You Should Really Avoid Using This Plugin

byleoemery

12.2K followers

Updated 10 years ago

There are a ton of plugins to help your site along.

Personally I'm not a big fan of plugins and avoid them at all costs.

But the one plugin in my opinion you should avoid for sure is the plugin from wordpress called Jetpack.

Yep it's a very popular plugin with it being downloaded over 13 million times. But popular does not always mean good.

There are several reason not to use this plugin but the biggest one is how this plugin will destroy your sites performance (page load time)

If you're not familiar with jetpack it is a plugin that has 34 modules.

The problem with jetpack is that once installed it puts a HUGE load on the front end of your website - this being the load time of your site.

I did a little experiment on one of my test sites, one with jetpack not installed and one with it installed, and the results we very amazing and not in a good way.

Without jetpack being installed my page load time was 43 1/000's of a millisecond and the plugins only had a 25% impact on my sites load time.

This is where you want your site to be - a fast load time.

Now I then installed jetpack and here's the results.

The load time increased by a factor of 10 and now the plugins are effecting my load time by 81%

Now this is with a website with just 6 plugins installed (plus jetpack making it 7) and look how it affected this sites performance. Many sites have double this amount of plugins.

Heck I know sites that have over 20 plugins. I could imagine how slow their site loads.

Speed and performance is one of the major keys to a successful website - if your site loads really slow many people will not wait around and leave to find another site.

Jstpack also requiers you to register at wordpress.com before you can use their plugin. And this has ZERO value for you.

Jetpack gets you to do this for only 2 reasons -

1) So they can track your usage

2) So they can promote products to you.

Neither one I want from a plugin.

And one more thing, when you install Jetpack it's like installing 34 plugins at once, and be aware 17 of those plugins (modules) are pre-activated.

And if you don't know that you've running things you probably don't need to have running.

In fact most people install Jetpack just because it offers a site stats counter. That's great but you can use other tools that are far less taxing on your site.

For example:

Google Analytics - it can be hard to get use to GA but the more you use it the easier it becomes.

And if you want to avoid the learning curve of GA you can use Statcounter.com It's very easy to use and you can see all your site stats at just a glance.

I believe in you!!
Leo

P.S.

Even the WA (siterubix) does not allow you to install Jetpack.