After using the Wibiya Toolbar on our SEO blog site for 2 months we have decided to remove the plugin and revert back to our “Sexy Bookmarks”. Why, you may ask? Well, after listening to feedback from our blog readers and with our own experience we felt that the traditional social sharing plugin was more effective (for us). We have come to this conclusion for a number of reasons:
1) The Wibiya Toolbar slows down the page loading time. Google takes into account your page loading time and if it is excessive can affect your rankings. Our pages loaded slower with Wibiya than when we were using Sexy Bookmarks.
2) It was a bit annoying every time you entered the website a message appeared introducing the blog. The message is a bit intrusive to viewers who just want to read the SEO blogs. It is similar to a video playing automatically when you enter a website, very irritating.
3) Every time a visitor rolled over the plugin different sharing functionality popped up. This can get frustrating if you roll over the button by mistake.
4) The footer at the end of our page was hidden by the toolbar. This was a design issue. If we were to keep the toolbar we would have had to change the length of the footer.
5) The toolbar is a visual distraction if you have large amounts of text on your web page.
These were minor issues but eventually changed our mind in using the Wibiya Toolbar. Although we have stopped using the toolbar I think there are a lot of good points about it. The Wibiya team are still in development mode at the moment and I am keeping an eye on any improvements. Some good points about the toolbar were:
1) The speed it takes to set up. It literally takes 5 minutes to install on a CMS website.
2) It is very easy to integrate with your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
3) You can add live chat functionality very easily and with the click of a button.
4) It is useful for bookmarking your articles on sites like Digg.
5) You can “Like” articles and “Retweet” very easily.
We are going to stick with our traditional sharing and bookmarking functionality for the moment but we would definitely give it another go down the line. I think Wibiya will suit some sites better than others. If you have had a positive or negative experience with the Wibiya Toolbar let us know by commenting on this article. You can download the Wibiya Toolbar here.
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