Jetpack Boost and SEO

Hi Dennis,

Jetpack Boost offers several features aimed at improving your site’s performance which can indirectly benefit your SEO by providing a better user experience and potentially reducing page load times. One of these features is the ability to minify CSS.

Jetpack Boost does indeed minify Critical CSS using CleanCSS, a well-tested CSS minifier. You can find more details on the minification process in our GitHub repository and the CleanCSS package on npm.

It’s possible that Semrush may have specific criteria for minification that differs from our current configuration. To help us investigate this further, could you please provide us with more details on the Semrush report? Any specific warnings or errors you can share will help us understand what Semrush is detecting and allow us to make any necessary adjustments.

We’re committed to ensuring that Jetpack Boost optimally enhances your site’s performance, and we appreciate your cooperation in resolving this issue.

Best regards,

Dear Alin,

Thank you for your elaborate answer. As for now, i disabled Jetpack Boost to see what effect it has on my SEO. As i find semrush too expensive for my business, i have to wait a bit.

The ‘warning’ coming from semrush: “55 issues with unminified JavaScript and CSS files”. The _jb_static/?? file that`s created by Boost seems to be the cause of that.

When i click the _jb_static link in my source code i do find an elongated non-minified css..

Kind regards

Hi @destmedia,

Thank you for your reply. To investigate this further, could you please share the URLs that are getting reported by Semrush?

If you want to stay private, you can contact us through the contact form and share these details there.

Thank you.

Thank you. It concerns basically all pages on my website as jetpack Boost touches them all. But for instance my home: https://www.tuinwerk.nu/ || https://www.tuinwerk.nu/het-wakkere-end/

Can it be related to xmlrpc ?

Hi @destmedia,

Thank you for the information provided. Upon review, I’ve observed a potential issue that could be affecting the performance of Jetpack Boost. The URL https://www.tuinwerk.nu/project-type/tuinaanleg-projecten-utrecht appears to be redirecting to https://www.tuinwerk.nu/tuinwerk-portfolio/tuinaanleg-projecten-utrecht/, which in turn seems to originate from a redirect at https://www.tuinwerk.nu/project-type/houtwerk (as shown in this screenshot). To ensure that Jetpack Boost can correctly regenerate Critical CSS, I recommend first verifying and resolving these redirect patterns. Once these are addressed, you may proceed to check if there are still issues being reported by Semrush

Dear Alin,

Thanks again for your response. This is where i start to struggle a bit:

All redirects seem to me clean cut. As in, al redirects seem valid. I find the ‘houtwerk’ redirect hard to reproduce( cant really find it). Ill look again..

Nonetheless: I find it hard to figure why these redirects should disable Boost to create a minified css. Do i need to install CleanCss seperatly? As i don`t use node.js..

Hi @destmedia,

I apologize if my previous response didn’t directly address the issue you highlighted. On a brighter note, I’ve received confirmation from our team that the problem you reported is scheduled to be resolved in the upcoming plugin update, set for release at the end of this month.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.