Last week Microsoft bought GitHub and there was a flood of “the sky is falling” from the anti-Microsoft trolls as well as the typical knee-jerk reactionary type folks we find in the tech industry. It reminded me of the time four years ago when SolarWinds bought Pingdom. The day the deal went down I read comments from current users saying they would start looking for a new service. We hadn’t even touched anything and people were in a panic.

So, after the events last week, it got me thinking how I have not written many (or any?) posts about available free tools such as Pingdom. So, here’s one for today. I will use the free website performance tool from Pingdom to do performance testing against this blog. I’ll run a quick test against my “Hey Cortana” post from last week, with Disqus enabled at first then disabled.

Here’s the result with Disqus enabled:

13 seconds to load the page? That seems like a bit of a drag to anyone trying to read my post. I know I wouldn’t wait around that long for a page to load (and from my page stats, I can tell you don’t either).

Further down the Pingdom test results page, I find details on the number of requests and content size broken down by domain:

I see 14 requests from Disqus, with a sum total of 413.27KB. Roughly one-third of the entire 1.2MB page size, just from Disqus.

Now, let’s have a look at the same page, but this time with Disqus disabled:

The page size is half as much as before, and the load time is about 90% faster. The total number of requests went from 156 down to 52, a nice decrease.

Let’s look at the content and requests by domain:

The Disqus requests are gone. As a result, this blog will perform better for my readers.

Disqus no longer serves any purpose for me or my readers. As a result, I have removed it from this blog. Thanks to Pingdom I was able to identify this easy change to improve the performance of my blog. I have some additional cleanup to do for this blog. I will continue to use Pingdom to help me navigate the location of performance tuning opportunities.

If you are so inclined I would advocate that you try Pingdom for your own blogs and websites.