Jetpack Boost from Automattic
Description
Jetpack Boost provides one-click optimizations that supercharge your WordPress site’s performance and improve web vitals scores for better SEO.
So, Automattic, the guys who write WordPress, have published this performance plugin. It provides 3 major modules:
- Optimize CSS Loading generates Critical CSS for your homepage, posts and pages. This can allow your content to show up on the screen much faster, particularly for viewers using mobile devices.Read more about critical CSS generation at web.dev
- Defer Non-Essential Javascript moves some tasks to after the page loads, so that important visual information can be seen sooner.Read more about deferring javascript at web.dev
- Lazy Image Loading only loads the images the user can see. As the user scrolls, images are loaded just before they show up on the page. This simple optimization makes sites faster and saves bandwidth for your host and your customers.Read more about lazy image loading at web.dev
This WordPress plugin tries to address some issues with performance and websites. ALL websites suffer from performance issues from time to time and there are simple techniques to help with optimising your website that can drastically improve the speed of your site. These are standard practice across all websites to improve performance.
Automattic have created this plugin (https://jetpack.com/boost) to help address 3 major issues with CMS (content management systems):
- CSS loading and compression,
- Deferring non-essential Javascript and
- Lazy loading images (only show images when the user has scrolled to that part of the web page).
This is basic website optimisation, but non-the-less very important in managing your WordPress website.
Once you have installed this WordPress Plugin (it’s about a 600kb ZIP file, which is quite small by todays standards) you should head over to one of the performance checking websites to get a speed evaluation; how fast is your website running:
The Jetpack Boost Plugin will work with other ‘Page Cache’ plugins such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
The Jetpack Boost Plugin does not rely on the rather hefty Jetpack brand of products in order to run, so is quite lightweight, so it will not over impact the performance of the website – which of course would be counter productive, so I can see why they created it this way!
You will need to login with your wordpress.com (free signup) or social networking profile (google, Facebook, etc.) account in order to enable this plugin. Once enabled you have the options to optimise your website. The plugin will give you a ‘before’ speed score and an ‘after’ speed score.
The first website (this site) I used this with went from a score of 58 (mobile) / 86 (desktop) to 93 (mobile) / 98 (desktop) with very little effort and all seems to be running well.
Jetpack Boost Plugin Information
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Author: Automattic - Jetpack Site Speed team
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Compatibility: Unknown
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Download: https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/jetpack-boost.2.0.0.zip
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Name: Jetpack Boost – Website Speed, Performance and Critical CSS
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Requires: 5.5
Jetpack Boost – Plugin PHP version needed: 7.0
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Rating: 5
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Tags: Critical CSS, pagespeed, performance, speed, web vitals
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Last Updated: July 24, 2023
Jetpack Boost – Plugin Version: 2.0.0