I'm trying to make my site faster, but I noticed that Facebook widgets slows down download, should i remove them? I think that it's usefull for users see how many people likes a page, don't you?
Most share widgets are not suited to be used on your site, adding just a few widgets can increase load times by 2000% on the fastest sites..
Maybe whoever developed these widgets, just didn't know about performance.
It is however possible to create widgets which doesn't depend on such external scripts, so its just plain stupid that they have it this way.
I hate Facebook.
Often it happens to me that it even takes longer than five seconds to load the crappy facebook SPY widget.
I wait and wait and wait, only to see who pressed the like button.
Sometimes I have to wait ONLY for the like button.
100.000 victims during earthquake. and then LIKE.
No facebook s*cks. Facebook makes for me sites worse.
That's true Widget's help you to promote and it's good for users.
But i am worried that using joomla or drupal cause bit slower for website's to load.
Nice Video Matt
Regards
Imran Khan
I worked on my site for few days and my load time went from 13 seconds to 5-6 seconds. Too bad the site disappeared from rankings few days after :( its on page 27 from being 3rd for almost a year.
Just to point it out and it doesn't happen too often, but some of those widgets when the host server fails, prevent an entire website from loading.
They could obviously do any remote calls with a setTimeout to avoid hangs but most of them don't...
Widgets are hit and miss... I think it's safe to say that the more you load on your site the greater your changes of ruining the user experience.
Facebook already has an asynchronous javascript - its right at the top of the page of the javascript sdk developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/
FOR INTERMEDIATE - ADVANCED WEBMASTERS:
Matt mentions the idea of loading the widget "asynchronously," which gives you the benefits of having the widget on your page...but without slowing down your page load times.
If you are interested in learning more about this technique, be sure to check out the tutorial I've published on my website. Just search for this title in Google:
Install the TweetMeme Retweet Button... WITHOUT the Slow Page Loads!
i think compress javascript files and images to one file is much more about server load (number of requests), the page speed in this case is secondary.
SUMMARY:
Yes, slow widgets can theoretically hurt your rankings, because they can negatively affect your page load times.
No, this does NOT mean you should remove the widgets. Instead, consider the fact that Google's page speed signal has a very WEAK influence on your rankings. If your users enjoy the functionality provided by the widget, they will be more likely to bookmark or link to your page--signals which have a STRONG influence on rankings.
The widget is 1 step back + 2 steps forward.
Français
