Jetpack For WordPress Performance
As I had mentioned when I hit one year of using WordPress to host this site, I’ve been fairly pleased with the platform overall. The one area where I saw potential for improvement, though, was in the performance of my site. With the Turbo plan from EasyWP, I felt like I really didn’t need more CPU and RAM to solve problems with occasional slow loading since I don’t exactly have a massive site, nor is my site typically under any sort of heavy load. Rather, I figured that I needed to put in a little effort to optimize my site and content a bit.
Enter Jetpack. Jetpack offers security and performance improvements for WordPress sites. It’s a service that actually comes baked in automatically (no pun intended on Auttomatic) if you host a blog on WordPress.com. The main thing any WordPress admins are probably familiar with from Jetpack are the analytics that you see on the WordPress dashboard. I had forgotten about it entirely, though, since I hadn’t run a blog on WordPress.com for quite a few years. A reminder came when I installed the WordPress app on my iPad since the default dashboard for the app tries to load the analytics from Jetpack and complains the plugin is missing if your site doesn’t have it.
My first thought was to look at what, exactly, Jetpack offers since I didn’t need it for analytics; I was already getting those from Cloudflare Analytics. Jetpack offers a wide variety of services, but their free tier provides sites stats and a basic CDN for your images, CSS, and JavaScript.
The CDN alone seemed worth it to me so that I could get heavier content geographically closer to anyone trying to load my site; my hits most frequently come from the US, but the site sees visitors from all across the globe. Configuring Jetpack is relatively simple. From the WordPress plugin page, I just installed “Jetpack.” After the plugin was installed, I was taken to a page to link to my existing, ancient WordPress.com account to my WordPress site since the WordPress.com account is what’s linked to Jetpack. From there I selected the free tier they offer. After that, the plugin was configured on my WordPress site with some fairly sensible defaults. For example, opting in to the CDN configures the following:
Given that WordPress plugins are one of the most common vectors of compromise for WordPress accounts — based very scientifically on nothing but my own anecdotal experience — Jetpack also offers the ability to keep your plugins automatically updated. If you have particularly sensitive plugins you’d be worried about updating automatically you get the option to pick which plugins receive the auto-update treatment; for me, I just opted to update all of my (admittedly small) plugin collection automatically.
This was all that I had intended to configure initially, but while searching WordPress plugins for Jetpack I happened to notice an additional plugin called “Jetpack Boost.” Boost takes things a step further by optimizing the content served out by a WordPress site before it goes to a visitor. It offers options for:
- “Optimize CSS Loading” via Critical CSS
- “Defer Non-Essential JavaScript” so that less important JavaScript executes after the page has loaded
- “Lazy Image Load” so that images aren’t loaded until they’re required
Because I wasn’t forward-thinking enough to realize this would be great content for a blog post, I didn’t pay attention to the page rating I was given prior to enabling all 3 of the above features. After turning them on, though, my ratings for both desktop and mobile were pretty stellar:
Even without hard metrics, I had personally noticed — most likely as the person who looks at this site far more than anyone else on the planet — that media-heavy posts were a bit slow to load. Even though I wouldn’t do things like upload full resolution screenshots from my iPad, loading still wasn’t snappy. After enabling all 3 features of Jetpack Boost, though, even heavy pages like my posts about the HomePod Mini and Magnum Quest seemed to load quite quickly.
It’s worth mentioning that, prior to adding a bunch of site-altering plugins like this, it’s highly recommended you take a backup of your site first. This way you can easily revert to a backup if something goes horribly awry. This is simple to do in just a couple of clicks from the EasyWP dashboard, though obviously the process will be different based on your hosting provider.
Originally published at https://looped.network on November 20, 2021.
