This time I have decided to speedtest social plugins.. you know, the ones that lists small icons for you to bookmark your post or page on different social websites.
I quickly found out that there are quite alot of these plugins. Most of them just inserts a list of icons at the bottom of your post or page. There are also some that comes as a widget, and some that is linked to an external site, such as ShareThis. But it is the ones that inserts icons on your page or post that I’m testing today.
The test was done on a fresh install of WordPress with no other plugins activated. I used Firefox and Firebug to do the speedtesting. The plugins were configured to show 5 icons each, with the exception of Slashdigglicious and SocialList which don’t let you choose which sites you want to show, and ob-textonly-social-bookmarker which is text only.
The testet plugins are:
- Bookmarkify 0.9.1 by Gary Keorkunian
- Bookmark Me 1.1.4 by Satollo
- ob-textonly-social-bookmarker 2.0 by Rajender Singh
- obsocialbookmarker 5.3.3 by Rajender Singh
- Slashdigglicious 1.0.5 by Robert Tsai
- Sociable 2.6.5 by Joost de Valk
- Social Bookmarking RELOADED 2.9 by Valent
- Social Bookmarks 4.0.65 by Apostolos Dountsis
- SocialList 1.5 by Codemaster
- SociBook 0.8 by Erik Sefkow
- TimesURL.at Sociable Plugin 1.4 by Justin Hartman
| Plugin | Size | Icons | CSS | JS | Load |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bookmarkify | 137kb | favicon | no | no | 800ms |
| Bookmark Me | 23.5kb | local | no | no | 1.18s |
| ob-textonly-social-bookmarker | 6.89kb | no | no | no | 986ms |
| obsocialbookmarker | 371kb | local | no | yes | 5.79s |
| Slashdigglicious | 11kb | favicon | no | no | 1.52s |
| Sociable | 167kb | local | yes/no | no | 1.46s |
| Social Bookmarking RELOADED | 228kb | local | yes | no | 1.5s |
| Social Bookmarks | 423kb | local | yes | no | 1.46s |
| SociaList | 39.3kb | external | external | external | 2.32s |
| SociBook | 189kb | external | no | external | 714ms |
| TimesURL at Sociable Plugin | 145kb | local | yes | yes | 1.8s |
Notes! The load times are average of 5 page refreshes. The Sociable plugin let’s you use the plugin without a CSS file, this shaves off some milliseconds. Remember, this test is done with pageload in mind, so ease of use, options etc is not taken into account.
Conclusion
There are two plugins that stand out here. And that is Bookmarkify and SociBook, they both have average pageloads of under 1 second. Ob-textonly-sociable-bookmarker also loads under 1 second, but this plugin uses no images. But overall, all the plugins are reasonable fast to load, with the exception of obsocialbookmarker with an average pageload of almost 6 seconds, due to the use of loads of javascript!
