I've just spent a few hours at the poor performance of my website, www.tallandtrue.com.au

I use JCH Optimize and Jot Cache on the website and in the past, I've been able to tweak it to perform reasonably well based on GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed testing.

But lately, I've had problems, with JCH Optimize causing AddThis social share buttons to disappear and I've had to keep winding it down and as I've done that, I've noticed the performance has gone pear-shaped.

When I confirmed this with GTmetrix today its report included suggestions to remove a whole lot of "redirect chains". I had no idea what was causing them ... until I realised the redirect chains only occurred on pages where Disqus was enabled for comments. Then I found the following post on the Disqus forum:

disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-discu...dus_and_many_others/

Sure enough, I disabled Disqus and the redirect chains disappeared and the performance improved! Now I need to follow the instructions in the post to see if I can re-enable Disqus and configure to stop causing the redirect chains.

I thought I'd share this with the Joomla forum in the hope that it helps someone else.

Regards,
Robertf

A little more info on the Redirect Chains issue:

1) It affects WordPress websites using the Disqus plug-in for comments, too
2) It can be resolved by logging into Disqus admin and in the Advanced Settings, disabling the Tracking option, as per the screenshot.

The performance of my Joomla and WordPress websites is still better without Disqus enabled, but at least now, with the Tracking option disabled, the performance is nowhere near as bad as it was and GTmetrix is not reporting pages of Redirects Chains to dodgy sounding websites!

Again, I hope this is of help to someone who encounters a similar situation using Disqus.

Regards,
Robertf