Should I remove widgets that increase my site's load time?

[agapitoflores001]

Nice tips. I can use this to speed up my browser. Great. Very informative. I hope it is also effective.

[BlueBoden]

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.

[CAESARbonds]

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.

[francismori7]

Use AJAX to load it AFTER the page was loaded. Speed is kept and you can still have it if they wait a bit.

[SuffolkGuides]

Useful tips, thank you

[figurethis2]

Users love speed simples ;-)

[NICHOLASM1987]

Too many widgets can slow your page, but most people are on really cheap hosting which is why the site goes so slow. 

[imrankhanseo]

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

[mhaidarhanif]

If I'm him, I will absolutely remove it immediately.

[DrSunnz]

So where does he get all these questions from? Can I send him a question by email or something?

[mhaidarhanif]

@DrSunnz You can ask him via E-Mail, his Blog, Webmaster Forum [group closed], or even Twitter. But he'll decide.

[andruha11234]

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.

[todnyc]

@andruha11234 what's the site?

[andruha11234]

@todnyc sorry, i would rather not disclose my niche

[todnyc]

@andruha11234 LMFAO

[andruha11234]

@todnyc and thats funny why?

[MrKappaBeta]

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.

[rtsownage]

Remove widgets that increase my site's load time? So if I add widgets it goes down?

[todnyc]

@rtsownage yes

[daveashe]

Facebook already has an asynchronous javascript - its right at the top of the page of the javascript sdk developers.facebook.com/docs/r­eference/javascript/

[SEOMofo]

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!

[varbalazs]

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.

[SEOMofo]

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.

[hji003]

thanks Matt. I really hate sometime facebook API goes down, and it pull up some error for my site :(

[TGcommercial]

Matt I removed my donation widget from my site.

[carterblizz]

@TGcommercial that doesn't seem smart... my donation pages has just started actually receiving money... its waay cool :)