@vivoxplorando
We are truly sorry you had a bad experience… 🙁
Shareaholic does not contain malware, spyware or break sites. In-fact, Shareaholic software is trusted and used by some of the most visited websites on the web to grow better.
Our track record speaks for itself. Plugin reviews posted in the past 12 months:
5-Star (highest possible rating) = 180 reviews
1-Star = 10 reviews
For every 1-star review, we received 18 5-star reviews. 1:18. While we would like all our reviews to be 5-star reviews, we’d take this for now 🙂 and we are working towards a perfect record.
3 Seconds…:
GTMetrix is a great tool, however, we recommend also checking out WebPage Test as it is generally accepted to yield the most accurate results.
Optimizing for speed is all about perceived load speed, not total load speed. Perceived load speed is what Google cares most about.
We spend a lot of time optimizing perceived speed, we are obsessive about it. Just in the past 3 months, we have cut out jQuery from our codebase, cut out another 40% from total code and made big leaps in PageSpeed improvements.
One of the primary metrics of Google PageSpeed Insights is Time to Interactive or TTI. Which is defined as the point when:
- The page has displayed useful content, which is measured with First Contentful Paint.
- Event handlers are registered for most visible page elements.
- The page responds to user interactions within 50 milliseconds.
Once all these things are true, Google considers your site to be fully loaded.
According to Kinsta testing (one of the fastest hosts for WordPress), Shareaholic adds only 14 milliseconds to actual load time: https://kinsta.com/blog/shareaholic-review/
A summary of all the other things we do to optimize perceived speed:
https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/204339849-Shareaholic-and-Site-Page-Speed
Cloudflare CDN / Cached Libraries:
The widget loads certain libraries from Cloudflare’s FOSS CDN – https://cdnjs.com/. This is done asynchronously so it doesn’t slow down perceived page speed.
Also, because these are being loaded from Cloudflare’s FOSS CDN, chances are that your web browser most likely will already have some of its resources and libraries in cache. Therefore, most of them should load lightning fast. BTW – most page speed tools can’t measure the impact of such cache optimizations.
All this said, we are making a concerted push to remove all library dependencies. jQuery is already gone. With the rest being actively worked.
Monetization Toolkit – Affiliate Links (Viglink):
The Affiliate Links feature that you’re referring to is part of our Site Monetization toolkit. It is designed to help make it easier for publishers to monetize their content. This is a feature that you can toggle off/on.
The following article goes into the depths of how it works:
https://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/202938373-Affiliatize-Links-How-it-works
We realize that in the past it was not clear in the onboarding flow. We took that to heart and redid our entire onboarding flow earlier this year to make setup super personalized and clear. More about it here: https://www.shareaholic.com/blog/personalized-onboarding-site-tools/ We want you to be in control, always.
Again, apologies for the poor experience. I hope this response helped clear things up a bit. Only with your feedback can we improve.
