WordPress Comments Slow Down Page Speed
Gravatar slows down page loading speed. The article has some good suggestions on speeding up comments and I’m most curious with “2. Load comments dynamically (e.g. a button that says “click here to view comments”).” Anyone knows a theme that does this? Once page loading speed is taken into account in Google’s ranking algorithm, that should be a much more requested feature.
A lot of good traffic can be driven to a site because of comments being indexed by search engines; would hiding them by a “click to view” button completely block Google from the comments?
I’ve had a page grow to have hundreds of comments and while I wasn’t using any caching plugins at the time, I was using plenty of others. I didn’t notice any slowdown, even though I’m on a simple shared host. How many comments are we talking about here?
That said, SuperCache or any of the other caching plugins should negate the issue without reducing usability (adding buttons to view things that users take for granted typically isn’t a moving usability in the right direction).
I don’t know of a theme that does this, but I have seen it here;
http://briancray.com/
To be honest, I haven’t checked it out to see if he is just loading the data and hiding it, or he pulls the data in afterwards with Ajax or something. His site is pretty fast though.
I like to use Google’s Page Speed plugin to check my caching and expires configuration. That’s how I found out that my old host didn’t support the .htaccess changes, which are needed I think for SuperCache to work.
The Depo Masthead theme does this. But the premise is wrong, Gravatars (or any images) aren’t going to hurt you in the Google rankings or we would have seen a massive drop-off in traffic on WP.com.