Everything is better when your site loads faster. Google ranks you higher. Users are happier. Bounce rates decrease. More of your content is shared and discovered. And Conversion rates increase. Every site owner cares about site speed, and our team at Shareaholic is obsessed by it! Not a day goes by where we’re not thinking about and working on making Shareaholic even faster.

At Shareaholic, we use industry best practices to make our code as fast and unobtrusive as possible. We detail some of the techniques we use to to keep your site running fast on Shareaholic here.

There are certain Shareaholic features that do a bit more heavy lifting than others and can take a little longer to render on the page than others because of their nature. There shouldn’t be a need to turn any of these features off as they are heavily optimized, but hey, we understand there is a delicate balance to be achieved between features and site speed, and these options are completely in your control. Here are a couple of options to make your pages load even faster:

1. If you are using Shareaholic’s WordPress or Drupal plugin, try turning on Server Side Share Counts API under advanced settings. This feature consolidates many client side HTTP requests to one single request for your visitors, which should make your site feel faster.

   In addition to saving on client side HTTP requests, Server Side Share Counts API is also optimized to use server side caching, so that it doesn’t have to fetch Share Counts from each source (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc) on every page load for each visitor. The API temporarily caches share count results in order to improve performance. In most cases, unless you’re using a really bad shared host (if you are, consider switching!), this should make your site feel faster.

   Disabling the Server Side Share Count API enables Client Side Share Counts. When Client Side Share Counts are enabled, the end user client calls the individual share service directly to gather share counts information. While we do optimize these calls, and cache them client-side, Server Side Share Counts Counts should generally be more performant.

2. Try turning off Share Counts on your Index Pages (Index Pages are pages with more than 1 post). If you have multiple posts on your Index page (ex. your homepage) with share buttons enabled for each post, you may notice a slight delay in share buttons rendering completely as Share Counts need to be fetched for each post. For pages with only one post, share buttons and share counts should render more quickly since one has to retrieve share counts for just one URL.
3. Try turning off 3rd party data services under Analytics Settings. The data collected from this is used to enhance analytics and the quality of Content Recommendations. We do not recommend turning this off, but it is an option.

We hope you find these tips to be of use. Happy tuning!