Jetpack, the WordPress Plugin We Love to Hate

Jetpack, the WordPress Plugin We Love to Hate
Jetpack logo by WordPress
Jetpack logo by WordPress (Photo credit: growdigital)

First off, WordPress is amazing software. And it’s free.

That doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, but I am a big fan.

Jetpack has an alluring promise, Content Delivery Network via WordPress.com, fancy tiled images, social sharing options that includes commenting, and several other handy features.

Here’s the problem:

It’s slow. One of the slowest, if you have a plugin on your WordPress install that is slower than Jetpack, please let me know about it.

It replaced several popular plugins, like After The Deadline. Those plugins are no longer supported as stand-alone products. Not necessarily a bad thing, but when you have all the loading time that Jetpack bloats up just to use one feature out of the suite, it’s not efficient.

Doesn’t play well with other plugins. Some plugins will just stop Jetpack from functioning, there’s a list of them.

Can’t minify. Minify takes all the CSS and javascript that themes and plugins use, consolidates them to help the pages load faster.

Here’s the big problem, if you switch from WordPress.com, you need it to keep your subscribers. Just like a recent client of mine did.

At least Jetpack is being actively maintained. And there have been several recent updates since it’s release.

Bottom line, Jetpack is a big commitment, and you need to base the rest of your install around that plugin to avoid conflicts.

UPDATE: Jetpack is much improved.

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2 Responses

  1. Seems to be a good news for WordPress users, The Pack combines the power of so many different WordPress plugin into one plugin and also uses the power of WordPress.com cloud servers. This is really awesome. Going to Jet Pack my blog now.

    1. Thanks for commenting Karan. There are a lot of great features in JetPack. And I have used it with great success on several WordPress installs. They have continued to improve the plugin since publication. It’s probably just a matter of time before some of those functions become part of the WordPress core.