according to pingdom.com) is my social sharing.

I was using 1 click retweet, and when I changed this to Sexy bookmarks, it seemed to improve.  But, I'm wondering 2 things:

1.  Do you guys have any recos on which plugin is best to use and takes least time to load (I'm not sure if this is contraditory).  My priority is G+/Tw/FB.

2.  On my sexybookmarks, it's strange because visually, the plugin is not showing up correctly.  Where the G+ button should be, it's invisible.  Ironically it works, if I click on it, but a normal person is not going to realize it's there.  Any suggestions?

In case it helps, my site is TheFlooringGirl.com.  I don't think the plugin shows up there, but it does show up at the bottom of all of my blog posts.

Thx.  I appreciate any guidance you can provide.

[Jborgueta]

Thx Steve.  I'm just installed it...or so I thought.  I activated it, but it doesn't seem to be appearing.  Let me know if you have any advice.  Not sure if I need to format it somewhere.

I'm going to try to check.  But, let me know if I'm missing something.

Edit: Nevermind, I figured it out.  You go to settings, then Discussion and then find WP Socialite and choose options.

Of course, now, all my settings say 0 even though I previously had +'s, etc.

Thanks again.

[Jborgueta]

Thx Alex.  I will check out that link.  And, thank Steve. That is incredibly helpful.  I'm going to check that out.

[SteveTheWoodsman]

The best one - bar none - is WPSocialite. It loads only a 5kb image of the social sharing icons but on hover will load the rest... Deferring the load until it's needed. I originally saw it being used on Tech crunch and then implemented it on several client sites... It has a sleek look to boot.

That alone has cut some sites load time by 6+ seconds by our tests.

Hope that helps!

[Polarstar]

Hi Janis, this may help: http://www.w3-edge.com/weblog/2011/02/optimize-social-media-button-performance/

cheers, AP