Tilda Comments

Project type: web service (SaaS), my own product. My role: everything from idea to production: backend, frontend, infrastructure and design.

The problem

Tilda, the popular website builder, has no built-in comments. I wanted a service that adds them to any Tilda site and that:

• installs without any coding skills;
• has almost no impact on page speed;
• offers proper moderation and spam protection;
• runs on ordinary shared hosting.

What I built

The comments widget. It goes onto any Tilda page with a single line of code in an HTML block (T123). One snippet covers the whole site: the widget detects the current page, including Tilda Feed posts, and shows the right discussion thread.

Dashboard for site owners:

• several websites in one account;
• moderation: approve, hide, delete, restore, trash;
• pre-moderation and bulk actions;
• widget design settings (theme, accent colour, card colour, corner radius) with a live preview;
• form fields (first name, last name, email, phone) and whether each is required;
• links to the pages where comments were left.

Authentication: sign-up, email confirmation, password reset and change, with its own SMTP mailer.

Super-admin area: users, projects, service-wide statistics and account blocking.

Tech stack

Plain PHP 8, MySQL and vanilla JavaScript, with no frameworks or external dependencies, so it is fast and happy on regular hosting. The widget runs in an isolated iframe and talks to the page via postMessage. Deployment is automatic from Git.

Under the hood

Speed. The whole widget is about 16 KB compressed. It loads lazily, only when the visitor scrolls down to the comments, and lives inside an iframe, so it can't slow the site down or break its layout.

Security and anti-spam. Signed HMAC tokens instead of cookies (they work reliably inside an iframe), comments accepted only from the project's own domain, bot protection (honeypots, rate limiting, link blocking), CSRF protection and consistent input limits across the dashboard.

Compatibility. Regular pages, Tilda Feed posts and *.tilda.ws preview domains for testing before publishing.

The result

A production-ready service that connects to a Tilda site in a few minutes without code, doesn't weigh the page down and brings live discussions under your content. It is free to use.