: Difference in using third party social buttons and directly integrating each social buttons ourselves I wanted to add specific social buttons to my article. I used ShareThis. It gives a facebook

@Margaret670

What Peter Scott said. Plus, don't forget, if you decide to make your own button, that Facebook has guidelines about styling the Like button that must be followed. Twitter also has some rules about the colors and logos that can be used.

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@Pierce454

In terms of SEO, plugins like ShareThis will be no different from creating share buttons yourself. All that it does is use the existing facebook, google, etc. api as per the documentation (so you would probably end up with an almost identical button if you did it yourself, in terms of functionality). However, remember that each social media share button that you add will be an outbound link on your page - which will have a small negative effect on your page's SEO rankings.

Obviously you get greater control over style etc. if you create it yourself.

ShareThis and the other 3rd party plugins for social media integration are pretty lightweight, so you won't see any noticeable increase in load times by using them instead of code that you write yourself.

My basic advice would be that unless you are looking to add extra functionality besides simple sharing buttons then 3rd party code like ShareThis is perfectly good. Creating a duplicate yourself would serve little purpose.

I hope this helps.

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