FV Gravatar Cache

by FolioVision

Description

There’s one problem with Gravatars. They are very slow to load. Each page with comments on them makes one call per comment to the Gravatar server. While a single call takes only a 100ms, on a page with hundreds of comments, we are talking about major slowdowns. Page loads can take 20 seconds and more.

This plugin solves this problem by:

caching gravatars with WordPress cron job..
caching gravatars on comment submission
maintaining a single copy of the default gravatar instead of downloading it again and again for all the email addresses with no gravatar associtated

Installation guide

Support and more information

Installation

You can use the built in installer and upgrader, or you can install the plugin
manually.

After installing, make sure you visit the plugin settings to make sure the plugin works correctly. You will see a check if the cache directory is writable and you will have to set the gravatar size (plugin also uses autodetection mechanism, which might come handy).

Screenshots

FV Gravatar Cache screen

Faq

Gravatars are not caching properly

Hit the “Empty Cache” button to clear the cache database and clear out the cache directory by hand (you can see the path at the very top of the Settings screen). Then hit the “Run Cron Now” button, it will refresh a couple of gravatars, so you can check the cache directory again, to see if it’s filling up correctly. “Current Cron offset:” will increment, so you can track the progess and see how the cron is running. You can also turn on “Debug mode” and check log.txt afterwards.

Generated (Itenticon, Wavatar and MonsterID) gravatars are not working correctly!

These types of gravatars are not currently supported. Drop us a note and we might add this feature in next release.

I want to have bigger gravatars on author profile pages. Your plugin supports only one gravatar size. Is there any workaround?

You can turn edit your template to turn off the FV Gravatar Cache just when needed, add this code right before that section in your WordPress template php file:

<?php global $FV_Gravatar_Cache; remove_filter( ‘get_avatar’, array( &$FV_Gravatar_Cache, ‘GetAvatar’ ) ); ?>

In case you need the FV Gravatar Cache running later in the template, just bring it back with:

<?php global $FV_Gravatar_Cache; add_filter( ‘get_avatar’, array( &$FV_Gravatar_Cache, ‘GetAvatar’ ) ); ?>

I don’t see the default gravatar on my options page!

If you selected empty gravatar in wp-admin -> Settings -> Discussion, then it’s ok. Otherwise try to resave the options and it should appear.

Reviews

Gravatar Cache boosted my site's performance scores

By roam92 on January 11, 2021

Out of the box, the WordPress commenting system is not very performant. For each comment – which could be dozens on a single page load – WordPress makes an uncached call to an external site (gravatar.com) to load the commenter's avatar image. This happens even for the default (and most common) case that the commenter has no gravatar, and it happens repeatedly even if the same person comments multiple times on a single page. My site was getting flagged for this slow drain in profiling tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom... But I did not want to give over my commenting content to third-party companies like Disqus. About a year ago, I discovered FV Gravatar Cache, which vastly reduces this back-and-forth and automatically maintains a fast cached copy of all commenter's gravatars. I installed the plugin and after waiting a little while for it to cache the needed gravatars (which it works through methodically in the background via cron, be patient), my site's metrics and performance scores improved correspondingly. Thank you for this helpful plugin! WordPress really should have something like this built in.

Not working

By grafis (Snackmaster) on February 8, 2020

Nothing cached according to GTMetrix. The plugin settings page "cache information" shows 19 email addresses as the cached objects. The plug created six random user profile PNG files here, did not create cached versions of default Gravatar icons: /wp-content/uploads/fv-gravatar-cache Hmmm....

Only caches a few out of each hundred

By christinaleans on March 22, 2019

I installed this plugin on 3 blogs with three different hosts, and three different themes. It has the exact same problem on all three sites: it only caches about 3-10% of the Gravatars. Posted in their support forum but they responded (politely, to their credit) that they would only look into it if I paid them...even though it's clearly an issue with their plugin.

Database Junk

By Gulshan Kumar (thegulshankumar) on October 6, 2017

I deactivated plugin but still contains elements in Database

Highly recommended

By (TheAnalyzer) on August 15, 2017

Been using this plugin for several years now. It just sits in the background doing what it does, year after year. Trouble-free and reliable.

Good but need more

By gokuldeepak on September 3, 2016

This plugin works well and increases speed but the problem is it only caches images for the registered users. I want to cache for every user who comments on my page. (They Don't need to login to comment on my website instead giving their name and email id is enough)

Is it working?

By semperaye on September 3, 2016

Not sure if it's working, the settings are showing no gravatar's in cache.

Reduce my load time and improved my performance scores

By xantius on September 3, 2016

This plugin was super helpful for reducing the amount of requests my most popular web pages made (pages with over 150 comments) and helped clean up my scores on website analyzers. Thanks!

Works like a charm!

By robintel on September 3, 2016

This is just what I needed, simple to use, fire and forget!

Changelog

0.5

Tested up to WordPress 6.8
Fix PHP warnings before settings are saved
Fix settings page access to be admins only
Added uninstall procedure to remove files and database table
Security: Added nonces for settings page list of avatars
Security: Added permissions check for settings saving as an addition to the existing nonce
Security: Use SHA-256 hashing for cached file names which is stronger than MD5

0.4.8

Fix for avatar caching for comments without email address (rare cases)

0.4.7

Fix for PHP timeout when Gravatar server unreachable during comment posting
WordPress 5.4 compatibility checked

0.4.5

Security fixes
WordPress 5.3 compatibility checked

0.4.3

Fix for WP Rocket CDN rewrite

0.4.2

Fixing PHP notices

0.4.1

added retina alternative for default gravatar
fixed retina images srcset
retina images downloading enabled by default now

0.4

changed images directory to wp-content/uploads/fv-gravatar-cache/
added support for retina images
added cache purge after update if cache directory is set to default
added protocol independent urls
added paging for gravatars into settings screen
fixed cron offset reset
fixed perfomance issues
fixed PHP warning
fixed security issue for debug log functionality
fixed images – adding .png extension as default

0.3.8

fix for PHP warnings by Thomas van der Westen

0.3.7

Added admin_notice warnings
Added a check if the cache directory is empty when the cached data is present in database – to prevent 404 errors for cache gravatars
Improving conditions, improving checking of values after submit

0.3.6

Fix for PHP warnings
Fix for cache disappearing after plugin upgrade (applies to users who didn’t changed the cache directory)

0.3.4

Cron job limited to 2 seconds execution time

0.3.3

Bugfix for empty gravatar in cache

0.3.2

Bug fix for WordPress 3.1 admin bar
Bug fix for blank gravatar

0.3.1

Better detection of missing/default gravatars

0.3

First public release

0.2

Added cron support

0.1

Works only for logged in users