On one side you have your reader community, who constantly shares and bookmarks your articles. On the other, you have Google who has an inclination towards quick loading websites. As a webmaster, you’re a sandwich!

Not sure how many of you have noticed but the moment you add a social bookmarking plugin/console to a website, your page load time goes for a toss! This is primarily because most of the social bookmarking scripts or plugins available today are bloated, using chunks of javascripts and non-optimized image files. Even the most popular ones, like Sociable, Add to Any, and Shareaholic (better in the lot), dramatically reduces page load time, especially for first time visitors.

Google on the other hand loves quick websites. Dailybloggr is a 91 on Page Speed, which is good, but when you compare it with other websites, webmasters tool suggests that its 21% less than the industry average. The moment I install a social bookmarking plugin (having tried almost all the popular ones which has updated since 2008), the page speed goes minimum 5 points down.

Irony: Google’s own Plus One Button is sluggish

Even though Google updated the scripts and offered AJAX snippet to make it fast, it hasn’t helped much. Adding Google Plus buttons on the site would take down Page Speed by at least 3 points.

Now, either I am obsessed with Page Speed, or the developers are not paying attention to page load times.

One way out is not to use social bookmarking scripts and instead manually code the links to your posts avoiding Javascripts. However, this is not a scalable solution and wouldn’t help, unless all you want is a delicious or digg bookmark.

For those of us who needs the popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc, there is still no silver bullet solution. If the buttons are fancy looking, there is bloated code, if the code is slick, then the UI sucks, if UI is great then there are no configuration options.

So, what are the options we have? Something that can balance page load time, and user friendliness. Anyone?