Social sharing buttons are now a common feature on most websites.  Just take a look at the end of this article to see that AlbanyWeb is a regular participator in this trend.  It's a simple way to help bring your site to the attention of more visitors.  There's nothing better than a personal recommendation, and these buttons make it easy for your existing visitors to spread the word.

Choosing the best buttons

However, the code behind these clever little buttons can really affect your website efficiency.  On some websites, apparently simple buttons are created using multiple calls to external websites for each single button.  If you have quite a lot of buttons, that is a lot of calls.  Not only that, but fetching the icons from each individual social media site leads to inconsistent appearance.

At AlbanyWeb, we did a lot of shopping around for a good and flexible option...