Gravatar for WordPress: Why should you use it for your site?

Do you like to chat on the internet? If the answer is yes, sit up and pay attention.

You’ve probably noticed that comments on blogs are always accompanied by a small image.

This image, which is called an avatar, allows you to better understand who the author of the comment is (you, me, etc.).

You can imagine that you would see me differently if my avatar was a totally crazy image or represented someone else.

To display this image, there’s a handy service called Gravatar, obviously compatible with WordPress (but with other web applications as well, you’ll see).

If you’re not familiar with Gravatar yet, keep reading. In this article, I’ll explain why you should use it, and especially how to create and customize your Gravatar profile for WordPress.

I will finish by revealing some useful tips, but I won’t say more yet. Just read the overview… and the rest of the article.

Originally written in October 2014, this article was last updated in October 2025.

Your WordPress projects need the best hosting!

WPMarmite recommends SiteGround: great performance, great support. All you need for a great start.

Try SiteGround

How do you choose a domain name for your next WordPress site? Check out the ultimate guide, made by WPMarmite.

What is Gravatar?

Gravatar is a free service used to manage your avatars across the web and allows you to “transform your email address into your digital passport: one avatar, one bio, social connections, and verified links,” as stated on its official website.

Websites and other services can use these avatars to “humanize” their platforms a little more.

Beyond WordPress, a number of other applications use gravatars, including Slack, Github, Atlassian, Disqus, and even Stack Overflow.

By extension, the avatar, i.e. the image that represents an internet user, has taken the name of the service that manages it. This is why you will hear more about “gravatars” than “avatars.”

Here is an example of various comments from readers of the WPMarmite blog. You can see that it helps you get a better idea of who is who:

So, how does all this Gravatar for WordPress thing work?

But, by the way, how is your WordPress site able to associate the image linked to the gravatar of the person commenting on your site/blog?

First, you should know that Gravatar is natively integrated on every WordPress site.

Then, as soon as a user with a Gravatar profile wants to comment on a post on your site, his gravatar is automatically displayed next to his message if the email address registered with Gravatar is the same as the one in his WordPress profile.

If no match is found between the two services (Gravatar and WordPress), the comment will be accompanied by the mystery person or a gravatar automatically generated by WordPress.

We can admit that this doesn’t represent who we are quite as well (unless we want to remain anonymous 😛).

In the background, Automattic

Is that clearer to you? So let’s continue with a tiny bit of history, to satisfy the more curious among you.

Launched in 2005 by Tom Preston-Werner — who also founded GitHub — Gravatar is the abbreviation for Globally Recognized Avatar.

This beautiful project was bought in 2007 by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and major contributor to WordPress.org.

To understand the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, check out our detailed comparison.

For the past fifteen years, Automattic has been in charge of the project and has maintained it.

Why should you use a gravatar for WordPress?

After this presentation of Gravatar, let’s place ourselves on the user’s side. What are the advantages of using a gravatar?

There are several:

• A gravatar allows you to unify your identity on the web, since it follows you everywhere. Once you have associated one with your email address, it will appear every time you use this address to comment, provided that the site on which you want to comment supports Gravatar (this is not the case for Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, for example).
• It humanizes you because your comment is associated with your image: we know what you look like, which is warmer than the unrecognizable avatar of the mystery person, for example.
• You reinforce your credibility and your brand image. A “real” person will be more trusted. Having a gravatar is insurance for not being considered spam.
• Your profile is updated on all sites. You want to change your profile picture? No problem. Do it once on your Gravatar profile, in a few seconds. The change is immediately made on all the sites on which you have commented. You don’t have to do it manually on each site, which saves a lot of time.

Moreover, as WordPress explains, the use of a gravatar simplifies the process for “everyone.” This means for the user, as you have seen above, but also for the site administrator.

The latter, for example, does not have to bother managing user accounts, nor their images. The Gravatar service takes care of everything for him.

For all this to work automatically, in the background, you must of course have a Gravatar profile, of course.

If you’re not on the web to spill murderous comments while wanting to hide your identity, find out how to associate a gravatar with your email address, just below.

How to easily create your Gravatar account

To get started, go to the official Gravatar website. Start the registration process by clicking on the blue “Get Started Now” button:

A new window will open, where you will be asked to enter your email address. Once you’ve done that, you’ll receive a verification code in your inbox.

Copy and paste the code in the space provided, then click on the “Continue” button.

Note that if you don’t already have a WordPress.com account, you’ll have to create one in the process.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll assume that you don’t have an account already.

To create your profile, you’ll be asked to enter your name, choose an avatar, and fill in certain personal information (place of residence, biography, profession, company).

You can also connect your profile to your social networks or to your WordPress.com site, as well as customize the colors of your profile.

That’s it! If everything worked, you’ll land on this page:

How to customize your Gravatar profile

How to assign a gravatar image to your email address

Now that you have an account, you can assign an avatar (well, a gravatar) to your email address.

In the left sidebar menu, click on “Avatars”:

You will then have 2 choices:

1. Upload a picture from your computer (Upload new).
2. Take a picture with your webcam (Camera).

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will start with the most common case, in my opinion, which is to upload a photo from your computer.

Click on “Upload new,” select your image, then click on the “Done” button.

Before going any further, a quick note on the image you choose: Don’t forget that it will represent you publicly. The ideal is to choose a photo that shows you at your best, or the logo of your company/site/blog.

Once you’ve uploaded your image to Gravatar, you’ll have the option to resize and edit it (by adding a background or filters, for example). Use the corners to choose the area to crop (if any):

When you are satisfied, click on “Done.”

And that’s it, your email address is now associated with a gravatar. You can now display it everywhere you leave comments on the Internet.

The Gravatar homepage displays the image associated with the email address:

Now you can add other email addresses and images to display different gravatars.

What other information can you add to your Gravatar profile on WordPress?

While a Gravatar profile is logically associated with a photo, that’s not the only thing you can display when you post a comment. You can make your profile even more complete by including:

• Information about your identity, such as the name to be displayed publicly, your location, or a few lines to describe yourself.
• Links to your website/blog, “or any sites that help describe who you are” as mentioned by Gravatar.
• A background image or color.
• Contact information, such as your email address, a phone number, a LinkedIn or Facebook account, etc.
• And even your crypto-currency wallet addresses “to make available for friends and services.”

All this data can be added directly from your profile:

Please note that it is possible to create several gravatars on your profile, without the need to create a new account by email.
You can add more email addresses to your Gravatar account by going to the “Avatars” menu and clicking on the “Add a second email” link.
Using multiple gravatars can be useful if you want to separate your personal and professional activities, for example, and distinguish your comments accordingly.

How to set a default Gravatar on your WordPress site

After reading the lines above, you now know how to associate a gravatar with your email address.

However, not all readers of your site have done so. As a result, they will have a default gravatar.

As a site administrator, you can set a default gravatar for people who do not have a Gravatar profile but who want to leave a comment.

There are two ways to do this.

Method 1: Use the default settings of WordPress

To do this, go to Settings > Discussion. If you scroll down a bit, you will discover a section dedicated to avatars:

This menu has 3 parts:

• “Avatar Display”: If you uncheck this box, the avatars will not be displayed anymore. 😉
• “Maximum Rating”: This allows you to define the maximum rating you want for the gravatars of the people who will leave comments.
• “Default Avatar”: You have 10 display options for people who do not have a Gravatar profile, ranging from the famous “Mystery Person” to a simply “colored” image.

Method 2: Use a plugin

If the avatars offered natively by WordPress do not suit you, you can define a default one by activating a plugin like One User Avatar.

This plugin gives you the possibility to define an avatar for users who don’t have one by going through the “Settings” menu of the plugin and selecting an image of your choice.

Before concluding, I would also like to give you a tip that should interest you and improve the user experience of your visitors.

Join the WPMarmite subscribers

Get the last WPMarmite posts (and also exclusive resources).

SUBSCRIBE NOW

How to cache gravatars (and preserve your site’s loading speed)

As you discovered at the beginning of this article, having a Gravatar profile has many advantages.

But there is at least one disadvantage with Gravatar: it can negatively impact the loading speed of your pages.

Before revealing a solution, here are some explanations to understand what we are talking about.

I don’t teach you anything if I repeat that gravatars are displayed on your site by the Gravatar service. So far, it’s pretty simple.

When an article containing comments is posted on your site, HTTP requests are made by your browser to Gravatar’s servers, in order to retrieve the images associated with each Gravatar profile of the commenters.

Are you still following me? On small articles, this is not really a problem.

But on articles with dozens or even hundreds of comments, the loading speed can take a few seconds. And that’s a bit more annoying.

The more comments there are, the more HTTP requests need to be made, and the slower your article/page loads.

To fix this, I recommend activating the FV Gravatar Cache plugin, which will, as the name suggests, cache your commenters’ gravatars directly on your site.

Some settings are available in Settings > FV Gravatar Cache, but those proposed by default are more than enough.

And there you go, one more problem solved. 😉

Speed up your website with WP Rocket

Turn your site into a rocket with the most powerful caching plugin recognized by WordPress experts.

Try WP Rocket

Gravatar for WordPress: Recap

Throughout this article, you’ve discovered how to use Gravatar for your WordPress site. In particular, we’ve covered the following:

• What Gravatar is and why you should use it
• How to create a Gravatar account
• How to customize your Gravatar profile, including how to assign a gravatar to an email address (a gravatar linked to Gmail, for example)
• 2 methods to set a default gravatar on your WordPress site.
• How to cache gravatars

All these tips will help you better represent yourself (or your organization, site, etc.) on the internet, while professionalizing your brand image by making it more “human.”

Don’t forget that all your interactions are public and contribute to building your reputation. It’s up to you to determine what is appropriate or not to say.

In the meantime, do you use a gravatar? Share your feedback by posting a comment.

Receive the next posts for free and access exclusive resources. More than 20,000 people have done it, why not you?

Register

About the author

Alex Borto

Creator of WPMarmite and co-founder of WPChef, he is dedicated to providing you with quality resources to help you create, customize and promote websites with WordPress.