Streamlining Jetpack: Enhancements for a Faster WordPress Experience

As Jetpack evolves, we’re taking action to streamline Jetpack and make it faster, lighter, and more efficient. This post is the first in a series where we’ll share how we’re optimizing Jetpack to perform better both in active and idle states.

Performance Optimizations

We’ve made significant behind-the-scenes improvements to how Jetpack operates, particularly in its disconnected or idle state. These optimizations are designed to reduce unnecessary processing and improve load times for your WordPress site.

Here are a few key updates:

• Block optimizations: By determining block names from filenames rather than performing disk reads for block.json files, we’ve improved block load performance.
• Reduced option calls: Previously, Jetpack made frequent get_option calls when disconnected, slowing down your site. We’ve drastically reduced these unnecessary requests, optimizing the plugin’s idle performance.
  • jetpack_edit_links_calypso_redirect: A legacy UI artifact for WordPress.com sites.
  • jetpack_tos_agreed: Optimized to avoid unnecessary checks in the frontend.
  • jetpack_sync_error_idc: A check for Identity Crisis errors was scoped to wp-admin. This reading was just for showing a warning only present in the admin.
  • jetpack_onboarding: A legacy onboarding system was removed.
• Frontend request reduction: We’ve eliminated some unnecessary calls to Jetpack’s infrastructure for the Subscription block modal, speeding up site load times.
• Memoized functions: By memorizing the Device_Detection::get_info() function, we’ve cut down on repeated calculations, improving efficiency.
• Admin page-specific connection handling: We now restrict connection error handling to admin pages, removing this overhead from the frontend entirely.

Legacy Features

To make Jetpack lighter and more focused on what users truly need, we’ve deprecated several older features that no longer serve the majority of our users. These features either overlap with WordPress core capabilities or are simply outdated. The following features have been removed:

• Google Analytics: Jetpack Stats has improved over the years, and Google Analytics can be handled by separate plugins for folks who still want to use it, so we moved it to a separate package.
• Custom CSS: Replaced by WordPress Core.
• Site Logo: Now handled by WordPress Core.
• Devicepx: Now handled by WordPress Core. When Core introduced support for srcset, devicepx became a lot less important.
• Calypsoify: This was a feature oriented to WordPress.com. We moved the code out of the Jetpack plugin.
• WordPress.com Block Editor and Toolbar: This is now better in WordPress Core, too. We chose to start favoring the core block editor more over the years.
• Responsive Video: Now handled by WordPress Core.
• Theme Tools: Comic CPT & Random Redirect
• Enhanced Distribution
• Cloudflare Analytics

What’s Next

We’re continually optimizing Jetpack to make your WordPress site faster. Future posts in this series will cover:

• More performance improvements, especially around frontend resource usage and idle state behavior.
• Deep dives into specific optimizations and how they impact site performance.
• Additional feature removals as we analyze and refine Jetpack’s offerings.

As we continue to optimize Jetpack, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know what you think and help us shape Jetpack into the efficient, powerful tool you need to achieve your goals.