Always looking for new and intriguing ways to market my blog, I recently went on a quest to make it easier for people share links to my blog posts. You’ve probably seen many of them already. The Tweet this, Like that and Digg it buttons of the inter-webs. If you belong to the network the button is connected to, it makes it super easily to share the page with your network.

So I jumped in head first and found a button for Twitter, Buzz and Facebook. Spent the time to set them all up, make them look pretty and then was hit with the reality of seriously SLOW page load times. I’m talking 23 seconds slow!

The majority of this abomination was the Facebook Like button making 10+ http requests to Facebook which is known for being slow already. The Like button does load asynchronously loading in the background, so the page is readable and scrollable before it completely finishes loading the buttons. It’s annoying that you can start reading and scroll down to see the buttons finally load. The time difference loading my homepage fetching ten Like buttons is 8.72 seconds.

The next culprit is the Retweetmeme Twitter Button. Twitter doesn’t support the tracking of “re-tweets” natively so other sites like Retweetmeme have setup this service which is a brilliant idea, but it needs some work. Their service is built around building iframes synchronously. This translates into an API call for each button on a page and since they are synchronous, they all have to wait in line for their turn to execute. So the more buttons, the longer it takes to load. Their servers are faster than Facebook’s and their api calls are lighter (requesting fewer things) so the tax for running this button is 2.25 seconds on my setup.

Lastly, I found the less popular Google Buzz button to be the clear winner here. No matter how many buttons there are on a page, it only queries the API once. This API is hosted by Google themselves who has VERY high standards for server response time. The strain this button put on my homepage is a mere second.

The problem compounds itself when I have all three buttons turned on simultaneously. There are so many http requests shooting out all over the internet, the performance degrades terribly. In fact the 23 second time I mentioned at the top was the very best I got. It was more often in the 30 to 40 second range.

The Bottom Line
So is it worth all of this just to be cool? Heck no! I will loose way more people  frustrated waiting for pages to load than I would gain from the social networking. I’ve found several good articles that offer some pretty technical suggestions that can shave some time here and there like this blog at SeoMofo.com. It’s really well written and it works, but it doesn’t shave enough for me.

The bottom line lies with Retweetmeme and Facebook. Their APIs and servers are just too slow when loading ten buttons. So I’ve compromised a little here. Since Google Buzz rocks in the technology department, I’m going to put it front and center on every post on my homepage. Google Buzz is only going to grow. This will help.

What I didn’t mention was the load times for single buttons like when someone is just reading a single blog post. All three combined add about one second to the load time, so I decided to leave them all turned on in single blog pages. There won’t be as much visibility here, but it will still get seen when someone goes to leave a comment. They will also see  single blog posts when they follow an inbound link that I use to market the site around the web.

Google has always been about innovating and pushing technology, so I’m not totally surprised they come out top with big margins. I am frustrated though, the other two buttons feel like the Javascript of the 90s. I’m also frustrated that so many other blogs don’t seem to care about page load times. It’s too bad really because there are several great sites I would visit more like Trey Ratcliff’s blog StuckinCustoms.com where he has 20-30 second load times. What a pain!

So I hope all this helps you decide what’s best for your website and blog. I enjoyed looking it all up.

Tags: buzz this, facebook like, twitter retweet, website optimization