I’ve been noticing that the pages have been loading a bit slow. I think this is mainly due to a few plugins that I use that are outdated. One causes a ton of the GIFs to always be loaded (these all the fancy moving images you see in the comments). I am sad to say, but these need to go! All of my mobile data users will thank me. It will also help get my page get higher in the ranks of search engines after this optimization. There are also some extra “behind the scenes” items that are causing load times that will be removed as well.
So what will be different for you guys (besides the faster loads)? It will only the removal of the fancy comment emoticons. If I can find a way to only load the emoticons when the user wants to use them (versus EVERY page load) then they may come back. Even then, if there is a lot of spam of emotes in the comments the page loads would still be poor. So for now I need to think of the masses!