After a month of keeping a Facebook Fan Box widget for Archon Digital’s Facebook Fan Page, we decided to remove the clunky javascript altogether and replace it with an image resembling the same “Become a Fan” button.

It was noted from my observations in the past month that the Facebook script loaded in what appeared to be a sort of toss-coin algorithm where it would load “sometimes properly” around 40% of the time and then the rest of the 60% is divided up into “load partly” or “not load at all” and then the inevitable “keep the entire page from loading altogether”.

Keeping a familiar Facebook button will help make it easy for people to click on the button since they are already familiar with Facebook. Facebook has been around for quite some time now that the human eye is already trained to “home in” on the “Become a Fan” button.  The only advantage lost from removing the script is the one-step process of adding fans to your Facebook page. It’s worth considering that problems with your page from loading properly would make you lose rather than gain more readers so who cares about that one-step process anyway.

Page load time improved dramatically after removing the Facebook Fan Box Script and I’m expecting to make a few more changes on the site to improve it’s performance on SERPs and speed up the site.