Hey, the comments section looks different.

Hey Creatures – you may have noticed that the comments section on your articles and slideshows look different. Hopefully, they’re easier to read and easier to use. You may also be wondering, of all things to fix on the site, why comments?? They were working perfectly well before!

The reason, in short, is speed.

The majority of traffic on Bleacher Report goes to the articles and slideshows that you all create. So, we want those pages to load as quickly as possible, for two major reasons:

• Faster page load times means happier readers. Studies have shown that people using the web have a patience of only a few seconds.
• More importantly, faster page loads means search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing can crawl and index more of the content that you create, thus allowing more readers to find your work. Also, it’s been speculated (but not proven) that search engines give preference to sites that load quickly.

So, when we took a long, hard look at these pages, we noticed a TON of old, crusty code in our comments section. That old code wasn’t being used and was slowing the page down, so we decided to bite the bullet and rewrite the comments code entirely.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to report back to you all in a couple of weeks with some tangible results – in the meanwhile, let us know if you’re enjoying or hating the new comments, and whether or not you’re running into any issues.

Thanks, as always, for making Bleacher Report a happy (and fast) place for sports fans.