Have you ever been on some random site that you have an account on and you realize your photo is automatically there? Well if you’ve never experienced this, you must not have a Gravatar. Created by the makers of WordPress, Gravatars can be pulled from any WordPress site using the function get_avatar().
Though Gravatars have been a part of WordPress core since version 2.5, the only place that I’ve ever seen them is in the comments section of blogs – and most were the mystery man or the Gravatar logo. But I recently went to update my headshot on some sites and boom it was already there! One thing to keep in mind if you’re adding Gravatars into your theme is that the user needs to have “Show Avatars” turned on for them to actually show. They can turn them on/off in the Avatar section of Settings > Discussion.
So I leave you with my example of using get_avatar(), which is in my header!