Watch page load times when using Wordpress social bookmark plugins
Comments(5) I’d like to make my blog posts more share-friendly by adding buttons at the end of every post for the most popular bookmarking/sharing web sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and so on. There’s a wide range of social bookmark plugins available for WordPress. A plugin that immediately caught my eye is SexyBookmarks. It looks great and you can choose between several catch phrases like Sharing is caring or Sharing is sexy.
Today, the Site Performance tool for my web site in Google Webmaster Central showed a hefty 50% increase in page load times! I quickly ran a web page speed report of my main page:
Responsible for the increase are the two .png graphics from the SexyBookmarks plugin. They add a whopping 220k of data to each page which makes my pages loading slower than 69% of all (not just on my site) pages seen by GoogleBot. This is not only bad from a SEO viewpoint. If SexyBookmarks is activated, all first-time visitors to my site will have 1 to 5 seconds added to the page load time, depending on their connection speed. Even though SexyBookmarks looks stunning, all that glitters is not gold.
I’m still looking for a resource-friendly, visually appealing social bookmark plugin for WordPress. It has to integrate nicely into any theme I throw at it. It should be maintained in regular intervals, I don’t install plugins that have been last updated in 2008 or earlier. I don’t like bloated javascript pop-ups like Add to Any as well.
I happen to like a plugin called Sociable. It has a very low resource footprint and doesn’t use any pop-ups.
What social bookmark plugin are you using on your WordPress site?
Update 1/17/2010: Josh from sexybookmarks.net just came up with a cool solution to reduce SexyBookmark’s image footprint a lot. You may want to have a look at his blog article “sexy got sluggish”. I’m pretty impressed by Josh’s fast reaction to my post and will be using SexyBookmarks as my favorite social bookmarking plugin again once v3 is out.
You may also be interested to read:
- Must Read Posts: New version 2.0
After quite a long time with no updates I just released a new version of my WordPress plugin “Must-Read Posts”. The new version adds several... - WordPress Plugin/Widget for Must Read Posts
Today, I was looking for a simple WordPress widget that allows me to statically display links to certain posts in the sidebar. I could have... - How-to: Change all internal WordPress links from www to non-www
I recently changed my website’s WordPress URL from its www-version to the non www-version: www.trick77.com changed to just trick77.com. As this may will confuse search...
Hi Jan,
Thanks for the honest review… I’m aware of this issue, and trying to find a viable solution that doesn’t just replace the image size lag with php script runtime lag…
See, the image sprite was an excellent idea when the plugin was first launched, as it only had 15 or 20 sites to choose from. A single image with 15 or 20 icons was still quicker than loading up 15 or 20 separate images… However, now that we have nearly 80 in a single sprite that’s almost 6,000px wide… It’s beginning to get a bit out of control.
One issue that we can correct immediately is the sexy-trans.png image… To this day, I still don’t understand what exactly made me make the background image as a sprite… Nobody is ever going to use more than one background image anyway, so there’s no need to load more than what the user selected to begin with! lol
Even though you weren’t happy with the performance of the plugin, it’s actually refreshing once in a while to get an honest point of view rather than flocks of people singing it’s praises… Helps to grow it in the right direction.
Josh, thank you for your feedback. I’ll be the first to use SexyBookmarks again once this is sorted out.
Cheers,
Jan
[...] weren't sure how to go about finding a solution. However, Jan over at Trick77 recently wrote an article warning users to be wary of SexyBookmarks due to the slow load times and massive image sizes… This really lit a fire under our butts and [...]
Oh my gosh, you indirectly helped me sooo much… I didn’t have any idea that that “Site Performance” tool existed in WT… Wow, this is going to improve my blog’s load times a LOT!
I think I’ll join you in waiting for sexybookmarks to release the next version before installing.
Hey Jan… You should be able to see my email address via this comment… Would you mind emailing me?
I have the dynamic sprite generation function working and tested on my end… Would you mind beta testing it on your end to see if it is satisfactory?
Thanks!