I felt very enthusiastic once Amazon announced OneLink, it seemed like a missing puzzle to serve international customers and boost earnings as an Amazon associate.
Now many months later I have very ambivalent feelings regarding this - yes, I've made some extra dollar (pound and euro) by serving Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de - on the other hand, earnings from these versions are humble not to say more, and in fact earnings from Amazon.com have started to dip for couple of months (I'm not blaming Amazon OneLink here)
After I decided to remove Social Share buttons from my blog to improve Page load times I discovered that on some pages javascript from Amazon actually is the biggest issue for blogs performance, and with combination of low income from Amazon OneLink, I decided it's time to further limit external javascript in order to improve page load times and speed.
Here is the test from an article containing amazon associates third-party javascript (OneLink and Recommendations) before optimizing this page for better load times
Page load times for page with Amazon Javascripts
In fact, that's a pretty decent result, page load time 2.21 seems great, but what makes me worried is the total request count - 279, this seems a lot, and it turns out, these are requests by Amazon's javascript:
Request by domains
More than 60% of requests come from Amazon javascript, 42% are from Amazon's OneLink.
Now, I decided to stop using Amazon's OneLink and to eliminate its javascript from my pages.
Results of testing after removing Amazon javascript from page
Now, this is some serious performance boost - page load time is under 2 sec, and the total request is just 110.