New Gravatar Hovercards: Faster, Open-Source, and Everywhere

Hovercards offer a sleek, interactive way to showcase user profiles. With just a hover over the Gravatar image, a card displays essential information about the user. This eliminates the need to navigate away from the current page and encourages engagement.

A new open-sourced Gravatar Hovercards library is live for users of WordPress.com and Jetpack, and is available to be implemented by anyone around the web. Here’s what’s new:

• Leaner and faster: By pruning redundant code and harnessing modern web APIs, we’ve achieved greater efficiency and reduced file sizes by more than 200%.
• Improved UX: The hovercard design is more refined and will work better across sites with different styles and branding. The library now supports different placements to cater to a variety of needs.
• Universal hovercards: The new library introduces the ability to attach hovercards to any element, not just the avatar image. For example, a site can @someone and show the hovercard on hover.
• Open to the world: Developers can integrate it into their sites via the NPM package.

If you aren’t seeing hovercards on your WordPress site, go to Settings -> Discussion and look for the setting to enable pop-up business cards. You will need to be hosted on WordPress.com or have the free Jetpack plugin installed.

We encourage you to explore Gravatar hovercards, and welcome your ideas and contributions via our GitHub repo.