Suyogya Shukla

Crafting magic on web

Jetpack isn’t bad for your WordPress site – stop the misinformation.

Jan 24, 2024

•

If you’re not familiar with Jetpack, it’s an optional plugin for WordPress.org sites that unlocks a host of features that some people tend to appreciate, and some don’t. This in itself is completely fine, but, there are still so many blog posts out on the internet that are blatantly spreading misinformation about the plugin, and I’m tired of running across them. You’ll find one such example of these posts here:

Why you should not use Jetpack & how to delete it

Not only is this post wildly incorrect, it also doesn’t back up any of the claims being made with any ~~credible~~ sources, at all. In this post, I’m going to address the 2 biggest disadvantages the post I’ve linked talks about and my hope is that more people realize a lot of this information is inaccurate. If you ever get a doubt about Jetpack, or any plugin in general, I highly encourage you research about it on your own & consider reaching out to the developers of the product directly, specially if you’re seeing a lot of conflicting content.

I’d like to preface this by making it clear that this post is on my personal site, and does not reflect views of Automattic Inc. or Jetpack, but my own. With that being said, considering I’m an employee for Automattic, it does give me a lot of insight into how our products work, and how posts like the one I linked above impact real world users who end up taking decisions on a whim based on incorrect information.

To give some context, I got introduced to this post by one of our users on WordPress.com who came in requesting to disable Jetpack after reading this post – while Jetpack is totally optional to use on a WordPress.org site, disabling it completely on a WordPress.com site is not possible because it acts as a bridge between our infrastructure and sites, enabling crucial features that power our platform – there is also no reason for someone to want to get rid of the plugin completely on WordPress.com, specially when a user forms an opinion based on incorrect information. Furthermore, while you can’t disable the plugin in it’s entirety, you can still choose to disable most of the non-critical modules as you please. With that being said, let’s debunk these claims.

Claim #1 – It’s a resource hog

The post mentions that Jetpack loads all of the modules on pages regardless of whether they’re active or not, which is just not right. When you have Jetpack active on your site, you can choose to keep certain modules activated or deactivated, and only the active modules are the ones that load on your site. Deactivated modules have zero impact on your site’s speed.

Besides, Jetpack is actively developed, maintained, and supported by a team of 100+ people passionately working to improve it every single day – it has come a very long way in terms of optimization and the impact it has on page loading speed. It’s far from perfect, but speaking from a user’s point of view, I’d sleep more comfortably at night knowing I’m using a plugin that is continuously being improved upon by a global team. In fact, Jetpack now also offers individual modules as standalone plugins if you’d rather not have a single plugin with different modules, allowing a general user more flexibility in choosing what works best for them. More on that here.

Claim #2 – The stats are not accurate

For some reason, the author mentions that Jetpack tries to pull data from Google Analytics which again, is simply not true. Jetpack tracks it’s own stats independently of Google Analytics. It does, however, allow you to pull in Google Analytics stats with ease if that’s more aligned with what you’d like to do as you’ll see here: How to add Google Analytics to WordPress. Jetpack uses a tracking pixel, just like Google or any other stats service out there. One benefit to Jetpack stats is that it doesn’t load a pixel on a page when you are logged in by default. This means it excludes your visits, so you’re not seeing data inflated by you loading your own site, resulting in more accurate stats, contrary to what the post claims.

You can learn a bit more about how Jetpack stats work and what counts against views, what doesn’t, etc. here: Jetpack Stats

Proposed solutions & why they’re worse

Lastly, the post lists down a bunch of different plugins you can use for each individual feature you need. If you’ve been using WordPress for some time, you know that approach is counter-productive and instead each individual plugin will add on to your load times a lot more. Based on the particular plugin you use, and whether it’s still actively maintained or not, you might end up using something that hasn’t been updated in years and is going to actually slow down, if not break your site entirely. Jetpack actually did a thorough testing debunking some of the claims around it’s impact on site speed here – I’ll recommend folks give it a read.

Conclusion

All in all, the purpose of my post isn’t to say Jetpack is a perfect plugin – as I said, it still has potential for improvements, but it’s actively developed, maintained, and is getting better every single day.

There is a lot of false information out on the internet claiming things that simply aren’t true, and I don’t want to have any more of that. Whether you want to use Jetpack on a WordPress site or not is a completely different story and something folks should evaluate for their specific use case. Personally speaking, I can’t imagine running any of my WordPress based sites without the plugin active. I’ve tried dropping a comment on Tracie’s blog but it’s still under moderation, and I don’t have high hopes that it will be approved.

One response

John C

Apr 18, 2024

Let’s dig a little deeper. While the blog post you linked to does a poor job off stating why you shouldn’t use Jetpack, the underlying statement is resoundingly still correct.
It is a heavy plugin. There’s no denying it. With the plugin enabled and all options disabled, it still has a negative impact on performance. This can be seen when viewed through tools such as GT Metrix. The number of requests increase, and some of these include requests to external assets which come with additional DNS lookups.
On Claim #1. I believe there’s a lot of confusion among novice developers on this particular topic. In simple terms, the modules in Jetpack come with conditional statements if they’re active or not. If TRUE, then the code is executed, increasing server processing. If FALSE, the code is not executed. However, in PHP, as with most programming languages, if a condition in an if statement is not met, the code block inside that if statement will not be executed. However, the code itself is still “read” or parsed by the PHP parser. This means that even though the code is not executed, it must still be syntactically correct. Additionally, parsing code that is part of a conditional block that is not executed still incurs some overhead because the PHP parser needs to read and check the syntax of all code within the script. Even though the time taken to parse and compile code that is never executed might be minimal, it still contributes to the total processing time of the script. The more complex and extensive the unused code, the more noticeable the impact might be. This will be more noticeable on budget hosting environments or when the site is under load.
Claim #2. It’s not as accurate as Google Analytics (GA), and I’m willing to put money on it. Google have a much larger network and can detect non-human traffic in a far more accurate way than Jetpack. Further, the amount of data available in GA far exceeds that of Jetpack. Jetpack serves the role more of a curiosity than serious analytical analysis.
The recent forced subscriptions to use stats for “commercial” websites only reinforces reasons not to use it. In short, there is a declining value in using Jetpack.

Loading…

Reply