This time around I have decided to test social bookmarking plugins. We all like to be social, but how much does these plugins cost our sites in terms of overhead?
The following plugins will be tested:
- Add to any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button (v.9.9.3.5)
- I Love Social Bookmarking (v.0.3.1)
- ShareThis (v3.0.1)
- Sociable (v3.5.1)
- Social Bookmarking RELOADED (v3.0.5)
- Social Bookmarks (v4.1.3)
I have decided to test plugins that works in posts and are more or less plug-and-play. This means that plugins that requires you to edit your theme to work are not taken into consideration.
Note on SexyBookmarks
I tested SexyBookmarks as well, but the plugin broke my dashboard, giving me “An Unexpected HTTP Error occured during the API request” messages all the time. A quick search gave me this link where you can read more about it: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/296622, where a work-around is offered.
| Plugin | Requests | Data | Memory | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 6 | 27 kb | 10.67 mb | Baseline |
| Add to Any | 149 | 56 kb | 10.9 mb | Default settings |
| I Love Social Bookmarking | 12 | 89 kb | 10.73 mb | Default settings |
| ShareThis | 16 | 41 kb | 10.75 mb | Default settings |
| Sociable | 25 | 397 kb | 11.13 mb | Default settings |
| Social Bookmarking RELOADED | 71 | 83 kb | 10.79 mb | Default settings |
| Social Bookmarks | 27 | 290 kb | 10.94 mb | Default settings, enabled 10 social sites |
Conclusion
So what can we learn from this? Well.. almost all plugins adds overhead to your site, so the choise is not always an easy one. Should you choose the fancy one? Or the fast one? I can’t choose for you, but according to this little test, if you care about your site loading fast, you should at least take a closer look at ShareThis and I Love Social Bookmarking.
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