Is your website optimised for social sharing?

Every single (social or other) script linked on a website increases the risk of crippling the site should the service providing the script be unavailable to the client for whatever reason.

Even if loaded asynchronously, the added loading time and "elements settling into place" provides a less than perfect user experience every single visitor has to endure, whether they share a link to your site on a social network or not.

I'm not only talking about the panic Facebook caused by being down. I'm also referring to the situations not everyone considers: Facebook being blocked in a corporate environment while your website is trying to load open graph.

There's value to the social engagement, no doubt about that, but as a developer I often feel the urge not to include any of the dynamic "like" and "tweet" buttons unless I'm explicitly asked to, instead I opt in for the regular links where at all possible.

If that means sharing my sites on Facebook won't automatically insert a short excerpt, so be it.