Deleting Disqus Made My Blog Run 3x Faster

I got fed up recently of the insane number of requests that were given over to my use of disqus here on my blog. I’ve had it enabled since moving from Wordpress to various other blogging engines, wanting to take my comments with me to a static blogging engine, but enough is enough. I remember disqus being a darling in the startup scene when it first launched in 2007 but it’s changed hands several times since and the idea that randoms ads may turn up on my blog at some point is a massive turn off.

Given that most commentary on content now seems to happen on other platforms like twitter, and it’s dubious tracking behaviour that I’ve seen covered several times I don’t have many qualms about its removal.

Chrome was reporting each page load would make 40 or so requests taking 30 seconds or so to load them all. That’s crazy - so I removed the disqusShortname setting from Hugos config.toml and rebuilt my site.

My blog pages now have 1/4 the number of requests, with 1/4 the data loading in 1/3 of the time! 1 minor change - I should have done this ages ago.