Why I Replaced Disqus and You Should Too
Tags: webdev, performance, bestpractices, disqus
Published: 2019-04-03 02:27:50

---
title: Why I Replaced Disqus and You Should Too
canonical_url: https://victorzhou.com/blog/replacing-disqus/
published: true
cover_image: https://victorzhou.com/media/commento-post/migration.png
tags: Web Development, Performance, Best Practices, Disqus
description: How switching from Disqus to Commento reduced my page weight by 10x.
---

When I started [my blog](https://victorzhou.com), I used [Disqus](https://disqus.com/) 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](https://victorzhou.com/blog/properly-size-images/) 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](https://victorzhou.com/blog/why-you-should-use-webpack/)):

![](https://victorzhou.com/media/commento-post/requests1.png)
![](https://victorzhou.com/media/commento-post/size1.png)

**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](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/why-performance-matters/).

## An Alternative: Commento

A while back, I saw a [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210697) post about a fast, privacy-focused alternative to Disqus called [Commento](https://commento.io/). Having learned my lesson, I benchmarked Commento before committing to it:

![](https://victorzhou.com/media/commento-post/requests2.png)
![](https://victorzhou.com/media/commento-post/size2.png)

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](https://gitlab.com/commento).
- It's [privacy focused](https://commento.io/privacy) - 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](https://commento.io/pricing). 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](https://docs.commento.io/configuration/frontend/). 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?

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_Originally published at [victorzhou.com](https://victorzhou.com)_