Fastest Social Share Buttons on WordPress

By no doubt putting a nice set of eye-catching social share buttons on your pages is the first step to seduce visitors to share your content. There are thousands of share button plugins on the WordPress plugins repository makes choosing the right one become difficult than ever.

The Requirement

Responsive Social Share Buttons

According to We Are Social, mobile traffic increased by 39% from 2014 to 2015 with one-third of all web pages now visited on mobile devices.

Fast Social Share Buttons

Page load speed is of utmost importance for any respectable website. We should not tolerate any delay because of rendering the social share buttons. Lots of social share buttons plugins enqueue one javascript and one css files for each social network. Dramatically increase page load time for that simple buttons.

WP Font Awesome Share Icons

WP Font Awesome Share Icons Buttons

Here comes our weapon of choice WP Font Awesome Share Icons available on WordPress.org for free. Supporting 16 different networks:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Plus
• Linkedin
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• VKontakte
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Digg
• Xing
• Weibo
• Renren
• SpecificFeeds
• Email
• W3C Validation Link

WP Font Awesome Share Icons Buttons

More Features

• Drag-n-drop ordering
• Easy enabling or disabling
• Square, Circle (round) or Simple icons.
• Multiple sizes out-of-the-box
• It will not re-load Font Awesome if it is already loaded and detected
• Many options about where to display the icons
• Option to open in new window, so users will not go away from your site
• Shortcode is included to enter on posts/pages etc
• PHP Function is included to enter it on your theme

Performance

WP Font Awesome Share Icons, as the name suggests, depends on the font awesome library. Lots of themes have already intergraded font awesome. Thus, WP Font Awesome Share Icons has an option to skip enqueuing its css to prevent duplication and waste of bandwidth.

WP Font Awesome Share Icons Settings

Another big win, if you turn off WP Font Awesome Share Icons’ open in new window and share counter functions, no javascript file is added.

Digging into the source code, the render function is no more than getting options and string interpolations.

$output .= '<li class="wpfai-list-item '. $icon .'">
 <a href="'. str_replace($find, $replace, $wpfai_socialmedia[$icon]['link']) .'" title="'. $wpfai_socialmedia[$icon]['name'] .'" class="wpfai-'. $icon .' wpfai-link'. ($wpfai_popup == 'yes' ? ' wpfainw' : '') .'">
 <span class="fa-stack '. ($regsize != '' ? 'fa-'. $regsize : '') .'">
 '. ($regshape != 'simple' ? '<i class="fa fa-'. $regshape .''. ($reginverse == 'yes' || (( $reginverse == 'no' && $regshape == 'circle-thin') ) ? '' : '-o') .' fa-stack-2x"></i>': '') .'
 <i class="fa fa-'. $icon .' fa-stack-1x '. ($reginverse == 'yes' ? 'fa-inverse' : '') .'"></i>
 </span>'. ($share_count >= $wpfai_counter_minimum && $share_count !== false ? '<div class="counter">' . $share_count . '</div>' : '') .'
 </a>
 </li>';

With open in new window and counter functions disabled, and using my theme’s font awesome library, only one css file is added.Negligible difference when benchmarking WP Font Awesome Share Icons plugin. Making it the fastest social share WordPress plugin I ever seen.

Bottom Line

If you just need basic, responsive, fast social share buttons, go for WP Font Awesome Share Icons. It has nearly no effects on page load speed.

What if I need more?

Checkout Monarch (Elegant Themes) and Social Warfare. They provide more advance display options and analytics functions.