How to reduce the load time on a page with a lot of iframes (social media plugins)

Question

I have an overview page with links to the social media presence of all the teams taking part in a competition.

Basically, the page is a big table with, where appropriate, in the cells an iframe with a social media plugin like the Twitter widget or the Facebook button, linking to the account of the team in question.

However, the page loads very slowly, because of the look-up time of all these little iframe plugins.

Is there a way I can reduce the load time of this page?

Answer 1

1. Paste the button JS only once at the bottom of the page and then load the HTML as many times as you want.
2. Try to use static links for Facebook and Twitter like on this site if you do not wan't the share count.
3. Use share tools like ShareThis and AddThis which have already optimized JavaScript.
4. Using cache to increase PageSpeed and decrease load times is very effective. As you are using MediaWiki, try this.
5. If you are done with the above, try optimizing other aspects of the site for an overall performance boost. You can start with Google PageSpeed and Yahoo YSlow.