Does Jetpack Slow Down WordPress Website?

Is it worth to activate Jetpack plugin?  Does it slows down and crashes your website? The answer is it depends! 

Designers, end-users and developers and even the creators of WordPress gush over the importance of Jetpack. They consider that Jetpack is not only mandatory to get the most from WordPress but is vital if WordPress continues its influence in this website design field. The stability of WordPress lies in its flexible nature because of its plug-ins and themes, that is why self-hosted WordPress.org is better than WordPress.com for passionate bloggers. 

Even WordPress.org has varied useful features that are needed in WordPress.org. Here, the need for Jetpack arrives. It aims to get the handy features for your self hosted WordPress blog. Jetpack offers several modules that could be beneficial but other drawbacks should also be considered. 

Table of Content

• Significance of Jetpack for WordPress
• Jetpack’s assets and liabilities
• Concluding Remarks

Significance of Jetpack for WordPress

Jetpack has been introduced by Automattic that provides all the features that are not included in WordPress.com. Jetpack is a powerhouse that has security features, visitor’s engagement, display options, and website statistics. Jetpack bridges the gap between the WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The user just has to sign up for a  WordPress.com account and has to activate Jetpack with the login info. So, signing up to WordPress.org provides all its features access to be used on self-hosted WordPres.org installation from Jetpack plugin. 

“Yes, it is correct that Jetpack has come up with plenty of features that are beneficial for the WordPress website Development. But it has some downfalls as well. ”

Jetpack’s assets and liabilities

• Jetpack offers only a few modules that are beneficial for your blog/website. 
• It gives plenty of features for free and if free is the option for you than you can adopt it easily. 
• Jetpack updates itself regularly and it is developed by the same people who are accountable for WordPress.com. So, it is compatible enough to go with. 

One might get confused that with these benefits why Jetpack is still questionable? The answer lies in the pitfalls that make it difficult to choose the Jetpack plugin. Have a look!

• Jetpack is huge. It has 30 modules and no one requires to use all of these modules. Obviously why one will select this plugin that includes more than you require?  We do not need each function in one plugin. 
• It is a bloated plugin. It includes massive coding which is not needed at all. It has been criticized that Jetpack has been designed to activate only those modules that you need. 
• It is estimated that Jetpack slows down the website and takes 8 to 10 seconds to load the website. 
• The Jetpack photon can affect your SEO. It is said that the photon modules for speeding up the image loading process with CDN can harm SEO. Almost 50% of the search engine traffic has got affected by jetpack’s photon.
• Hackers can easily access your account with one login. Yes, it is easy to control the WordPress installations from a dashboard but it is very risky. It gives an invitation to hackers to hack their accounts. 

So, it would be right to say that if you need to enable one or two Jetpack modules, they just chose the feature-specific plugin as per your requirements. 

Concluding Remarks

Yes, Jetpack indeed has lots of benefits. But just a few of them are significant for your WordPress website. But, all it depends on what you want or what is important for you?   If you want to use easy manageable, simple, all in one plug-in than Jetpack is not a bad chose either. It can be helpful but it is not required that one’s choice is essential to others as well. If used incorrectly, Jetpack will slow down your WordPress website.