[ad_1] What is Gravatar and why should you care about it? In a nutshell, it’s a service that helps you display avatars on the Internet. If you’re a user, it helps you create a profile picture that automatically follows you around to other sites. And if you’re a WordPress webmaster, it helps you automatically display profile pictures for your users and commenters. In this post, we’re going to cover everything that you need to know about Gravatar, with a special focus on WordPress because we’re a WordPress blog. With that being said, anyone can benefit from this article – we won’t get to the WordPress stuff until the end! Here’s everything that we’re going to cover: What Gravatar is, explained in more detail How to set up your own Gravatar Some tips for working with Gravatar on WordPress, like disabling it or caching the images locally Let’s get started! What Is Gravatar? Gravatar helps you create a unique user avatar that you can easily use at a ton of different websites across the Internet. Or, if you have a website, Gravatar helps you easily display unique avatars for all of your users. Gravatar is a portmanteau of the phrase globally recognized avatar. The idea is that a person can upload an avatar in one spot (the Gravatar website) and then have that avatar automatically recognized by other websites. The basic process works like this: You create a Gravatar account using your email address. You can add multiple email addresses if needed. You upload your desired avatar picture to Gravatar. When you use your email address on a website that uses Gravatar, that website will automatically use the avatar image that you set up with Gravatar. Gravatar comes from a company called Automattic, which is the same company behind WordPress.com and is owned by one of the co-founders of the open-source WordPress software (which is different from WordPress.com). Because of this, Gravatar is built into WordPress, though many other sites and services use it. Gravatar Examples To drive home the point, let’s look at some Gravatar examples. One of the most common examples is WordPress. All WordPress sites use the Gravatar service by default. Let’s say you leave a comment on a WordPress blog (like this one) using the same email address that you registered with at Gravatar. Well, that WordPress site will show your Gravatar image next to your comment – here’s an example from our comments section: There are a lot of other Gravatar examples beyond WordPress, though. For example, Slack uses Gravatar to generate profile pictures by default. So does Stackoverflow and tons of other websites and services. So, whether you knew it or not, you’ve probably used a site that supports Gravatar. How to Create a Gravatar Creating your own Gravatar image is easy and 100% free. Here’s how to do it… First, go to the Gravatar website and click the Create your Gravatar button: You’ll then be prompted to either: Create a new free WordPress.com account (if you don’t have one already). Log into your existing free WordPress.com account. WordPress.com is a service from the same parent company as Gravatar. Gravatar uses WordPress.com as its sign-on solution and creating a WordPress.com account is 100% free: If you just created your WordPress.com account, you might see another prompt on the Gravatar website telling you to sign in. Go ahead and click that button if you see it. Or, you might already be connected, in which case you can jump to the next step: Now, you’ll see your email address, along with a prompt to add a new Gravatar image: When you click that, you’ll be prompted to upload an image from your preferred source. Or, you can take a new picture with your webcam: Once you select your image, you’ll have an option to crop it if needed. Or, you can just leave it as the original. Once you’re happy with how it looks, click Crop Image: Then, you’ll need to set a rating. This helps website/service owners make sure they don’t accidentally have explicit pictures on their sites. If it’s just a normal “run of the mill” avatar, choose the suitable for display on all websites option and click Set Rating: And that’s it! You’re all done. If you want, you can repeat the process to add more avatars. Gravatar also lets you set up some profile information in the My Profile tab. However, you shouldn’t feel compelled to fill any of this out as most people will just see your avatar picture: How to Use Your Gravatar The nice thing about Gravatar is that you don’t need to do anything special to use it. All you need to do is use the email address associated with your Gravatar account. As long as: You use that email. The website/service supports Gravatar. Then your avatar image should show up automatically. If you want to associate multiple email addresses with your avatars, you can add new email addresses from your Gravatar dashboard: You’ll need to click the link in the activation email that Gravatar sends your new email address to make it live. Gravatar Profile Search – Search for Gravatar by Email If you want to look up your own Gravatar image (or someone else’s image), there’s a Gravatar profile search feature that lets you look up someone’s profile picture by entering their email address. To use this feature: You’ll then see the different profile picture options: WordPress Gravatar Guide: Improve Gravatar Usage On Your Site Now, let’s start moving into the WordPress-specific Gravatar tips for WordPress webmasters. While Gravatar makes it really easy to have real profile pictures on WordPress, there are two potential issues: User experience Performance In terms of user experience, the issue is that visitors can’t change their profile pictures from your WordPress site – they have to do it from the Gravatar website. This isn’t a big deal in your comments section. But if you allow user registration (say for a membership
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How to Disable Comments in WordPress: A Complete Guide
[ad_1] WordPress started life as a blogging platform. Years later, it’s now a Content Management System (CMS) that is used with over 40 percent of the web. Along the way, some of classic blogging staples have fallen out of favor. This means there are many sites that want to disable comments in WordPress. Despite this feeling surrounding commenting, there are a lot of benefits to letting users engage with your content. Still, if you want to cut out the comments, there are a few ways to do so. As such, this post is going to show you how to disable comments in WordPress. We’ll look at the different places within WordPress you can change settings, and also discuss some extra techniques to complete rid your site of comments. WordPress’ Relationship With Commenting In 2003, WordPress was a blogging platform through and through. It had all the hallmarks you’d expect: theming, blog-specific settings, and commenting functionality. Comments are a key part of a blog, and it’s fair to say that they have become more prominent as WordPress has evolved and grown. We’ll discuss more about the benefits later, but it’s also fair to say that as WordPress has evolved, some site owners have pushed back against commenting. This is because of the gradual change from blogging platform to CMS. As WordPress became adept at creating other types of site, comments weren’t as central to some users. Because of this, the platform has functionality in place to disable commenting on your site. Again, we’ll get into this in more detail later. The Value of Comments Within WordPress Before we get into how to disable comments, it’s worth talking about why you’d want to have them for a business-focused site. It’s easy to consider them superfluous to requirements, but this isn’t the case. In fact, comments can offer more value than other forms of engagement, for a few reasons: You’re able to gauge interest in your products, services, and content direct from your users. You can see how potential customers engage with you, and pivot your offerings. Users can become part of a community, which builds brand loyalty. It can also have an impact on visibility, and your affiliate network (if you have one). While there are more benefits we could mention, this is beyond the scope of the article. Still, if you thought comments were only for a blog site, it’s worth rethinking that mindset. Comments can be a valuable marketing arm, and cultivating a readership with them is a solid strategy. Why You’d Want to Disable Comments in WordPress We’ve covered what’s good about comments, but this doesn’t mean they’re always necessary. Here are a few points on why you wouldn’t want comments on your site: Comments require moderation to stop spam and off-topic discussions. While there are plugins to help with this, it’s not always going to be a prime solution. If you’re not able to dedicate time to essential comment moderation, it makes sense not to implement them. You may like to cultivate discussions elsewhere, such as a forum or even on social media. We think there are drawbacks to this approach, but if it’s right for your business, asking for engagement direct on your blog posts will dilute the engagement on other channels. If your content marketing is not central to your promotion, asking for engagement might not be beneficial. As such, no comments are better than handfuls of unanswered entries. If you’re writing informational posts, such as news items, they may not warrant comments. Here, you have flexibility to disable comments on a site-wide basis, or only for individual posts. It’s also worth noting that there are ways to cut down on the amount of moderation and engagement you do across your site’s comments. Solutions such as closing comments after a certain period of time, and removing comment URLs are an alternative to disabling comments in WordPress altogether. Still, if it’s something you’re set on, we have the methods coming up next. How to Disable Comments in WordPress (2 Ways) For a task that’s simple on the surface, there are a lot of options for disabling comments in WordPress. Taking a broad brush, here are the two primary ways of getting the job done: Use the core options within WordPress to disable comments. Choose a suitable plugin to disable comments across your site. When we dig into these options, we’ll also detail specific settings to help you disable comments and leave no trace. To finish the article off, we’ll note how to disable media comments, and how to delete existing ones. 1. Use WordPress’ Built-In Options The first port of call to disable comments in WordPress is the platform’s own settings. To find them, head to the Settings > Discussion page within your WordPress dashboard: There are a wealth of options here that can help you. In fact, we recommend heading here when you first set up your site. The main option you’ll want to consider here is Allow people to submit comments on new posts. Unticking this will turn off commenting on a site-wide basis. If you’re working on a brand new site and you don’t want comments, your journey ends here. Though, for existing site owners, this will only turn off comments for future posts. The rest of this post will help you get rid of pre-existing comments on your site. Disable Comments for Individual Posts Although WordPress provides a full bank of options for handling comments, you can also work with them on a per-post basis. There are a few ways to do this, and the most straightforward is to access a post’s Block Editor screen. Here, click the Post menu on the right-hand side, and scroll down to the Discussion settings. The checkboxes here will let you disable comments for the post in WordPress: Note that if you don’t see this box, you’ll need to enable it from the Preferences screen accessed from the ‘traffic light’ menu in the Block Editor: This
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