Removed Most of Jetpack

  • Thomas Endersen

    (@thehinesgaphideaway)


    2 months, 1 week ago

    We’ve been using Jetpack since our site launched–roughly 3-4 years ago–however, after all this time while we were trying to speed up the site’s content delivery (through experimentation) we noted a big increase in performance when MOST of Jetpack “stuff” was simply removed and the plugins deleted.

    In my view, most of Jetpack (these days) is redundant, such as Akismet, Boost, and Security tools. When Google’s PageSpeedInsights was telling us our response times were in the low 20s, after we removed most of Jetpack, PageSpeedInsights reported better response times in the upper 50s.

    Jetpack seems to be doing too much and we can’t afford to be so bogged down. Still, for some (perhaps) small sites where very little content is being delivered the Jetpack tools are useful, but considering growth, Jetpack simply isn’t all that worth it.

    In addition, some of the very useful tools about Jetpack, such as traffic statistic, are no longer free–so the incentive to use it is not cost-effective.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support Bruce (a11n)

    (@bruceallen)

    Happiness Engineer

    Hi @thehinesgaphideaway

    Thank you for sharing your detailed experience with Jetpack’s performance impact. While there is some overlap with standalone solutions like Akismet and security tools, thousands of sites benefit from Jetpack’s seamless integration and consolidated management of these features. However, we understand site speed is crucial, and appreciate your feedback about the PageSpeed score improvements.

    For optimal performance, you can activate only the specific features you need rather than the full suite, or try our standalone plugins. Many high-traffic sites run Jetpack successfully with the right configuration. We’re happy to help optimize your setup – just let us know if you’d like assistance.

    Thread Starter Thomas Endersen

    (@thehinesgaphideaway)

    Bruce, I appreciate the response and I definitely agree that Jetpack offers quite a few solutions that integrate well with our site. I must admit I didn’t disable Jetpack tools without feeling like I’m missing out on some benefits. However, our competitor sites do tend to beat us on performance (of course perhaps they spend much more on resources than we do), so for now given our current state, we want more with what we got. In addition, we do have some decisions to make as it pertains to our hosting partners–maybe it’s time to upgrade our hosting to allocate more resources to make our tools fly–It is possible we come back and enable Jetpack. Thank you.

    Plugin Support Bruce (a11n)

    (@bruceallen)

    Happiness Engineer

    Thomas, thanks for the followup!

    It’s great to hear you value Jetpack’s integrations, and we understand the challenging balance between features and performance. You make an excellent point about hosting resources – they can significantly impact how well plugins like Jetpack perform.

    If you decide to return to Jetpack after upgrading your hosting, we’d be happy to help you optimize the configuration for your new environment.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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