I have decided to turn off commenting on my blog. The reason, it just loads forever and as you know speed is everything these days when it comes to the internet.
Also, there isn't much activity on the blog comment system as it was when I first started online. The crazy part is we as marketers add comments to our landing pages to create social proof. Yet, not a lot of people leave a comment on the blog.
I see Youtube and Social media comments more so than on the actual website. Even magazine websites like Entrepreneur does not have comments on their posts.
There are other bloggers like Chris Lema who explains why he is also turning off his Disqus commenting off on his blog as well. Then you have OptinMonster who provides you with data to decide for yourself if you should have comments on or off.
So the reason why I am removing comments because Disqus the plugin I am using to manage comments just loads super slow on my blog. I then decided to look at the stats on the blog for this year.
As you can see there isn't much interaction to the web posts I post. Comments are not a major part of the blog and the interaction usually happens on Facebook. With so many readers on the blog, these minuscule numbers do not play a big role on the blog.
With the numbers above, you can see it isn't worth it because I don't even moderate the comments. Since there isn't much to moderate.
Well, I said the blog was pretty slow, so let us take a look at some stats. I took a speed test with GtMetrix and this is what I got a before and after.
BEFORE...
The before is with Disqus installed and it just took too long to load, damn 20 seconds! Even with all the cache plugins and FlyWheel server-side caching still didn't help.
AFTER...
This is what happens when I just disabled it. It literally shaved off 15 seconds off! That how bad Disqus has been slowing down my blog.
So with that said. I decided to turn it off. Sure it looks cool and helps with the interaction but not many of my readers are interacting anyways. They comment on the blog thumbnail on my Facebook page more so.
With that said, there will be no more blog commenting on this blog. Let me know your thoughts on this. Do you even leave comments on other blogs?
