Without any doubt, using Social Sharing plugins on your website can boost your social media engagements and traffic. But at the same time, it can hurt your website’s speed and performance. These days Google is taking the website’s speed seriously, page speed not only helps to get better ranking, but it also improves the user experience and increase chances of conversion.
So we can’t ignore the importance of page speed if we are really concerned to beat our competitors.
Installing outdated and junk plugins can make your website slow down and most of the time you start losing your ranking in Google. It is always a best practice to use updated and well-optimized plugins on your website. In this article, I’ll Compare the top WordPress Social Sharing plugin’s speed.
Which is The Fastest Social Sharing Plugin?
I am not going to announce a plugin fastest randomly, I did several tests to find the fastest social sharing plugins.
First of all, I made an environment to test the speed of all social sharing plugins. I used the DreamHost(Shared) for testing and installed a fresh WordPress 5.3.1. I installed the Twenty Nineteen theme and did not install any extra plugin. Here is a list of things that I used for my test.
- WordPress 5.3.1
- Hosting: DreamHost ( Shared)
- PHP : 7.0.33
- Theme- Twenty Nineteen
- Inline position for three networks Fb, Twitter, Linkedin
- Test Page: Single Post
- Share Counts: ON
These are results based on my speed test, I did repeated test three times to get more accurate results.
[table id=2 /]
This ugly table might be confusing for you, Let me explain what exactly it is showing.
First of all, I did a base test using Twenty Nineteen Theme. The total page size was 56.5Kb and there was a total of 10 requests including all styles, fonts, and scripts. In the first test, the load time was 0.9 seconds in the second test load time was 0.9 seconds also and in the final test, it went to 1.0 second. The average load time was 0.93 seconds. The loads time varies because of the server so I had no control over.
After getting the base test we started to test all popular social sharing plugins one by one.
I tested a total of 8 popular social sharing plugins to find out the fastest one. In order to do the speed test for plugins, I installed the plugin and the twenty nineteen theme at back. I Enabled the three Social networks based upon availability, in most of the cases those three networks were Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. The shares counter for a single network and total share count were enabled. and I choose the InLine position on the Single post page.
The results of those tests are listed in the above table.
Conclusion Based on The Speed Test
According to total requests and load time Simple Social Buttons wins the race and Social Warface is behind it with very little margin.
Simple Social Buttons adds only 4 extra requests and 52.5 KB in page size. That means it does not hurt your website speed. and when we check the load time it only takes extra 0.2 seconds to load.
Social Warfare is behind the Simple Social buttons with very little margin. Social Warfare adds 6 extra requests and 55.5 KB in page size. It takes an extra 0.3 seconds to load.
During the speed test, I found the Monarch plugin takes so much time to load as compared to other social plugins. Monarch adds 14 extra requests and 108.5 Kb in file size. It takes an extra 1.48 seconds to load.
Final Thoughts
If you really care about your website’s speed and at the same time you want to have social sharing enabled on your website, Simple Social Button is the best choice. It will give the best experience of social sharing with optimized speed.
