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Poll Results: Sharing Buttons

A poll has been running here regarding sharing buttons. We asked it this way:


12.5 thousand CSS-Tricks visitors voted. The results are in! Here are the choices and results:

  • 60% I don't ever use sharing buttons. I share my own way.
  • 31% I can go either way.
  • 9% I typically only share pages that have sharing buttons.

Of course, these are CSS-Tricks visitors. You can decide how relevant that is for yourself. I like to think that front end developers aren't entirely different from other human beings.

One way to look at it is that 60% of people (at least say) that they would never use them even if they were there. That's a pretty strong case that they could be considered visual clutter. You're already fighting to get a tiny percentage of people to share, and to know that you're trying to squeeze those from just 40% of visitors feels a bit weird.

But that's only considering direct use. There is the "remind" consideration, in which showing people a share button might remind them to share regardless if they use the actual button or not.

Then there is the performance consideration. There are ways to be responsible about the loading of sharing buttons, but any way you cut it adds weight to the page. There is always a risk you lose visitors from having them. I've never seen a statistic in which weightier pages garner more viewers. It's always more speed = more visitors.

The last big one for me is aesthetic concern. Even if you can make them visually nice, the presence of sharing buttons at all always feels a little cheap to me. It never makes a page feel more classy, anyway. And that leads into "quality of shares". We all know not all shares are considered equal. I don't have any data on this but it seems like you'd be likely to get higher quality shares from a classier page. From people who are good enough at social media to share things they actually like in a classy way.

From the comments on the original post:

Nate Green:

I typically don't use share buttons because I've found that they don't share things in a way that I’d like them to. Too many that I've tried either insert their own robotic message, use a crappy spammy-looking thumbnail, or link to a page that wasn't the one I was trying to share.



Jon Hobbs:








I usually don’t use share buttons because I want to have more control over the things I share. I’m also not an serial sharer so the little extra time it takes me to “craft’ the share doesn’t matter to me that much.





At the time of this writing, and I change my mind a lot on this subject, I'm with Shaw. I'm using custom anchor links for sharing buttons. Simple custom look, no performance penalties, there if people need them (perhaps most useful on mobile).