Social Share Buttons are slow

I am sure you know this social share buttons from facebook, twitter and google.

To use this social share buttons on your page you have to include some java script libraries and add a special html tag or a iframe to your page. They are pretty good documented.

I am using this social share buttons from facebook, twitter and google in several projects. And over time I realized that the pages with this share buttons are a little bit slow. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds that the java script library from twitter gets loaded. Same for Facebook. I downloaded all the java script libraries via wget and compared them with each other. Here is the Chart who is showing the libs according to his weight in kb.

I was surprised to find out that the facebook lib is 177 KB big. The twitter lib has 47 KB and the GooglePlus lib has just 14 KB. Together that’s 238 KB additional to load. Just to show some “like”, “tweet” and “+1” buttons.

I decided to get rid of this social share buttons, at least on the landing page. Since I removed them the landing page is much faster. Less data to load and less requests to make for the Browser.