Search Engine Optimization is something which I truly admire in my online marketing life. Not because it helps to achieve higher search engine rankings, but because correct SEO helps search engines to make this world a better place by providing the needed things at the right time in right order.
Just after the launching of my 1st loving WordPress plugin called SEO Advicer by spending 2 whole days to develop and launch, I’ve got another idea for a perfect plugin.
This time also I thought to keep SEO in the first priority for this new plugin or let’s say my 2nd loving WordPress plugin!
If you had sometime to read the launching post of SEO Advicer plugin, then you already know what pain which I had with the thing called WP SVN.
Fortunately, after the 1st commit of my 1st plugin, I realized much more about SVN.
This leads to a smoother committing of the 2nd WordPress plugin to the world. The plugin is having some connection with the whooping word – Genesis Framework!
Gift For Genesis Lovers: Best Social Share Counter
Yea! A gift from ScorpionGod Lair to the lovers of Genesis Framework. If you never heard of Genesis, it’s the #1 WordPress theme framework created in the SEO & Simplicity in the mind by the group of hard working people called StudioPress.
Just like Genesis, my 2nd plugin also kept SEO in the first priority when developing and even the benefits of this new plugin also directly related to your website’s SEO strength. By now, you may want to know the name of it …
It’s the Genesis Optimized Social Share.
At the second you finished reading the name, you realized few things about this. See whether you’re right or wrong. But now let’s make it short and sweet, so that I don’t have to bother with writing that long name every time I want to mention it.
Let’s say GOSS. Agree …?
GOSS is specially created for the Genesis users, because I’m also a Genesis user. Simply, GOSS can minimize the impact which is generated by your average social share counter plugin. The impact is the influence created onto your website speed and loading time.
How?
Yea, you should ask that, if you didn’t. Almost each and every social share counter plugin loads many JS files for thousands of social media sites, sometimes you don’t use all of them and that could be a problem.
But that is not the catch with GOSS WordPress plugin. when the average social share counter plugins load the JS files Synchronously, GOSS loads the selected JS file Asynchronously. That’s the catch.
Sometimes, you might be thinking what the hell is Synchronous & Asynchronous. Let me take 60 seconds to explain you the alien words.
When you load your social share counters using the Synchronous way, each social counter will be loaded in the initial page load by making the user waiting time high. In other words, this method adds more seconds to your Page Loading time.
Do you know that all the internet users don’t need to share something until they read it. Perhaps, you realize the fact: Loading social share counters in the initial load is NOT necessary!
If there’s no any usage of these counters for the user, until they consume your content. Why showing them at the same time your page loads. Even it kicks off your website speed?
Asynchronous method do the inverse of the above procedure, means it will not load the counters in the initial load of the page. Instead of that counters will be loaded once the page is loaded completely. This cut off the seconds added by the average social share counter plugins.
Simply, your website Loading Time will be much lower than what you could see with an average plugin. Want to check this new GOSS plugin on your Genesis site? You can download the latest version of the Genesis Optimized Social Share plugin on its own room of the WordPress plugins repository.
May be you want more …
Live Demo of GOPSS Plugin
- Increases your Website Speed while kicking off unnecessary delay. Since GOSS is loading each and every JS file Asynchronously, website speed will be much faster.
- As I said earlier, SEO was in my mind when I develop this plugin. So GOSS plugin doesn’t create any separate CSS & JS Files. Moreover, CSS styles and JS codes are fully minified and outputted on the same page itself.
- Best is always enough for a perfect play. GOSS doesn’t use all those thousand Social Media counters. Instead, GOSS uses only 4 Counters by default in its initial version. Best 4 includes Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.
- There is nothing to configure in the initial version of the GOSS plugin. Just install it and forget it. Settings page and more features will be launched soon!!
- All 4 social counters will be displayed after the post content as soon as you activates the GOSS plugin.
- Vertical counters are available for all 4 social media sites and aligned beautifully.
- GOSS plugin will appear only on Post Pages. Therefore, social counter JS files and plugin CSS styles will NOT be loaded on WordPress pages.
I’d like, If you could …
Genesis Optimized Social Share is my 2nd WordPress plugin. With the release of this 2nd plugin, I’ve got a huge passion to create more useful WordPress plugins. So this won’t be the last plugin I launch.
But I’d like to ask you few things,
1. GOSS is designed to work with any Genesis website. If you’re a Genesis user or going to be a one of them, please download my plugin and use. After that you could write a review for GOSS. Your reviews will influence on me to build more features.
2. I know you have a blog, So what’s wrong with writing a post about GOSS. Your readers may interested in GOSS.
3. Finally, If you’re serious enough to read this release post, You should have guts to share it. 😀
If you have any questions related to Genesis Optimized Social Share WordPress plugin, please write a comment below or open a support ticket on repository page of the GOSS.
your plug in works but Facebook javascript still sucks as the two scripts below (DUPLICATES except one is https) TAKE FOREVER TO LOAD (14.065 ms) despite your efforts.
Please advise if there is some way to work around.
+ Request 44: http://static.ak.facebook.com/connect/xd_arbiter.php?version=29
+ Request 45: https://s-static.ak.facebook.com/connect/xd_arbiter.php?version=29
Hey, Thanks for your comment. I checked my test website after installing GOSS plugin using Pingdom Tool. Yes, there are 2 Facebook JS one with http and other with https. However, test result shows those 2 JS loaded within 86ms.
I noticed your website is not working some times. I guess you’re having high receiving time. If I can see a Live test result, that’d be appreciated.
The Facebook share is still broken, please advice on a fix.
This is my site per webpagetest without a social plugin
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140203_AY_3PY/
With GOSS
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140203_XM_3S3/1/details/
906 ms for Facebook
651 ms for Google plusone
229 for Pintrest
727 ms for Twitter
The static facebook files do on occasion load faster, true
And there is the overhead for having google serve fonts.
But I am beginning to learn that 3rd party social services are bad Internet partners as they make you pay in terms of legacy code they refuse to update or innovate, much like it takes forever for printer drivers or remember the days when no one would update modem scripts
Like I said, your plugin does make a difference, and if I want to put up with having Facebook drag down my users’ experience with slow load times I definitely will use it.
Just checked again and it’s worse
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140203_CJ_3WR/1/details/
Yes, When you’re using any Social Share script, you have to sacrifice part of your website performance. I don’t use WebPageTest for my testing purposes. I always use Pingdom Tool and Original Google PageSpeed Tool. WebPageTest and GTMetrix is using the old Google PageSpeed Tool.
Anyway, I checked your website using Pingdom and here’s the Live test result.
>> http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dwagr/http://halfwaytoconcord.com/new-tax-measure-acalanes-schools/
According to this, 250ms spent to load 2 JS Versions of Facebook. Overall loading time is 1s which is great.
Finally, I don’t see any worse results for your site yet. Because you still have 1s Loading time. You still have 90 Original Google PageSpeed score. So what else you want to achieve.
HINT: You can minify & combine your CSS Styles manually, If W3 automatic procedure breaks the site.
Great Plugin! Seems ago be an issue with the Facebook popup window for the Safari web browser on MAc OS. The window appears below the Facebook box, and it is only about 20 pixels high.
Any chance of a fix?
Thanks a gain for a wonderful plugin!
Hi Shyam!
Great plugin!
I’ve a question to improve engagement and visibility via Twitter.
How to add my Twitter I.D. into the Twitter button,
so that people who is using that way to share my posts,
will include my Twitter handle?
Thanks for your time!
Hey Erik,
Thanks for the check on my plugin, love it!
Currently it’s in its initial release, so I haven’t included any settings page to add your Twitter ID to share button.
Can you play with some coding? If yes, follow this method.
Go to Plugins > Editor > GOSS Plugin. Then look for the following line under HTML5 comment.
echo '<div class="socialbox"><a rel="nofollow" href="http://twitter.com/share" data-url="' . get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '" data-text="' . urlencode( strip_tags( get_the_title( $post->ID ) ) ) . '" data-count="vertical" class="twitter-share-button">Tweet</a></div>';Change the above line to below one.
echo '<div class="socialbox"><a rel="nofollow" href="http://twitter.com/share" data-url="' . get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '" data-text="' . urlencode( strip_tags( get_the_title( $post->ID ) ) ) . '" data-count="vertical" data-via="YourTwitterID" class="twitter-share-button">Tweet</a></div>';Good luck!
Shyam