The social media plugins allow your visitors to share your articles from your website to their favorite social media network (facebook, twitter, etc). This can help to gather more traffic to your website.
If you want to achieve this, you can use a plugin that will offer the link from your website to the a social media network for your visitors.
Bellow are some social media plugins for the most popular content management systems (CMSs):
- Nice Social Bookmark module for Joomla
- ShareThis module for Drupal
- Social Bookmarks module for WordPress
- From AddThis website you can use code to add manually many different social media buttons to your website.
Where to pay attention
As everything foreign to your website, so the social plugins create a degree of dependence to it from third party pages. You should be sure that the plugin that you will use is from a reputable manufacturer (eg. facebook, google etc.).
Each plugin inevitably causes a significant number of http requests, in order to download all the necessary resources (graphics, css, javascript, etc.) from the plugin provider. This behavior can cause significant problems in websites with high traffic because of the http requests accumulation, due to increased demand and may result to timeouts or very long delays for your page until all the resources be downloaded.
Particular attention should be given to JavaScript plugins and how the third party code is embedded in your website. There is clearly a potential of slow execution of your inherent Javascript commands that you have planned for your website, because of the slow download and execution of the foreign provider Javascript (plugin). The asynchronous calls of the external Javascripts can improve the delays but would not essentially solve the above problem when it occurs. We recommend to include as much as possible clean and economical logic in terms of resources when you design your website in order to avoid undesirable situations in the future. Of course you should monitor for possible updates of the third party plugins for improvements that may be made available.
In conclusion pay special attention studying and integrating social plugins and select one which will have as much as possible less impact in your website, the one that will require the least possible resources (graphics, css, javascript, etc.) in order to operate.
