Rating: 5 stars
It just works, unlike other plugins that are supposed to do the same thing.
It has great options too for adding a custom default avatar if you don’t have one already, and even Lazy Loading for the Gravatars (with a custom loading image option too).
After testing on multiple sites, it seems to save almost .1 seconds for every 20 comments, which was way more than I was expecting. Those Gravatars really can slow down your site without something like this.
]]>Rating: 5 stars
I have tried SO MANY plugins like this for YEARS, none of them worked. This one did.
Have about 4,000 total comments on my blog and write about WordPress speed optimization for a living, and have disabled Gravatars for about 2 years because they take so long to load – some posts have 300+ comments.
My developer came across the plugin after a ton of testing, and this is the only one that actually worked. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I can finally show people’s faces in the comments. I will be referring people to this plugin to my readers.
Thank you plugin developer!
Tom
Rating: 5 stars
I tested some other plugins and they either did not work properly (e.g. only worked for comments, but not for post authors’ gravatars) or required manual changes to the theme to work.
This is the plugin that gave me best results so far.
There are a few details that could be improved, namely with regard to knowing whether the plugin is really working or not, as initially we see the default avatar for almost all users. But after a while we start seeing them being replaced with the proper, locally cached, avatars.
Also, I think the Apache rules set by default are not appropriate to recent Apache versions (uses Order Allow,Deny instead of Require). Even though the installation instructions mention the htaccess file, it would be useful to see a “warning” when setting up the plugin mentioning the file, as most users will likely only check instructions if they have problems with the plugin. Being aware of the htaccess file is important, as we may need to modify it (besides the permission instructions, the cache settings the plugin uses conflict with the cache setting I had in place).