What is the fastest Google +1 version?

Who are the fastest Social button aggregators – addthis, sharethis, addtoany, etc.?

We all know the Google +1 can add up to 3 seconds of load time per page, if you have millions of pages, as some of our clients do, this can add a tremendous amount of load time to their sites.

I decided to delve into this a little deeper on my own and run a general test on many versions of the new Plus one buttons as well as several aggregators (addthis, sharethis, addtoany, etc.) to see which one was the fastest.

After a grueling test of how to speed up the new Google +1 (see how the test was done below) – I came up with several great results:

• The fastest of the Google+1 plusone code: The “Explicit Render” code beats ‘em all… (on an average of 100 load times = 439ms versus the standard plusone button 1253ms – the “Explicit Render” Script is 2.9X  faster than the Standard button) & interestingly enough this may present the most opportunity as well – in terms of enticing users to click on the button. For example, using this render script – you can also put information behind the +1 button (+1 for more…) where people can only see drop down information after the +1 is clicked. This can be used similar to SEO friendly collapsible Div’s – when the user clicks +1 he can see more. Explicit Render Benefits: Entice users to +1 content and speedup page load time. Example: http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-render.html
• Firefox vs. Chrome: Chrome made the plusone render code 2X as fast as firefox. So you can see here that the render code loaded almost 5X as fast using Google Chrome.

Google +1 plusone – Chrome vs Firefox

• The Plusone “Tall” button was actually faster than the Standard and Small buttons. (Not by much):

Google plusone +1 tall vs plusone standard

• Addthis vs. Sharethis: Now this is interesting: You know those little counters that tell you how many people clicked on your site? I, personally, tend to click those more than the small plain buttons – they seem more interactive & fun. Two very nice sites that offer this are “Sharethis” and “Addthis” and they are very similar, but not really…

Addthis vs. Share This Load Time

• Addthis code was faster than Sharethis: However, the ShareThis code allows larger buttons… Toss up as to what is better.

• Addthis vs Addtoany. Addtoany is interesting in that it only displays buttons – no counter – but offers some sharing capability. The funny thing is that Addthis & addtoany both loaded almost as fast as each other, but Addthis has the fake counters which look more engaging.

Addthis vs. Addtoany

How the test was done:

First I created several almost-identical html pages with identical content (5 paragraphs of gibberish – AKA Lorem Ipsum).

Then, I used a nifty site: whichloadsfaster.com which allows you to compare page load times side by side. This site also allows you to repeat the load times over 100 times & average out the fastest load time of each.

Plusone tests:

http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-regular.html
http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-render.html
http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-small.html
http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-tall.html
http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-header.html
http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-bodytop.html

Social Aggregators:

http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-addthis.html
http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-sharethis.html
http://worldclassmedia.com/plusone-addtoany.html

Hope you liked it. Hey – do me a favor and +1, share, like & add this article! – Now that is overkill…

Look for more cool stuff to come…

Tags | Google +1, load time, page load, social aggregators