I do like Jetpack as it offers a lot of things all built into one WordPress plugin, but there are some things that need to be tweaked. This tutorial focuses on removing the Social Share buttons from the excerpts in the blog’s homepage.

I removed the social share icons from the homepage excerpts because I know it adds to the load time of my blog, so anything that isn’t totally necessary should be removed.

Yes broadband speeds have become a lot faster than they used to be, but there are many people who still have slower connections or are using their mobile phones to browse the World Wide Web. And if it’s client side code such as JavaScript then this can also load slower if the client’s device i.e PC etc. has a low amount of R.A.M or processing power.

Incidentally if you want to customise the Jetpack Mobile theme then please read my step by step tutorial on how to edit Jetpack mobile Theme post.

It is annoying to have multiple share buttons on the same page so if you have ten article excerpts on the homepage then you will have ten sets of share buttons all attached to each excerpt. I don’t think we should be that desperate that we need to have excessive amounts of obtrusive components all over the webpage.

One of the things that I dislike when I’m browsing the web with my mobile device, is pages that have lots of client side scripts such as pop ups etc. these pages or websites aren’t customised for mobile browsers so it’s hard to use or navigate around the site. Eventually I have to leave the website because of usability issues.

So with this in mind I decided to remove the share buttons from the excerpts in the homepage of my blog.

Remove Social Share Buttons from Jetpack in Excerpts

To do this you’ll need a code editor such as Editplus or Notepad++ so that you are able to comment out a line of code.

Here’s how:

  1. You need to find sharing-service.php, this is in public_html/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/sharedaddy/
  2. at the end of the file you will find the bit to code to comment out or delete
  3. look for add_filter( ‘the_excerpt’, ‘sharing_display’, 19 ); and comment it out.

That will get rid of the social share buttons from each excerpt in the homepage.

Thanks for reading and please do leave your comments and suggestions.