A couple of months ago while I was benchmarking my website speed, I came across a WordPress plugin called Shareaholic. I had been looking for a working, easy-to-setup solution for getting my content shared in the social media. But it had to be optimized for site speed as well. On the other hand, the idea of having to debug every god forsaken browser version by myself, was not on top of my list.
So I gave it a shot and I liked it very much. The service was easy to use and had everything I needed. However, when it came down to page loading time, cache and other optimization techniques, everything fell apart. The plugin loaded lots of external resources and it a negative effect on all of the benchmarks I used. Ultimately, I ended up outright scolding that sorry plugin and it’s 400 million users.
Behold: Shareaholic WordPress plugin’s new version 7.5.0.0
It has recently come to my attention, that there is a newer version out there. It should have fixed all or most of the issues regarding slow loading speeds. For some reason, I ended up notifying the company about my concerns. After receiving quick and friendly support from Shareaholic, I decided to give it another chance.
So without further ado, let’s start bringing in the results. These tests have been run on Shareaholic version 7.4.0.8, but according to the changelog, there shouldn’t be any real differences in performance.
Site speed without Shareaholic WordPress plugin:
Pingdom speed test results
Load time: 961ms
Requests: 58
Page size: 1.0MB
Perf. grade: 94/100
GTMetrix speed test results
Page Speed Grade: 87%
YSlow Grade: 99%
Page load time: 1.38s
Total page size: 450KB
Total number of requests: 25
Site speed with Shareaholic WordPress plugin installed:
Pingdom speed test results
Load time: 625ms
Requests: 80
Page size: 1.3MB
Perf. grade: 93/100
GTMetrix speed test results
Page Speed Grade: 90%
YSlow Grade: 99%
Page load time: 1.51s
Total page size: 542KB
Total number of requests: 25
Google PageSpeed Insights with or without Shareaholic:
Very unreliable Google PageSpeed test results
Mobile: 68 / 100
Desktop: 82 / 100
Desktop test’s best score was 87 while mobile test was ranging from 58 to 69. This was mainly because of my web host’s unpredictable response times.
Conclusion
I’m sorry fore being rude Shareaholic, you are not so bad after all. Shareaholic is a quick and easy way for getting social media sharing functions into your web site. However, social media plugins especially use a lot of external content which make your site always slower than it could be. The decision is yours.
- My biggest single issue with site speed is my server’s wait time. My web host sucks. I’m currently testing out new possibilities, maybe I’ll even set up a VPS box.
- To my surprise, Shareaholic had hardly any effect on Google PageSpeed Insights test or any test what so ever. Nonetheless, it was the tip of the iceberg. After installing Shareaholic, my Google Authorship portrait photo has disappeared from Google search results. I can’t really blame Shareaholic for it, but it shows me that web site loading speed DOES really matter.
- One possible improvement came up from the Google PageSpeed: It says that by compressing a resource http://static-shareaholic.s3.amazonaws.com/analytics_frame.html could save 36 kt (69 %).
