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
-
What is the value of having a social media feed displayed on your website?
This is something I asked myself this evening. You see a lot of sites with a Facebook or Twitter feed displayed, but I struggle to understand their value. OK, it shows that you are active on this or that social media channel, but unless you are posting great content consistently on the social media displayed, the impact of your feed could detract from the web page it is displayed on. It could also cause a visitor to that page on your site to click away from your site into the noise and distraction of that social media channel. I don't have an issue with using social media icons to link to your channels, but they are more discreet and the sort of thing people will look for if they are interested enough in your web pages to want to connect with you. Also, social sharing icons are good, but I do not see the value in social media feeds. Do you agree or disagree? I am more than will to be persuaded otherwise. Thanks in advance,
Social Media | | crackingmedia
Peter0 -
Twitter Tool Question
I've been searching for a tool that will allow me to send mass tweets to multiple @accounts? For example, I use Topsy to see who's shared my content and want to send a follow up tweet to everyone who has, but find it time-consuming to do this manually. What I have in mind is something where I can upload a spreadsheet of Twitter names, write one tweet and for this to be tweeted at everyone on the list. I haven't found what I'm looking for so far. Does anyone know of such a tool?
Social Media | | Matt_Wilson1 -
Does it matter waht email address you use for twitter?
Hello, Does it matter what kind of email address my client uses for a business twitter account? Like companyname@gmail.com or request@companyname.com or client'sname@companyname.com We're looking to use twitter for guest post outreach. Thanks.
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
How to coordinate blog, facebook and twitter.
I have a small law firm with a website including a blog, as well as accounts with Twitter and FB. I usually write a blog on the website then reference and link to that blog from twitter and FB. I also do short blogs that are basically links to other interesting articles about my field, and link to those as well. Is this helpful or correct from he perspective of SEO for the website? Is there a particular way to do this? I have much to learn so any comments are welcome. Many thanks.
Social Media | | NCCompLawyer0 -
Number of Facebook likes and shares for a webpage went significantly down.
I noticed that a bunch of "likes" and "shares" had gone down for a webpage I do marketing for, and I wanted to see if anyone had also experienced this. About two years ago, I realized that when I would send a FB message with a link to a webpage I was promoting, the number of shares and likes for the page would go up by one. So, thinking that I had stumbled onto something incredible, I proceeded to message over 500 people on facebook with a link to the webpage. Soon enough, I had increased the likes and shares displayed on the webpage to 635 (as shown in the Digg Digg plugin). Today, I went back to the same page and realized the number of shares and likes had gone down to 160. Has anyone experienced a drop in the number of shares and likes, and has anyone increased their likes and shares by sending a message with a link to a webpage being marketed? (You can test this out by messaging someone in facebook with a single link to webpage that displays the number of facebook "likes" and "shares" -Once you send the message the number should go up by one) Thanks
Social Media | | 1activator0 -
Best Social Sharing Platform for B2b sites
Guess that title of the question says it all. What is the best social platform for dull b2b sites? The kind of content that you wouldn't want to share with your friends and family.... Not that type of content before anyone gets the wrong idea 🙂
Social Media | | DavidLenehan0 -
Facebook Shares and the rel="canonical" tag
We use canonical tags for multipart videos, using part 1 of the series as their canonical tag. The logic behind this is that if you have eight parts, it's better for part 1 to get all the link juice for the entire series, so that when someone searches for the main keyword, part 1 is the highest ranked part to appear in search results, and the link juice from every part is aggregated into that one page. The problem is the Facebook made changes to their URL sharing practices to reflect the canonical tag. So as long as the tag is used Facebook ignores the image and description from say part 2, and uses the description from part 1. Can this be waived by using Facebook Open Graph Protocol? Thanks!!
Social Media | | Tug-Agency0 -
Social Media Campaigns
Hey SEOmoz Community, I have a couple questions about social media campaigns. Which KPIs do you use for social media campaigns? How do you determine realistic campaign goals? I am looking at projecting the number of followers/fans and the amount of traffic a site can expect to see as a result of this growth. Any suggestions. Thanks! Geoff
Social Media | | GeoffKenyon0