A short while ago, I got rid of gravatars in my comments section. In case you didn’t know, gravatars are those little pictures that appear next to your comments on a blog. Sometimes depending on the settings, when you hover over them they “jump out” a bit or fade in a new window that leads to the gravatar profile. I don’t know how useful those profiles are, but the pictures are definitely nice especially since they’ve become a kind of standard on most blogs.
The problem is that gravatars slow the site down. It’s not a question of bandwidth. Each picture is tiny and even taken together, they form a very low percentage of the bandwidth downloaded. The problem is that they are downloaded separately and take up connection time. In addition, for some reason there are many 301 redirects when requesting a gravatar image. This is not supposed to be a good practice and lowers a page’s speed score.
I like my site to load quickly. Not only is this better for users, Google also says that it uses speed as a ranking factor. I’ve managed to get it down to under 3 seconds on an average after a lot of tweaking – merging javascript, relocating it to the bottom, rearranging the order of inline javascript and CSS so that one doesn’t block the other. After doing all this, it sucks that gravatars are the bottleneck slowing things down.
Yet I don’t know whether those who comment on blogs like gravatars. I realize it provides a certain visual impact of the commenter. I want to know how much of an impact that is. If you comment on a site and don’t see gravatars are you disappointed? Is it a bummer?
As a frequent commenter on various blogs, I myself don’t feel any deficiency with gravatars missing. But I may be falling prey to the self sampling hypothesis and so I’d like feedback from you nice people about how important you think gravatars are for commenters and whether it’s worth the price in slower loading webpages.
I don’t even have a gravatar. I always wanted one but when I tried to get one, the process seemed too long (and complicated, since I couldn’t figure out a non-copyrighted image and I don’t want my own photo up there). So clearly I didn’t one want badly enough and I’m fine without it.
In reply to The Bride
There are plenty of non copyrighted images I could point you to if you want. Like others have mentioned, a gravatar fosters a sense of familiarity…
I did not realize that gravatar actually slows the page down. Does it really make a difference?
Personally I like having a gravatar, coz my name along with that pic gives a certain identity and familiarity to the person whose blog I am commenting on.
In reply to Ashwathy
It takes my pages speed from the 90s to the 80s :( .
Well, an image fosters a sense of familiarity. If there are repeat bloggers whose comments I like to read here and elsewhere, I just check out their pic quickly and read with interest. But specifically checking out their names is a bother. Also, I like seeing people’s faces or what they choose to show as their gravatar. But yeah, it’s not a major problem, I guess.
In reply to Fem
Hmm…I wonder if I should just take the page speed hit since so many people seem to appreciate them?