There are two types of people in WordPress, one who loves native comments and other ones who love Disqus comments ?.

Each has its pros and cons. But one of the biggest “cons” of Disqus Comments is the speed. Yes, it’s heavy and can slow down the site a lot with the default settings.

So before we start to optimize Disqus comments, let’s see how native comments look like, just to get a baseline:

Disqus with Default Settings

Ok, now let’s see how Disqus performs with default settings (I’m in the free plan).

Pretty bad right? Now let’s optimize it!

Disable Tracking

Go to your site’s settings in Disqus dashboard and turn off “Tracking”.

We’re able to remove 50+ requests and 40KB. Nice!

Similarly, disable “Affiliate Links”.

Not a big improvement, but still…

Load on User Interaction

Disqus is just “comments”, do we need to load them right on the initial page load? 99% of the sites have comments at the bottom, right?

Let’s load them only when the user interacts with the site (a kind of lazy loading).

Install Flying Scripts and add “disqus-comment-system” to the keywords.

Note: You’ll need to exclude “disqus-comment-system” from the minified/combined JS too if you’re using a cache plugin.



Now Disqus will be loaded only when the user makes an interaction with the site, like a scroll, mouse movement, keyboard inputs, touch etc.

How’s that?!

There is also a plugin called Disqus Conditional Load which lets you load on click, scroll. However, loading ‘right after scroll start’ is their paid version.

Conclusion

Fully Loaded Time Page Size Requests Without Disqus 0.8s 278KB 11 With Disqus 5.0s 700KB 107 Tracking disabled 4.4s 660KB 45 Affiliates links disabled 3.9s 652KB 43 Load on user interaction 1.0s 267KB 10

Comment below if you’ve any queries or feedback. I read and reply to each of them within 8 hours!