Site News: Growing and Disqus commenting

Our little site is growing!  Last autumn, Electrek.co was just a hobby and we’d see 40,000 pageviews in a month. Fast forward just 8 months and with the addition of Frederic Lambert on staff full time, we’re comfortably over 4 million monthly pageviews with over 1 million unique readers. We’re going to be adding some more writers over the next months including our resident Commercial Solar Expert John Weaver. You might have read some of his work already.

Thank you very much everyone!

And now just some quick site news: We’ve moved our commenting system from native Wordpress comments to Disqus *waits for applause*…

Why?

WordPress is easier for us because it is integrated into the WYSIWYG CMS and the inline comments (vs. iframe Disqus) help with search engines (read: Google), so WordPress makes a ton of sense…on the surface.

But we’ve been seeing lower than normal engagement in the comments over the past year on our other sites (9to5mac.com, 9to5google.com and 9to5toys.com) and the #1 reason why is that people just don’t use WordPress commenting. The #1 commenting system both in numbers and in my opinion, in features is Disqus. We love the moderation, the voting and a host of other stuff you can build when your product is comments.

We are always open to feedback so please let us know what you think of the change.

We’ve got some other changes coming in the coming months including the addition of what we’re calling guides. Stay Tuned and thanks for reading!