So, what is the concensus on Facebook/Twitter buttons and speed?

Wildcat Media

Well-known member
I had read in a couple of separate threads here that having the Facebook and Twitter buttons enabled in XF could slow the loading of forum pages. I've encountered this in the past with some of my other included scripts, even if they were loaded last on the page. And because I was having an issue with my own XF installation, I disabled mine temporarily and had one or two users comment about faster speeds. BUT...we are also using a shared database server for the time being, until we move to another server within the next week or so. I'm going to re-enable the buttons after we move to see how things compare. (The speed increases members see could be coincidental.)

I realize this isn't an XF problem specifically, but we nonetheless have to deal with it as admins.

Overall, has anyone noticed a general slowdown with FB/Twitter buttons enabled, or no?
 
Before some optimisation was carried out I used to see occasional issues related to Twitter and Facebook, not anymore though really.

Gravatar can have a huge effect if it is having problems so you may want to consider disabling that too.

My biggest problem is Google as I use a few of their APIs and it can be a real problem with pages loading sometimes.
 
Ever since they went to asynchronous loading I have not seen a problem.

@Brogan, I have seen slowdowns when downloading google analytic code :(
 
Thanks for the info.

I really want to use Google Analytics throughout the site (as it's new), but not if page loading time will suffer.

The async loading--was that accomplished via the HTML5 "async" attribute in the <script> tags? Just curious, as I'd try that on other sites. (I admit I haven't investigated this much yet--only saw it mentioned in passing elsewhere.)
 
I took a look and compared it to standard GA code...I should use something similar for my other sites with GA.

Thanks for the feedback--I feel better about re-enabling the extras in XF now.
 
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