There has been some discussion about social media buttons on websites. Because most of the buttons are crap by code-design and can break your website it is worth considering to remove them.

As Oliver Reichenstein by iA wrote last week, it is not worth it embedding the social media buttons. Here is why I removed them now:

• I already removed Facebook Button several months ago because the servers by Facebook sometimes are really slow and actually affected my site's performance. After removing these lacks were eliminated.

• All these buttons rely on external servers which of I do never know they are online. And if they are not or have an overload your site will hold loading until this widget works.

• They are not worth it. The design is mostly ugly and the users often do not click the buttons at all.

• Users who share my blog posts actively do it anyways and the response might be bigger than with an predefined sharing-text.

And additionally the existing heise.de SocialButton script which loads images by default and executes the real code after the first click relies on jQuery which I don't really need here.

Thanks for understanding, and please share my articles manually. It also makes your timeline prettier. Just reference my twittername @anselmhannemann if you like.