When I started my blog, I used Disqus for comments on posts. This was a natural choice: I'd seen sites use Disqus all over the internet, it was easy to setup, and they had a free tier. I happily integrated Disqus and moved on.

Here's the thing: I've always known that using Disqus came at the cost of some page bloat. I've written about web performance before and generally strive to make my pages fast, but I just assumed having Disqus was worth the bit of extra weight. My logic: If Disqus were really so bloated, everyone would've migrated away from them by now. Surely Disqus prioritizes keeping their payload reasonably small, right?

I was wrong. Last week, I finally did what I should've done at the beginning: benchmark it myself. Here are my results (benchmarked on my Webpack post):

Adding Disqus increased my page weight by over 10x and my request count by over 6x. That's ridiculous! I immediately started looking to replace Disqus - web performance is important.

An Alternative: Commento

A while back, I saw a Hacker News post about a fast, privacy-focused alternative to Disqus called Commento. Having learned my lesson, I benchmarked Commento before committing to it:

What a difference. Commento is orders of magnitude lighter than Disqus.

It gets even better. Here are more reasons I was sold on Commento:

• It's open source.
• It's privacy focused - it doesn't sell user data and tries to collect as little as possible. This is especially nice given that my blog's audience is probably more privacy-conscious than the average internet user.
• You can pay what you want. Disqus's free tier is ad-supported, and its cheapest paid tier is $9/month. Commento is actually cheaper (if you want it to be)!
• It's configurable. If you scroll down to the comments of this post, you'll see that the styling of the Commento integration matches the styling of the rest of the site.
• It has an Import from Disqus tool that's easy to use. I was able to quickly migrate all of my old Disqus comments to Commento.

Commento works great for me, but I'm not trying to say it's the right solution for everyone - there are several good, lightweight commenting platforms out there.

Are you still using Disqus? Did you know how much bloat it adds to your page? What's keeping you from switching?

Originally published at victorzhou.com