It is often common to embed a Facebook “Like” button on your website so that on the one hand you show the number of followers of your Facebook page and on the other hand you invite the user to click on it to start following your page. However, this type of buttons tend to overload a website quite a lot because they consist of Javascript code that dynamically generates the button with the updated number of followers and the functionality needed to give a “Like”. This means that every time you load a page of your website you have to send 11 extra requests to the Facebook servers to download all the necessary elements. Given that these servers are currently located on the west coast of the United States and are not available through any CDN or similar service, depending on where the user is located, it is likely that each of these requests will have to cross half the globe to complete the download. All this causes your website to slow down unnecessarily and its loading speed is affected, which is quite negative in multiple aspects.
What if you could replace the button provided by Facebook with a single and simple image of the same button showing up-to-date number of followers of your Facebook page? It would be fantastic for website performance optimization or WPO, because it would only require a single additional request to the server, and it could be served and cached quickly from a CDN very close to the user’s geographic location. In this way you could ensure that the loading speed of your website would remain very high and without performance penalties.
How can this be achieved? It seems a win-win solution too good to be true… Well, it can be achieved in a much simpler way than you think thanks to the Imagemagick library and a simple Bash script. Read on…
