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.

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