Blog and website owners have a number of options when it comes to installing a comment system, and each system has its own pros and cons that will be unique to different websites.

Speed should be one of the considerations that website owners use when choosing which comment system to use. But according to a recent analysis, there’s not a huge difference in speed-related performance among five popular comment systems.

Royal Pingdom ran a number of performance tests to compare the default WordPress comment system with LiveFyre, IntenseDebate, Disqus and Facebook’s comment system.

The final results?

As far as overall impact on page speed, WordPress’ comment system came out the winner, and Facebook’s comment system was the loser. But, as Royal Pingdom says, “there was not that much of a difference between using WordPress’ built-in comment system and any of the other four, third-party systems.”

Those results were pretty consistent across individual tests that included total number of files loaded, impact on page size and multiple page speed tests.

Royal Pingdom also rightly points out that these commenting systems may perform differently in real-life installations where other plugins and hosting considerations can also have an impact on page speed and other performance metrics.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

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About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Marketing Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the US. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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