Async Social Sharing WordPress Plugin
I have never found a WordPress social sharing plugin that I loved. I just wanted a simple social plugin that would load any external scripts asynchronously, allowed me to share my posts on Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Hacker News and never included the words “Sharing is sexy!“.
A few weeks ago I started working on developing my own social sharing plugin, and today it is available to the public via Github.
Download from Github
I hope to have the plugin approved and available via the WordPress plugin repository within the next week.
Update: May 1, 2012
The plugin is now listed and available for download from the WordPress plugin repository.
Version 1.0.1 added lazy loading to async-share.js and fixed bug with plugin settings link.
Features
The Async Social Sharing plugin loads the third-party social scripts asynchronously to improve site performance.
The plugin allows you to display the following sharing widgets:
- Google+
- Hacker News
An options panel is provided to allow unwanted social widgets to be disabled:
Why is Asynchronous script loading better?
Asynchronous loading allows multiple files to load parallel to each other. Instead of having to wait for Twitter to respond with their script, the browser moves on and starts fetching the next request.

Credits
JavaScript code was inspired by Stoyan Stefanov’s Social Button BFFs blog post.
HackerNews button code by Ilya Grigorik
Update: May 1, 2012
The plugin is now listed and available for download from the WordPress plugin repository.
Version 1.0.1 added lazy loading to async-share.js and fixed bug with plugin settings link.


Jen Mozen
This is great, Rachel! Despite the thousands of social sharing plugin options out there, I also found myself creating my own solution for my blog because I couldn’t find any that included the Google Analytics social tracking tags. Good luck getting through the plugin approval process!
Rachel Baker
Jen,
Thanks for the comment/feature addition idea of adding Google Analytics social tracking. I will definitely add that to the wish list.
Ryan Evans
I, too, hate “sharing is sexy”. I like being able to select the sharing options. Great work!
Miko Matsumura
Rachel you are awesome and I love your plugin, thank you for making it. Quick question, the plugin does not show up on the front page of my site http://miko.com is there a way to set it up so that those awesome buttons show up there directly on my home page instead of forcing my users to go into each post to see them?
Rachel Baker
Miko,
I will add that in the next release, that should be out tomorrow or Thursday.
Miko Matsumura
wowwwwww. you are so uber!!! I’m so grateful! let me know if theres something i can do for you.
Flying Orange
Thanks for making it simple and clean! Any chances of adding in Pinterest as an option?
Hsawires
hi,
i have just download your plugin in mu blog i am using wordpress 2.9 but since i download it and install it i am not be able to see all my installed plugins. i have about 20 plugins installed and i see just 6 of them, and your plugin is not on the list. please advice how should i use your plugin without problem or how to uninstall it without affecting my Blog.
Miko Matsumura
omgggg it worked…
brad waters
i like it because it was built in chicago
well, that and it’s simple and async. thanks, rachel!
Ivan
Love it
, simple and asynchronous. Please don’t make it ‘full of options’ and heavy.
Just one thing, Google + is not working for me, don’t know why …
Ivan
Is there any way I could call function in my template files to add it anywhere I want?
Thanks!
noshovel
i would like to second this, i like the plugin but would love a shortcode or phpcall added in
Cafeine
Any plan to add pinterest to it?
Dean McDonagh
Hey Rachel, excellent work. If you have time to show how we call this anywhere we want, that would be fantastic!
Jack
This is great work here! You might want to load the js scripts that are only configured. For instance if Hacker news isn’t set, no need to load the script
Thanks!
Pothi Kalimuthu
Works great. After the recent FB incident that affected numerous websites’ overall performance, your plugin is the right solution. Thanks for creating this plugin.
engloy
Great plug-in! Is there a way I can control the spacing between the widgets? Find that there is too much space between the different icons. Thanks a million for a great plug-in!