The lightest social sharing plugin, recommended for WordPress websites.
Recently, many people contacted me asking me about which plugin to create social sharing buttons for WordPress websites to have the least impact on loading speed. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of social sharing buttons. Although they help users share favorite articles on social networks easily, however, they also more or less adversely affect the loading speed of the site. That’s why I recently removed the share buttons (created by Jetpack) at the bottom of my posts.
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Although I don’t like it, to meet your requirements, I have researched on other websites. Accidentally, I came across the WP Rocket benchmark results, which gives a detailed look at how social sharing plugins affect the loading speed of the website. And today, I will share it with you.
Table of Contents
Benchmark social sharing plugins
The benchmark was conducted using Pingdom Tools. The website uses the default Twenty Fifteen theme, does not install any plugins other than WP Rocket and Query Monitor (but only works in backend).
Here are the benchmark results used as a benchmark (when not using the social sharing plugin):
Results and tips
The lightest, recommended social sharing plugins include: Social Media Feather, Monarch (inline mode), Simple Share Buttons Adder and Mashsharer. These plugins only increase the page-size as well as the website load time a bit.
The next group includes plugins that are a bit more “bulky” but still acceptable: Monarch (when there are more widgets in the sidebar), Jetpack (icons + text mode), Shareaholic, Monarch (when inline mode). & fly in), Sharify, AddToAny (with and without floating sidebar).
The heaviest, not recommended social sharing plugins include: AddThis, ShareThis, Async Social, Jetpack (official icon mode), Really Simple Share and Ultimate Social Media & Share. They double or even triple the load time and page-size.
These results were tested a long time ago (since 2015) and are subject to change. However, hopefully they can be of help to you in making the right choice.
Do you know any other lighter, better looking social sharing plugin? Don’t forget to share it with us in the comment box below.
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