Locally mirrors commenters’ Gravatar, Libravatar and Mastodon avatars and serves them from your site, rather than loading them from a third-party web site upon each page load.
This has several effects:
<ul>
<li>
If most of the comments on a post have no avatar, those turn into one load of a shared image, instead of one for each comment, that happens to return the same “mystery” image.
</li>
<li>
You will be serving more (small) images.
</li>
<li>
If a commenter’s URL looks like a link to a Mastodon / ActivityPub profile, their Mastodon account’s avatar will be displayed.
</li>
<li>
When commenting, a live preview of the avatar tracks the contents of the “Email” field.
</li>
<li>
<a href="https://www.gravatar.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">gravatar.com</a> and <a href="https://www.libravatar.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">libravatar.org</a> no longer have a web-bug on your blog that is loaded by each viewer. Instead of being loaded at every page view, the avatar is loaded just once, on the server-side, at the time each new comment is posted.
</li>
<li>
If someone changes or deletes their avatar, your site continues displaying the image that was their avatar at the time that they last posted.
</li>
<li>
Likewise, the user’s Gravatar or Mastodon profile is saved along with their comment, viewable by admins even if they later change or delete it.
</li>
</ul>
<h3>Security and Privacy</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://www.libravatar.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">Libravatar</a> is open source. Gravatar is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravatar" rel="nofollow ugc">owned by WordPress</a>, and their <a href="https://automattic.com/privacy/" rel="nofollow ugc">privacy policy</a> says that they don’t monetize that info. But hey, corporate policies change, subpoenas exist, and domain names get sold.
</li>
<li>
Should you trust Gravatar with user data? Well, in 2024, Gravatar announced that they are <a href="https://jwz.org/b/ykXF" rel="nofollow ugc">pivoting to blockchain</a>, whatever that means, so that’s fairly disqualifying. See also <a href="https://jwz.org/b/ykPk" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress “growth hacking”</a> and <a href="https://jwz.org/b/ykNg" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress sells users’ data to train AI tools</a>.
</li>
<li>
There used to be a potential issue due to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravatar#Security_concerns_and_data_breaches" rel="nofollow ugc">Gravatars using MD5 hashes</a>, but these days they use SHA256, so I assume that’s no longer a problem.
</li>
</ul>

Mirror Gravatar


The plugin does just what it says and it's a great way to improve WordPress just a little bit.


Great plugin to make WordPress a bit better

Locally mirror commenters' Gravatar or Mastodon profile images.

10up

Jeffrey Paul

Oomph, Inc.

Jake Goldman

Darin Kotter

Faisal Alvi

Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles if the current user has media permissions. Generates requested sizes on demand just like Gravatar! Simple and lightweight.
Just edit a user profile, and scroll down to the new “Avatar” field. The plug-in will take care of cropping and sizing!
<ol>
<li>Stores avatars in the “uploads” folder where all of your other media is kept.</li>
<li>Has a simple, native interface.</li>
<li>Fully supports Gravatar and default avatars if no local avatar is set for the user – but also allows you turn off Gravatar.</li>
<li>Generates the requested avatar size on demand (and stores the new size for efficiency), so it looks great, just like Gravatar!</li>
<li>Lets you decide whether lower privilege users (subscribers, contributors) can upload their own avatar.</li>
<li>Enables rating of local avatars, just like Gravatar.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Support Level</h3>
Simple Local Avatars’ support level is marked as <code>stable</code>. 10up is not planning to develop any new features for this, but will still respond to bug reports and security concerns. We welcome PRs, but any that include new features should be small and easy to integrate and should not include breaking changes. We otherwise intend to keep this tested up to the most recent version of WordPress.

Simple Local Avatars

I've 100+ writers on a news website. It's was so hard for to everybody create an account in Gravatar. This plugin helps me a lot to upload writer photos from the dashboard.

Hats of the plugin author.

Great plugin

Great Plugin Great Support


The support of the WordPress REST API is a lifesaver for me. Simple Local Avatars is the only avatar plugin I know of that supports the REST API.I used it in my React with WordPress Tutorial. Without it, the whole Tutorial wouldn't have worked.


Does what it says and supports REST API


I like that it allows gravatar to continue to be used. If you set the local only option however all your existing avatars will be reset to the same avatar.  People get used to their own avatars and these shouldn't change, they should be copied locally from gravatar when the option is set if local copies don't already exist.  Croping also fails.  Looks like I need to look for another plugin as this is no longer under development.


Good but with "Features"


This plugin does well in extending WordPress' Avatar capabilities.


Nice Plugin

Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles. Generates requested sizes on demand just like Gravatar!

Mirror Gravatar vs Simple Local Avatars