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
-
If you post on two Twitter accounts could be rated as duplicate content
I have a personal Twitter account which is building up, but I also have a Twitter account for my holiday letting agency and until now I’ve always separated the subject of the tweets and links to my websites but I’m using Buffer which automates your tweets in advance and so I included some of the links to my business holiday letting agency articles on my personal account and people seem to like them and have shared them, but is there any risks to doing that regarding duplicate type of content? At the end of the day some the people on my personal Twitter will be interested in my agency tweets about holiday accommodation, I just want to do anything which could be termed spam.
Social Media | | persuaders0 -
How To Remove Fake Social Media Likes
Hi there Mozzers, Unfortunately I used a black hat seo company for my website at http://greatedmontonhomes.ca in the past. Over the last while I've been able to clean up quite a few of the bad links going to the site, but the company also engaged in buying fake Facebook likes and Tweets. Is there any way to clean these up? Guy
Social Media | | guypelletier0 -
Social Media + MOZ Open site explorer
Hello Everyone, When i run a report on Open site explorer, it says that our website has 129 Facebook likes and 129 tweets. However, our website has had over 4k Facebook likes and i imagine much more than 129 mentions of our url on twitter. Can any one shed any light on this? Thanks 🙂
Social Media | | Alexogilvie0 -
Social Management Software
Hi all Just wondering, what service do you use to manage multiple social profiles ( in excess of 50). Curious as we have used http://commun.it for twitter accounts, but gets tedious as we need to log in on several different accounts, although great service Also use Hootsuite but reporting is terrible ... Really looking for some platform that offers lots of account management, building networks while offers decent reporting. And preferably some platform that expands beyond Twitter and FB only Thanks in advance John
Social Media | | Johnny4B0 -
Social media strategy
Hey everyone, I know is this is a bit of an old strategy, but what do you think about building social profiles (blogger, tumbler, wordpress, etc) with a keyword in the url for link building and SEO? Outdated strategy? Unnatural? Has it worked for you recently? Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
Social Media | | jhinchcliffe0 -
Quick Fire Social Academy
Has anyone heard of Quick Fire Social Academy?? (http://quickfiresocial.com) My boss just signed up for it and wants me to check it out. This the claim their website makes: "In 5 Minutes A Week Or Less You Can Setup A Full Social Media Campaign That's Full Of Red Hot Viral Content !" I went to their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/QuickFireSocial. They only have 7 likes and the page was just created in January of this year, AND I see no Red Hot content on their site. So, I have a few concerns. Is anybody using them? How are the results?
Social Media | | smartlinksolutions0 -
Twitter and Link Juice
Sorry if I am late to the party with this, but I thought Twitter stopped giving sites link juice? I have been running some sites through Open Site Explorer and there main links are coming from Twitter. I have other sites who are on Twitter and nothing comes up. Why is that? Thanks!
Social Media | | ClickIt0