How to Remove Ads From Disqus Comments

Disqus pays for its free plan by placing ads in your comment section, right underneath your content, in the same place your readers go to engage with you. Those ads aren't yours. You don't choose them, and you don't earn anything from them. That's the trade-off for the free tier.

There are two effective ways to remove them.

Option 1: Upgrade Your Disqus Plan

The straightforward route is to pay Disqus. Their paid plans eliminate the ads. You can find the current options on the Disqus pricing page.

This works, but it's important to clarify what you're purchasing. You're paying to eliminate a downside. The ads disappear, and the rest of Disqus remains unchanged: the comment area still loads a heavy bundle of third-party scripts, and your readers are still tracked across the sites that embed it. You're paying to remove the ads, not to lighten the comment section or enhance its privacy.

Option 2: Switch to a Platform That Never Shows Ads

The other way to remove the ads is to use a commenting platform that doesn't show them at all. :)

For just $0.99/mo, FastComments provides deeply optimized performance functionality without tracking or ads.

You Keep Every Comment

The part people worry about the most is losing their existing discussions. FastComments has a built-in Disqus importer that transfers your comments, user names, user avatars, inline images, votes, and timestamps. We even migrate all images to our own CDN for you.

If you want the full, detailed walkthrough, we have a dedicated guide: Migrating From Disqus To FastComments. The short version is below.

How to Switch in Three Steps

1. Export your comments from Disqus

Follow Disqus's own export steps. They'll email you a file with a "gz" extension. You don't need to open or unzip it, and a default Windows install can't anyway. Our backend reads that compressed file directly.

2. Import the file into FastComments

Once you're logged in, head to the import page, select Disqus from the dropdown, and upload the file as-is. The import runs in the background; the page will auto-update as it runs to show you a live count of the number of comments discovered and imported. It's safe to re-import as many times as you need.

3. Swap the Disqus snippet for ours

Remove the Disqus embed code from your pages and drop in the FastComments snippet instead. As long as your page URLs stay the same, your imported comments will appear exactly where they were.

On WordPress?

If your site runs on WordPress, skip the manual steps and install the FastComments WordPress plugin. It handles installation, setup, and synchronization for you, and then you can deactivate Disqus.

Test It Before You Commit

You don't have to flip the switch all at once. You can run Disqus and FastComments on the same page temporarily to compare the look and feel before you fully make the switch. If you'd like some assistance with any of this, reach out to us and we'll help you through it.

Not sure what FastComments will cost you? Every plan is ad-free, and you can check your number on the pricing calculator. If you're in the EU, you can create your account on eu.fastcomments.com so your data stays in the EU.

Recap

1. Export your data from Disqus
2. Import it into FastComments
3. Swap the Disqus snippet for FastComments's

That's it. No ads in your comment section, lighter pages, and every comment you already had.

Cheers!