I have been writing articles for my friends at Elegant Themes recently. One of the topics I have been focusing on recently is the importance of integrating social media buttons into your content. I have also spoke about how social media buttons can slow down your website.
Last week, I developed a small WordPress website for a niche that I have been keen on testing. Getting the right social media buttons was something that was high on my list as it will be vital to the success (or lack of success) of the website.
On my search for a suitable social media plugin that adds sharing buttons, I came across Ultimate Social Deux. One of the things that grabbed my attention was that the plugin was designed with speed in mind.
Look & Feel
Instead of displaying the official sharing buttons from external services, the plugin uses light Javascript and CSS to display clean, colourful buttons.
Each social media button shows the number of shares that an article has for each service.
In addition to horizontal buttons, there is an option to place floating buttons at the left hand side of your page.
I’m currently testing the plugin out on this blog, so you can see the horizontal and floating sharing buttons in this post (though I have a tendency to change things every few months, so if you are reading this at a later date, I may have switched to another plugin)/
Settings Area
The settings area gives you a better understanding of what Ultimate Social Deux can do. There are five settings areas in total.
The basic settings tab allows you to define your Twitter username, default Pinterest image and the text that is used for total number of shares.
Eight social media services are available. The default colour for each service can be adjusted. The standard hover colour can be changed too.
I would probably keep the default colours as they use the same colours associated with each service. However, I can see the benefit of changing the colours to match your theme’s colour scheme. For example, I saw one website who had changed all buttons to black as it matched the rest of their design.
In addition to sharing your pages on social media services, visitors can also email friends about your article. Every aspect of the email can be modified and Captcha can be enabled to reduce spam.
Sharing buttons can be placed in five areas: floating, top of pages, bottom of pages, top of posts and bottom of posts. There is no option to switch the floating share bar to the right hand side of the page, however horizontal buttons can be aligned to the left, centre, or right.
The text that is displayed before horizontal buttons can also be defined and you can manually exclude the buttons from certain posts and pages.
Clicking on a share button will generate a pop up box that allows people to share your content. By using a pop up instead of opening the sharing option in a new browser tab, Ultimate Social Deux ensures that the visitor does not leave the current browser tab.
The width of height of each pop up can be defined through the advanced settings area.
Buttons can be inserted directly into your posts or pages. Alternatively, you can use shortcodes to add share buttons. There is a shortcode available that allows you to display the total number of shares for a page.
Unfortunately, there is no option to display the total number of shares automatically, nor is there a PHP function available for it. Therefore, you cannot hard-code the total number of shares into your website design, you can only show this information by using a shortcode.
Final Thoughts
When compared to social media sharing plugins such as ShareThis and AddThis, Ultimate Social Deux lacks a lot of features.
It does not offer multiple icon options and styles. It does not allow you to hard code buttons into your website design. It does not include any widgets either.
None of this personally bothered me as I am happy with the default style and happy with the way buttons are automatically inserted into pages. Both types of sharing buttons also look fantastic on tablets and mobile phones too.
The one thing I would like is an integrated CSS box. Currently, the horizontal buttons are placed right next to the content area. A margin added to the buttons. This can obviously be done by editing the plugin directly, however that is not ideal as the code would get overwritten.
Hopefully, the spacing problem will be corrected in the next update of the plugin. After activating the plugin, I validated my website and noticed that the plugin generates one error. It is just a basic error that is caused by an element link not being included. This should hopefully be upgraded soon too.
Ultimate Social Deux is available from CodeCanyon for $12. If you have any questions about the plugin, please post them below in the comment are and I will do my best to answer them :)
Thanks,
Kevin
I need to set up a CDN too. Anyways, I think we are going a little off topic now.
I am glad you have resolved the errors with your plugin. It’s a stylish plugin and it definitely has a lot to offer.
From a website owner’s point of view, it is good that so many good social media sharing plugins are being developed.
No, we did not change anything on our site, nor have we optimized it for speed at all.
Later today we will share our results when we have our CDN and minimized CSS & js set up.
We are currently working on the next update which will feature a new and improved option panel along with drag&drop reordering and we will make fever requests to the server to get counts.
A preview of the renewed option panel can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tc7mn0uspgg9qsk/Screenshot%202014-10-29%2010.54.27.png?dl=0
I was not lying. That is the speed I got through GTmetrix.
I just ran the report again for your website. It now shows 49 requests. This shows that you have optimised your design since I made my comment as there are less requests. Sneaky :)
Despite this, I am getting a page loading time of over 3 seconds for the page.
And my website loads considerably quicker.
In my defence, I have had to disable a defer loading plugin I use to optimise my website because it was clashing with another plugin. I’m currently looking at alternatives and it will soon be much quicker. If you had checked it last week, it would have been significantly faster.
The whole reason I brought this issue up was because you were criticising other developers about their social media plugins, despite your own plugin being buggy.
Yea, that was one of the reasons we had to get rid of a member in our support team and assign him to something that had nothing to do with servicing our customers.
We never had anyone else reporting this error, so it comes as a surprise that you where not able to resolve it. Usually it is a CDN or caching issue where the latest version of the iconfont is not transferred to the browser.
Lets not get ahead of our selves and state something that is not true.
Testing social.ultimate-wp.com on Pingdom tools gives us a load time of 903ms: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bnQHTM/social.ultimate-wp.com
This is significantly faster than your own site even though you have minimized your CSS and js:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/cvqlrx/http://kevin-muldoon.b.wetopi.com/ultimate-social-deux-wordpress-plugin/#comment-8489
For comparison we even load more buttons and more images on our site. So not really sure where you want to go with the above statement?
All errors on our site comes from other sources like the X theme that we used as a framework for our child theme.
I just did a few simple checks.
I noticed that:
I am unsure as to whether any of the issues are related to the plugin itself, though obviously it is not good for your demo page to load slowly and contain errors etc.
Kevin
My issues were never resolved either with IE11 and trust me I tested on multiple machines… And the print icon issue where Phil and I were having the same problem was never fixed… your support response was “Well, WPEngine sucks then.. lol” ??? If it takes months to fix something I move on to alternate software that already works fine without bugs.
Yea the commenting system on CodeCanyon sucks, which is why we are handling all of our support through our own support forum today.
We agree that we lack a set of features that other plugins have, but we are working towards resolving these issues.
We want to do it the right way according to WordPress coding standards, which some of our competitors does not care about. We also care about speed and how many requests we make to the server in order to get the content for the buttons. One of the mentioned plugins in this article does not really care about the amount of requests and is basically loading the icons through png images instead of an icon font. An by that taking more requests to the server than actually needed. This not only harms your SEO, but also your speed.
If you look back at my correspondence to you in the comment area of your plugin, I reported that there were 17 errors. You did not respond.
I’m glad the issues have now been resolved.
Not sure which error you are talking about? But running it through a w3 validator is not giving anymore markup errors.
I can’t speak for Brian, but I know that the issues I raised about there being errors with the plugin were never resolved.
Can you enlighten us in what you mean by lack of good developer support? We want to improve our customer support, so feedback is very valuable to us.
I agree with this. In the end, I removed Ultimate Social Deux as it was too buggy.
Hey Brandon, I am actually using this now: http://codecanyon.net/item/easy-social-share-buttons-for-wordpress/6394476
I no longer use ultimate social deux because of lack of good developer support.
Easy Social Share is a lot more customizable and loads fast.
I’m using the Divi theme currently and I noticed after installing this plugin every page and post has the words page or post at the very bottom of the pages. It works well for what I’m using it for but between this and a lack of options I think I might look else where. Anyone know of a quick loading stylish floating social bar?
For anyone that had issues with this plugin I highly recommend trying it again… Since March the developer has released 6 new versions all with new features and fixes. Post/page exclusions by ID now work great, you can now hide on mobile devices, it now supports all custom post types, and even WooCommerce.
I have been running this since I read Kevin’s review and love the speed! Compared to AddThis, Digg Digg, etc… there is no comparison in load times.
You can see the changelog on bottom of this page: http://codecanyon.net/item/ultimate-social-deux/6556073
Hi Esteban,
No I am not sure. I used the plugin for a short while but stopped because it generated a validation error.
I recommend contacting the developer as it sounds like it is not working in the way it should.
Kevin
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for your post. I recently installed ‘Ultimate Social Deux’ on a new blog I am starting.
Although it kept the promise of being nice and easy to install, I started to notice a strange behavior in my posts (http://goo.gl/3GWBlJ):
1. the “share this” text next to the top page buttons seems to be taken as the first words of my posts and appear in the summaries / excerpts on other pages.
2. what is more disturbing, if you try to share via FB, the thumbnail generated is not an image from the blog, but an image of the social deux plugin.
You have any idea of why this is happening? I am not a techie, so any advice you can provide in plain English will be highly appreciated.
Thanks so much,
Esteban
No problem. Yeah it sounds like you the floating bar will work with it better. Best of luck :)
I guess Ultimate Social Deux will come with more options in later updates, hopefully without compromising on lightness :-)
In Divi, the project pages are given the url as the post nams (type; http://wayout.no/project/indriel-no/) and I tried to exclude with this “id” in the exclude box, but no luck. I will go for the floating bar for now and watch what happends to this plugin in the future
Thanks for your answer and for lots of good read :-)
Hi Hakonzen,
The plugin could be improved with an option to integrate buttons into a template using PHP. Could it be added to Divi using a shortcode via a module? I imagine that many visual themes will have problems with this type of thing.
You can see the id for any post or page via your admin area. Check out the url of a post you are editing and you will see it defined there :)
Kevin
Hi Kevin!
I use the Ultimate Social Deux on my site, wayout.no and I like the look and feel it gives. But I got one problem with the custom post type projects on the ET´s divi theme. Ultimate Social Deux takes this as a post, and sumits the share bar inbetween elements in a rather destroying way (for the layout). I could offcource just go for the floating bar, but thats not what I`m looking for. I see I can exclude some pages by Id, but I can´t find any Id´s on the Divi themes project pages