Snippet for own (gr)avatars

Question

Following snippet used(and works great) but generates a redirect chain :(.

If (function_excists('basicgravatar') 

 function basicgravatar ($avatar_defaults) {
   $myavatar = get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/images/gravatar.png'; //Child theme
   //$myavatar = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/images/gravatar.png';  //Main theme
   $avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = "New default avatar";
   return $avatar_defaults; }

add_filter( 'avatar_defaults', 'basicgravatar' );

Using GTmetrix which shows following:

Remove the following redirect chain if possible: http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/?d=http://oursite.com/media/wp-content/themes/our-child-theme/images/gravatar.png&s=40 and 2 more lines with almost identical msg.

Also this is shown as result after using code above:

The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 2 request(s) and 20.2KiB.

The more comments the more redirects.
(The quotes above show results after only two(2) comments and 1 author box, imagine 50 or more comments...)..how to solve this, without editing any core file.

Thanks in advance for time and effort.

Answer 1

I use FV Gravatar Cache plugin which solves this problem by:

• caching gravatars with WordPress cron job..
• caching gravatars on comment submission
• maintaining a single copy of the default gravatar instead of downloading it again and again for all the email addresses with no gravatar associated