Pingdom: Disqus, Facebook and other third-party social comment systems have little impact on network speed

Website monitoring service company Pingdom recently published an article saying that the results of testing WordPress's built-in comment system with four other third-party social comment systems such as disqus and Facebook showed that third-party comment systems will not seriously slow down web page speeds.

(Note: Pingdom is a website that provides professional website monitoring services. In addition to the paid professional version, it also provides a free version of website monitoring services for ordinary users. It can monitor the user's website once every 1 minute and report the fault to the user via email or mobile text message.)

The following is the original text:

For blogs and many other types of websites, engaging with readers is a very important thing, but many people also think that installing a third-party comment system like Disqus, IntenseDebate or LiveFyre may slow down the site.

If a website is too slow, it will not only fail to encourage debate, discussion or interaction among users, but it may also cause users to lose interest. But do third-party comment systems really slow down a website?

We tested five website comment systems and found that they don’t have as much impact on website speed as many people think.

Comments are important, but so is speed

First of all, let’s be clear: comments are important for many websites (not just blogs). We believe that comments are a critical component for our own Pingdom blog as well. When we were looking for a third-party commenting system for Pingdom, we posted a post asking for your feedback. As you can see, we are still using the commenting system that comes with the WordPress blogging platform, but we are also looking for alternatives.

For example, we mentioned in December last year that among the top 100 blog sites on the blog search engine Technorati, Disqus comment system has the highest market share of 22%. In the comments received on that article, we saw a lot of great opinions and suggestions.

But if installing a third-party comment system will slow down the site, many webmasters will not want to install it. Because users like fast websites - don't expect users to have good patience, a few seconds of speed difference often determines whether the website can retain users - webmasters obviously attach great importance to this.

The five common comment systems we tested include:

1. WordPress’ built-in comment system

2. Disqus

3. Facebook

4. IntenseDebate

5. LiveFyre

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Test results:

1. Number of files loaded (number of requests)

First, we compared the number of system requests sent when using different third-party comment systems. The results showed that WordPress had the least (6), Facebook had the most (14), Disqus and LiveFyre both had 9, and IntenseDebate had 11.

(Figure 1: Number of files loaded)

2. Page size

The number of files loaded actually has little effect on the page size. The page sizes of WordPress, Disqus, LiveFyre, and IntenseDebate are almost the same, only Facebook's page is significantly larger, nearly 47KB larger than WordPress.

But don’t underestimate this 47KB. Many websites still need to install various plug-ins or additional programs. If each of them adds up to an extra 47K, the page will become much larger when added together.

(Figure 2: Page size)

3. Website performance

The page size and the number of files loaded do not necessarily represent the speed of the website that users perceive. The following are the website loading speeds tested in three different cities:

(Figure 3: Website loading speed, from top to bottom: Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Dallas, the United States, and New York)

The differences between the five commenting systems weren’t huge, but WordPress was the fastest to load in every city.

If we combine the results from the three locations above, we can get the average loading speed of each of the five comment systems:

(Figure 4: Average loading speed)

Obviously, the differences among the five are still not that big. This result may be different from what you might have guessed before reading this article.

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Conclusion: Little impact on website performance

There is no significant difference in website performance when using WordPress alone or other third-party comment systems. However, Facebook is slightly slower than the other four.

Of course, this test has great limitations, and the situation in real life may not be the case, because many users visit websites that run many plug-ins and modification programs. In addition, the location of the server also affects the speed of web page access.

But overall, we think that based on our testing results, third-party comment systems will not significantly slow down your site.