Bart Kuijper

When displaying a post or comment with avatars enabled, WordPress will always check for the existence of a Gravatar. (Note: even the default avatars ‘mystery person’ and ‘blank’ are in fact Gravatars served from gravatar.com.) WordPress does this by sending an MD5 hash of every displayed post or comment author’s email address to gravatar.com. Even with many plugins that introduce locally stored default or user avatars, this check still happens. On top of that, some themes or plugins force (Gr)avatars to load even if the display of avatars is disabled completely in WordPress’ settings. If for whatever reason you do not wish for Gravatar to receive these requests (which some people have voiced GDPR concerns about), this plugin is for you.
The way it works is every time WordPress attempts to display an avatar, this plugin first checks if the image is about to be retrieved from gravatar.com. If it is, the URL is changed to the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image (included with this plugin). If the avatar has any other source, this plugin doesn’t interfere.
Gravatars are also removed from the Discussion page in Settings and replaced with the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image. Again, any non-Gravatar images are left alone.
Upon activation of this plugin, if a Gravatar is selected as the default avatar, that setting is changed to the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image. If any non-Gravatar avatar is selected, that setting isn’t changed.
Upon deactivation of this plugin, if the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image is selected as the default avatar, that setting is changed to the Gravatar logo. If any non-Gravatar avatar is selected, that setting isn’t changed.

Redirect Gravatar requests

All requests to load an avatar from gravatar.com are redirected to a local image, preventing Gravatar from potentially gathering data about your site  …

José Miguel

Will Stocks

Optimum Gravatar Cache allows you to create a local cache with optimized copies of gravatars. The optimization is accomplished by resizing the avatars to the sizes used on your site, in addition to optimizing the images internally. Optimizations are performed to minimize the size of each avatar served by the plugin.
The plugin uses WordPress CRON to perform heavier tasks. Avatars are resized in the background. Avatars are optimized internally in the background. Except in certain cases where it is necessary to resize the avatars in the page request.
The plugin handles all your site’s gravatar as long as the wordpress get_avatar() function or buddypress bp_member_avatar() function is used. Works with plugins, themes, etc.
The plugin allows you to customize the avatar by default. This avatar is served whenever the user / visitor does not have a custom gravatar. This greatly reduces the number of requests made by your page, improving the user experience. Besides allowing to frame the avatar by default with the theme of your site.
The plugin, after being configured and activated, starts by serving gravatar for all. And it begins to create the cache dynamically in the background with the sizes being collected by the requests, as well as those configured on the plug-in page. When the avatar already exists in the cache, the plugin serves the avatar in cache. The plugin periodically checks to see if the user updated their gravatar on gravatar.com if yes is updated locally. This way, keeping an updated cache.
The plugin intends the following:
<ul>
<li>Work with the gravatars locally, cache;</li>
<li>Reduce the number of requests per page, thus reducing the total time required to load all files. This is achieved because most users do not have a custom gravatar, and for those, only one file needs to be downloaded;</li>
<li>Optimize all avatars by reducing their size and transfer time again.</li>
</ul>
Please if you find any bugs of any kind please contact me so that I can solve it as soon as possible.
<h3>Languages</h3>
<ul>
<li>English en_GB (@willstockstech)</li>
<li>Portuguese pt_PT (@jomisica)</li>
</ul>
Help translate this plugin into your language
<h3>Dependencies</h3>
This plugin depends on the following PHP modules:
<ul>
<li>php-gd or php-imagick (So that it can resize the avatars)</li>
<li>php-curl (So that it can communicate with the gravatar using the same connection to update several avatars)</li>
</ul>
The plugin also depends on WordPress CRON to be able to solve the heaviest tasks in the background.

Optimum Gravatar Cache

It stores optimized copies of gravatars locally, reducing the total number of requests. This will speed up site loading and consequently improve the u …

Redirect Gravatar requests vs Optimum Gravatar Cache