Article on reducing page size for social media

[drbyte]

Interesting read: https://jonsuh.com/blog/social-share-links/

[DivaVocals]

Very interesting read.. But I would have been interested to see him compare specific sharing scripts.. AddToThis vs AddToAny for example.. there are others, but these two are the most popular.. He lists stats, but doesn't say what social sharing script he is using to get these stats..

All that aside, I will submit that there's one con he failed to list here.. Tracking.. His method will allow shares to happen, but except for Facebook's own tracking interface which only tells you when your page was liked or shared, there is no means to track shares using this method.. For example, using this module, I can not only see when someone shared the page, I can see when someone clicked on of those shared links and trace where they went to on the site, and at what point they dropped off the site.. To me this is the information I want to know IF my social media sharing is even effective, and to know if I am even engaging visitors at all once they view the shared link..

[drbyte]

Agreed.

Tracking is certainly something sacrificed by using that method.

Not saying their approach is necessarily good or bad. Just an interesting read.

One take-away for which I appreciate the reminder, is to be sure to assess the bandwidth impact of every feature you add to the site ... and decide whether the benefits of the feature outweigh the cost of bandwidth and the potential loss of customers if that bandwidth causes slowdowns that drive them away.

[DivaVocals]

Totally interesting read along with the article on social sharing that Delia shared on the template thread.. But that article advocated another extreme IMHO.. I don't disagree that social media should not supplant the mission of selling product, and there are ways to ensure they do not minimize this.. However, I don't think it should be done away with altogether as that article suggested..

One take-away for which I appreciate the reminder, is to be sure to assess the bandwidth impact of every feature you add to the site ... and decide whether the benefits of the feature outweigh the cost of bandwidth and the potential loss of customers if that bandwidth causes slowdowns that drive them away.

I agree which is another reason why I am replacing AddThis' code on all of my client sites with the AddToAny code.. I thought the AddThis code really slowed down page load. I can see a noticeable change in load time on pages that use the AddToAny code over the AddThis code.. But doesn't mean that there isn't room for improvement.. I will totally look at what options (if any) are possible..