Future Theme Option (A Friendly Suggestion)

[motionstream]

Hi SwiftIdeas,

I wanted to plant the seed for a potential theme option, not just for Supreme, but for all SwiftIdeas’ themes:

It would be really great if end users of your themes could switch off social media sharing options by eliminating “ShareThis” from loading into the header.php file.

This makes sense (to us) for the following reason:

Since social media can be turned off on individual posts, there needs to be a macro option to REMOVE ShareThis from the header.php file as well. Eliminating ShareThis from the header.php file vastly improves load time for our site and with more and more people opting to view content on mobile devices—speed is everything.

Also, most mobile devices have sharing capabilities built into the OS, so including ShareThis in SwiftIdeas’ themes seems out of step with the direction that the world is moving. We love you’re themes, and you’re doing really great work, but eliminating “ShareThis” in future theme updates would make your products even better. Thanks for listening!

[Mohammad – SUPPORT]

Hi,
Great thanks for your suggestion. I sent it to development team to include this feature in next upgrade.
Thanks
Mohammad

[motionstream]

Thanks Mohammad!

Just for your reference, turning off sharing and eliminating the “ShareThis” script from the header.php file has made a significant difference for us. Using Pingdom’s Full Page Test, our homepage (which is 3.3mb total size with 112 server requests) load time performance grade went from 75% to 95/100% on a desktop, and 93/100 on mobile devices. That’s huge! Our average load time is now under 3 seconds on a desktop and approximately 5 seconds on mobile with an optimal cellular/wifi connection.

I’ve read that most people will give up on a website if it takes more than 7.5 seconds to load, so to get the average load time below 5 seconds totally rocks. Google rewards speed as well. “ShareThis is a legacy of the old web, time to move on from it.

Thanks again for your consideration.

Best,

Lionel

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Hi @motionstream

Thank you for the point – we’ll see what we can do.

– Ed

[motionstream]

Thank you!

[David Martin – Support]

Thanks Ed.

– David.

[Amanda]

Hey guys,
I’m having the same issue. If I turn Supreme off, I save a total of 2 seconds. There are a lot of css and javascript files for the server to return to the browser. The fastest I can get my site to is 4 seconds. Which in my brain is a lot of seconds. So, as mentioned above, a friendly suggestion to think about for future themes.

[David Martin – Support]

@Amanda Thanks for the +1 vote, understood.

Cheers,
David.