Social media buttons slow down website load time

You could try

$(window).load(function() {

instead of

$(document).ready(function() {

so it will wait until after your images and everything has loaded.

If that doesn't help, then I would suggest having them only appear on hover. Have a bunch of static images / CSS sprites, that get replaced when the user hovers over them.

If you don't want that extra step, and you have server access to install modules you can try google's mod pagespeed to defer the javascript for you https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-js-defer

If you don't have server access you can try the CDN route, Cloudflare's rocket loader is very interesting, I am testing it at the minute for similar reasons, and see ~ 33% speed increase http://www.cloudflare.com/features-optimizer

If that doesn't help you could try the old favourite of sticking the buttons at the bottom of the page and repositioning with CSS so they look higher up; that way you can have them where you want them but they don't seem to interfere with the page load time.

You could try simpler oldschool alternatives like here http://zurb.com/article/883/small-painful-buttons-why-social-media-bu

or see if service like http://www.addthis.com/ or http://www.sharethis.com/ work any faster for you

Of course the elephant in the room at this point is that to have the 3 main social media buttons on the page, and for it to only cost you a second - sadly seems quite good! They are deceptively complicated buttons that don't seem well optimised, google pagespeed insights finds something to complain about with all of them iirc.

Since you are taking a 100%+ speed hit, I would suggest some A/B testing to see if you really need them, i.e. for your site does being slower decrease traffic? Does having the share buttons bring in more traffic to warrant their presence?

While this question is old and the person asking probably won't see my response, here is an alternative for anyone with the same issue -- as long as you don't mind sacrificing showing the number of likes/shares/etc.

You can simply add links that send the visitor to the actual social network and open a sharing window with pre-filled URL and description.

The code is very simple and you can use any image or text you want, which will make it easier to fit the buttons in with your site's design.

<a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=URL" target="_blank">Share on Facebook</a>
<a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=URL&text=TEXT&via=YOURTWITTERACCOUNTNAME" target="_blank">Tweet</a>
<a href="https://plus.google.com/share?url=URL" target="_blank">Share on Google+</a>

Simply replace URL with the URL of you website and TEXT with a short description.

This solution requires no JavaScript and is therefore extremely lightweight. You can use logos, icon font, simple text ("Share on Facebook").

I also wrote a blog post that covers many other social networks.

The social widgets should not be slowing down your load time too much, unless they are blocking more important scripts that are waiting for the page to finish loading. The code you're using is asynchronous, which helps, but in most browsers this will still block the window.onload event. See Stoyan's post here for information about how you can load the JS SDK in a non-blocking way using iframes.

If that's too much, and you want to delay the SDK downloading or running (and speed it up once it does run), here is my recommendation:

First, either use a library like jQuery that provides a way to hook into the DOM being ready in a cross-platform fashion. Here is one implementation. Once you have your "DOM ready handler", you should do one of the following two things:

1. Move the JS SDK loading code into your DOM ready handler.

2. Take xfbml: true out of FB.init(...), if you have it (in this case, you don't), and take xfbml=1 out of the SDK URL. This prevents social widgets from being parsed and initialized immediately. Then, call FB.XFBML.parse() in your DOM ready handler. See the documentation here for that method. The best thing to do for performance would be to specifically call FB.XFBML.parse(document.getElementById('')) so that the SDK doesn't waste time going over the whole DOM.