Do Gravatar Images increasing the load time of your website?
These days almost every website owner has gravatar in the Author box. And at the same time, you will be able to see the gravatar’s for the commentators as well which is quite sensible as the website look more genuine and authentic with avatars.
But, yes it slows down the website speed. As gravatar’s pulls the images to load from each and every commentator’s gravatar server’s. Which is definitely attached to the individual email address.
Hence while loading the images the website has to make several HTTP’s requests, which dramatically increases the load time. And if your website receives several comments, then your users have to suffer a lot.
Impact of Gravatars on your WordPress Website
Check out an example of a site tested in GTMetrix making the HTTP request to load all in Leverage Bowser Caching. Most of the requests are being made from Gravatar.
As it can be seen in the above list one post has to make so many requests to load it. And those all from the comments, is that meant you should stop accepting comments?
Nah… not at all. Comments are good for your website. It good to find out an alternate solution to speed up your website.
You might be using optimization plugins for your WordPress site and caching the images of your site. But it won’t help out gravatar at all. So, how about caching gravatar images and increase the site optimization to the further level.
Cache Gravatar Images in WordPress
Let’s jump into and see how we can Cache gravatar images for better user experience.
Head over to your WordPress dashboard and install FV Gravatar Cache Plugin for your WordPress website. You can install and activate it from the WordPress search Option as well.
Once the plugin is activated, navigate to Settings – FV Gravatar Cache from the WordPress dashboard.
It will open the FV gravatar cache plugin settings page, which looks very simple and thankfully don’t have to do a lot to make the plugin working.
From the bottom of the FV Gravatar cache settings page, Click on the Run Con Now button.
That’s it the plugin will start working on your WordPress website and cache all the gravatar images for you. And Finally, results can be seen in the Cache Information section(Just click on the Show link).
Note: This might take a few minutes, it all depends on the number of images that have to be cached.
And, finally, Click on save changes button.
There are times when the users keep on changing the gravatar profile images. So it’s always good to show the updated blog commentator’s avatars on your website.
So what now, as the images are already cached on your WordPress hosting server. Considering this, the plugin developed has already incorporated an option.
All you need to do is Check the Daily Chron feature. That’s it the plugin will make sure that it features the updated images, as it will sync with gravatar at some intervals. And that will help not requesting in real-time.
Conclusion:
It’s a great plugin to have on your WordPress website. Cache the gravatar images on your own WordPress server and be out of the worry about your site loading. It will dramatically optimize and enhance site performance.
Hey Navin,
This was incredible, very useful. As Gravatar’s impacts hard in loading the website.
This plugin goes well and solves the issue with an ease. Well coded plugin with very minimal and clean settings page.
Hey David, Yes, I agree with you, Gravatars can put any webmaster thinking. But, fortunately, teh developer of this plugin comes out with a great outcome.
Thanks for dropping by and keep visiting 🙂
Hello Navin,
Thanks for sharing this beautiful plugin and I am definitely going to use it on my blog. Gravatar images is drastically impact a blog performance.
have a great day 🙂
Vishwajeet
Hey Vishwa sounds great.. best of luck for caching.
Thanks for going through.
Have a great day ahead! 🙂
Hi Navin,
That’s a good way to reduce loading time. Gravatar profile pics can take a lot of time in loading especially in cases when your site gets 100+ comments.
Although the above method would work flawless, another tweak would be to use a “click to show comments” where comments aren’t loaded at beginning but only when a user requests it.
Thanks for sharing, btw.
Regards,
Shafi Khan
Hi Shafi,
Glad you like it. Yeah, you are right “Click to show comments” and “Lazy load comments” are the good features to utilize.
On the other hand, there are some more benefits of caching the gravatar images. Showing the comments to the new user will encourage them to drop their feedback on the post, which is valuable.
As seldom the small button “read comments” or “click to show comments” just overlooked in the matter of a scroll.
Have a great day!
This did not remove my page speed notices at all! Plugin to slow load or click to show comments; considering this plugin as the pingdom states “ leverage cache gravitars/ avitars
Hi fine article
Curious: my new web blog just got 2 comments.
I see that it was noted by Pingdom and the other testing sites as you wrote about- informing me of leverage cache: gravatars/ avatars bringing page scores down slightly.
Is this what this plugin was made to rectify?
Thanks
Howard
Howard, as your blog is new now, it received fewer comments, but as the time goes on your blog start growing in all the ways, your visitors will leave back a lot of comments on your site, probably then it will make the difference.
And if you are working on to speed up your website, test it with GTMetrix and it will show you all the areas to work on to optimize your website.
Navin
I must commend that you’ve gotten a good blog post, Navin.
True, many sites today access the Gravatar system, so when you comment on a forum, or post on a friend’s blog, the icon next to your comment is the image that you want it to be, not just a generic icon. You can help shape a more customized, personalized web experience for yourself and others.