Social Share Buttons API slowing down site?

Is this a known issue and is there a possible fix with settings for social buttons on Jetpack?

That’s indeed a known issue. Each call to a third-party website will slow your site down a bit more. Every button and every additional image has an impact on performance.

In the end, you’ll need to decide what’s more important for you: sharing counts, or the performance gain. If you choose the latter, you can follow the instructions here to disable sharing counts on your site:
https://jeremy.hu/jetpack-remove-the-share-counts-from-the-sharing-buttons/

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for the info. I will keep the share counts for now as I like knowing how many social shares I’m getting. Speaking of: my Facebook share counts disappeared as of a few hours ago. Looks like it’s affecting several users. Any idea on a fix?

Thank you!

Facebook has indeed changed the way that their API counts shares. Due to this change, the current method of counting shares that Jetpack uses is not working. We are planning to release an update to Jetpack soon which will address this issue. Keep an eye out for an update, it should fix your problem!

Thanks Jeremy! I notice it’s not giving me a thumbnail when I post new posts to FB. Is that part of the same API issue?

No, that would be a different issue.

I don’t seem to run into any issues with the post you mentioned in your original post, though:
https://i.wpne.ws/apvM

It includes Open Graph Meta Tags, most likely added by the WordPress SEO plugin, and Facebook appears to recognize these tags and doesn’t report any issue:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fsmellslikeinfinitesadness.com%2Ftop-10-layne-staley-songs%2F

Do you experience the issue with a specific post?

Hi Jeremy,

It was actually with my most recent post:

https://smellslikeinfinitesadness.com/listen-to-new-chelsea-wolfe-song-iron-moon/

No matter how many times I pasted the link it failed to pull a thumbnail. But I tried running it through the debugger and now it works. Does the debugger actually correct errors? I thought it only pointed them out. I updated the WordPress SEO last week due to the security issue. I wonder if that messed something up with OG tags?

Thanks!

Does the debugger actually correct errors?

The debugger includes a “Fetch new scrape information” button that allows you to force Facebook to refresh the information it has about the URL. Until you click on that button, it won’t refresh the information about the post.

I updated the WordPress SEO last week due to the security issue. I wonder if that messed something up with OG tags?

I don’t think so, the tags are actually correct, nothing is wrong with the tags on your site.

Other site owners reported problems similar to yours last week; it seems it was a temporary issue with Facebook, and it got solved on Friday.

Could you give it another try, and let me know if you still experience issues?

Hi Jeremy,

I posted something this morning and FB didn’t pull a thumbnail initially, but it worked when I tried it a few minutes later, so not sure what that means.

That could either be a problem with Facebook, or your site might have been too slow when Facebook first tried to crawl the post to pull information for its post preview.

I’d suggest that you see how things go with your next post, and if you still experience the same issue, run some tests to see if your site’s loading time is fast enough. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to help you.

I hope this helps.