Why Use AddThis.com Sharing Buttons

AddThis.com produces a bit of JavaScript that enables website owners to quickly and easily add social sharing buttons/links to their website. In addition to allowing users to easily share your content socially, they also provide analytics information about what content is shared via which method, giving a greater insight into visitor behavior.

However, just because it provides these benefits to websites does not necessarily mean that it is a good tool to implement on your website. If you are concerned about the performance and the total payload size for your website, then you may have some reservations about the AddThis sharing buttons. On one site I was looking at, when all of the AddThis JavaScript, CSS and Images were combined, it took up 250kB. When you consider that this is a responsive website, and many mobile users only get 300MB of data before they get to overage fees, you hope that there are other ways to implement the sharing to the major social sites.

As a result, I will avoid using the AddThis widget on any site that I work on.

Tags:

Related Posts

Apr 29, 2014
2 minutes

Avoid jQuery.bind()

When chasing down performance issues, you never know what kind of problems you will find. I was looking for something that would cause jitter when scrolling on the page. After looking at the custom code that runs on every scroll event, I still had not found a reason for the jitter. Looking at the JavaScript CPU profile when scrolling in Chrome showed that there was an overwhelming majority of the time spent in a function in the Prototype JS library.

#jquery #javascript #performance
Read More
Apr 30, 2014
2 minutes

Always Namespace Variable Names in JavaScript

After running into a few issues with variable naming collisions over the past few days, it drives home how much we all should be namespacing our variable names in JavaScript. When writing JavaScript code that is only in use on your own website, you should still always namespace your variables. If you are writting a JavaScript library that will be in use on any website a user puts it on, namespacing your variable names is a minimum requirement.

#javascript #design-patterns
Read More
Apr 25, 2014
4 minutes

Optimizing Website Load Time

Assuming you have already done a few things to improve the page load time of your website, such as using a Varnish caching server, GZipping your content in transit, minifying that same content, and turning on all caching options that Magento or your web platform of choice have available, there is still more you can do. When it comes to website performance, the 80/20 rule definitely applies. 80% of the performance tweaks that you perform will only provide a miniscule improvement to the site load time, while the 20% of things you do make a big difference. Any time I am looking to speed of the performance of a website, I seek those 20% items that give you the biggest bang for your buck.

#magento #performance
Read More