Usability tradeoffs- Google Plus, Facebook likes, twitter widgets

[malinens]

They are very useful but it slows down my website. For one Google Plus button browser needs to download 100 Kilobytes of already compressed javascript. Also twitter widget loads not as fast I I would want. Of course everything loads fast after first visit because of cache but I want to get impression of very fast website when visitor are first time on my website. Are there any tips and tricks to make social stuff load faster or not interfer with usabilty? Thanks!

EDIT: made google plus button load asynchronously but it didn't have visible impact on loading time. The biggest headache for twitter widget. Maybe there is alternative to Twitter widget or should I disable it?

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Put the external loading scripts at the end of your coding and place the container for them using CSS.

This way the rest of the page continues loading instead of stalling while waiting for the external scripts to load. Solves the problem of the whole page stalling if the 3rd party's server is down.