Minor Comparability Issue with WP3.7

Hi Angus,

It sounds like you need to set the data-attribute for the link you’d like to share because you manually positioned the Share Buttons outside of your looped content. What happens when you do this is that the stats from the most recent post are usually detected by the app, which means that’s also the post your readers would be sharing. Now, if you would like to keep this behavior, do nothing, and the Share Buttons will dynamically pull in the link based on what’s detected on the feed page, and if they load on a permalink page, they will pull the link for the permalink, allowing your readers to share that page from the widget area.

I assume that you read the Positioning Apps Manually guide for information about using the shortcode to place apps in a widget. Near the beginning of this support article, there is information about setting data-attributes for passing information into the app if you’d like to do so.

As for the time it takes to load the Share Buttons, you’ll find that on individual pages, it loads pretty quickly, but usually after the rest of your page content loads. This allows your readers to start reading without having to wait for the resources to load before the page renders.

You’ll find that on your feed pages, if you have the apps enabled, it will take longer for a couple of reasons. One, there is a lot of content that loads on these pages even without our plugin, which usually includes a fair share of image files and maybe scripts and resources from other plugins. Our buttons are loading multiple times, hooking into the individual content, and just in case you also have the Related Content app enabled, because of the nature of this app, the recommendations are specific to the individual content. You’ll probably find that the apps load quicker if you were to lower the number of articles that appear on a single page in a feed.

Also, if you have share counts enabled, these numbers are being pulled directly from the servers of these services, which may cause a drag, depending on time of day and traffic levels on these servers. Disabling share counts quite often noticeably speeds up our Share Buttons app.

And don’t forget to consider caching. If you use caching plugins, this improves page load time. And for your readers, browser caching should also be considered as once the scripts have been stored locally, the apps will load much quicker on subsequent views. We personally cache our plugin resources on Amazon Webhosting Services to speed delivery. This service is used by many large technology companies for this purpose.

And yes, depending on your geographic location, you may experience delays if the data is having to travel further from server-to-server.

I hope you found this information helpful. If you have any other questions or concerns, you can contact us directly through our helpdesk by visiting our support center, and thanks so much for your support! I hope that by using some of the above suggestions, you are able to improve the load time of our apps on your site. 🙂