You have two directions one side you have your reader community, who constantly shares and bookmarks your articles. On next, you have Google who has an tendency towards quick loading websites. As a webmaster, you’re a sandwich!
Not confident how many of you have acknowledged but the moment you add a social bookmarking plugin/console to a website, your page load time goes for a toss! That's mainly because many of the social bookmarking scripts or plugins available today are bloated, using chunks of javascripts and non-optimized image files. May the most popular ones, like Sociable, Add to Any, and Shareaholic (better in the lot), dramatically reduces page search time, especially for first time visitors.
Google on the other hand loves quick websites. Sem & Seo is a 86 on Page Speed, which is good, but as you compete it with other websites, webmasters tool suggests that its 21% less than the industry average. The while I install a social bookmarking extention (having tried almost all the popular ones which has updated since 2008), the page speed goes minimum 5 points down.
Even though Google updated the scripts and offered AJAX snippet to attain it quick, it hasn’t helped much. Adding Google Plus buttons on the site may take down Page Speed by not less than 3 points.
Now, either I am obsessed with Page Speed, or the developers are not worrying about page load times.
One exit is not to use social bookmarking scripts and instead manually code the links to your posts avoiding Javascripts. Even, this may not a scalable solution and wouldn’t help, except all you want is a delicious or digg bookmark.
For that between us needs the famous ones as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc, there is yet no silver bullet solution. If the buttons are fancy looking, there is bloated code, if the code is slick, then the UI sucks, if UI is great then there are no configuration options.
So, which are the options we have? Something that can balance page load time, and user friendliness. Anyone?
Not confident how many of you have acknowledged but the moment you add a social bookmarking plugin/console to a website, your page load time goes for a toss! That's mainly because many of the social bookmarking scripts or plugins available today are bloated, using chunks of javascripts and non-optimized image files. May the most popular ones, like Sociable, Add to Any, and Shareaholic (better in the lot), dramatically reduces page search time, especially for first time visitors.
Google on the other hand loves quick websites. Sem & Seo is a 86 on Page Speed, which is good, but as you compete it with other websites, webmasters tool suggests that its 21% less than the industry average. The while I install a social bookmarking extention (having tried almost all the popular ones which has updated since 2008), the page speed goes minimum 5 points down.
Irony: Google’s Own Plus One Button Is Sluggish:
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Even though Google updated the scripts and offered AJAX snippet to attain it quick, it hasn’t helped much. Adding Google Plus buttons on the site may take down Page Speed by not less than 3 points.
Now, either I am obsessed with Page Speed, or the developers are not worrying about page load times.
One exit is not to use social bookmarking scripts and instead manually code the links to your posts avoiding Javascripts. Even, this may not a scalable solution and wouldn’t help, except all you want is a delicious or digg bookmark.
For that between us needs the famous ones as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc, there is yet no silver bullet solution. If the buttons are fancy looking, there is bloated code, if the code is slick, then the UI sucks, if UI is great then there are no configuration options.
So, which are the options we have? Something that can balance page load time, and user friendliness. Anyone?
