Care to share; testing Simple Share Buttons Adder

A couple of days ago a WP DoNotTrack user asked which WordPress sharing plugin I would recommend instead of privacy-killer “Share Buttons” by Lockerz / AddToAny. I’m not really into those sharing thingies (except for my little own performance-centric experiment maybe), but I nevertheless had a quick look in the Plugin repository and this was my feedback:

Just did a quick test with “Simple Share Buttons Adder“, no tracking there that I can see, cfr. this webpagetest test result (I did disable the custom font in styling->share text to avoid having to fetch a google font).

No tracking and performance isn’t shabby either, but some speed-improvements could be made:

  • By default the plugin includes a Google Font, which slows the page down. Changing this to “inherit from my website” in the “Styling”-settings, improves the performance.
  • Each share service’s image is fetched separately, from a performance point of view it would make sense to use one image sprite instead.
  • You can add a share counter: but without a caching plugin the page load is slowed down significantly, but with a caching plugin the counters aren’t updated any more. ideally the share counter would be empty on page load (i.e. just placeholders in HTML) and after the page has loaded an ajax call would get and set the correct numbers. The “backend” the ajax-call connects with could feature some light caching (5 minutes maybe)?

But all in all a nice sharing plugin, so if you want to have those share buttons, do give Simple Share Buttons Adder a go.