Jetpack Boost Cornerstone Pages

Improve your site’s speed by optimizing its most important pages with the Cornerstone Pages setting.

Cornerstone pages are specific pages on your website that Jetpack Boost prioritizes. It applies tailored optimizations to improve these pages’ performance rather than making broad changes across the entire site.

Number of allowed pages

This setting is available on both the Boost free plan and the Boost Premium plan: the free plan allows you to optimize your homepage and one additional page, while the Premium plan supports your homepage and up to ten pages additional pages.

Read more about Jetpack Boost plans.

Cornerstone Pages usage

The Cornerstone Pages setting is automatically enabled once you activate Boost. You can find it below the Page Speed scores section, right above all of Boost’s features.

The box including all the Cornerstone Pages information is collapsed by default, and it shows the number of pages you currently have set up.

Clicking the arrow pointing down will expand the section, giving you more details about the preferences, including a way to manage the list of pages.

First time running Boost and Default Pages

When you activate Boost (or click Include default pages), it will populate the Cornerstone Pages list with the following URLs:

• Your shop page if you have a WooCommerce store;
• Any page marked as Cornerstone Content from Yoast – that’s the case if you have pages tagged as Cornerstone Pages in your Yoast plugin settings.

The list is limited to the number of pages available in your Boost plan.

Homepage

The home page is always a cornerstone page. For that reason, it’s above the list in its own section.

This means that you do not need to add it to the list. If you try and do that, you will be greeted with an error message.

Edit the list of pages

When adding new URLs in Cornerstone Pages, you can enter a full URL (https://example.com/shop/) or a relative URL (/shop/).

If you provide a relative URL (/shop/), Boost will expand that for you to a full URL – https://example.com/shop/

Jetpack Boost stores relative URLs for the Cornerstone Pages in the database. If your website runs on multiple domains, your URLs will automatically show the current domain in the list.

If you migrate to another domain, you won’t have to update the Cornerstone Pages list – Boost will handle it for you.

Please note that only URLs from the same domain are allowed.

If you load the default pages, you will have to manually save the URLs you added to the list by clicking the Save button.

Trailing slashes

All URLs in the list will be displayed without a trailing slash; even if you add one, Boost will remove it automatically, as the system handles slashes.

When saving the values in the database, a trailing slash will either be added or removed based on your website’s permalink structure.

Removing all pages from the list

You can remove one or more URLs from the list or all of them, then click the Save button to validate the changes. Removing all pages from the list and saving them will automatically add the home page to the list.

If you leave the Cornerstone Pages list empty, the system will consider your homepage a default page to flag and automatically list it there.

Cornerstone Pages benefits for Boost features

The Cornerstone Pages settings can positively influence active Boost features.

Page Speed scores

Page Speed scores will still be measured against your home page.

Critical CSS

When generating Critical CSS, Cornerstone Pages will have their version explicitly tailored to them, rather than the generic critical CSS generated for a group of pages.

For example, if the “About” page on your website has a unique look – different from the rest of the pages on your website – adding it to the Cornerstone Pages list will have Boost generate a Critical CSS specifically for that page’s layout.

Previously, Boost would have generated one Critical CSS that respects both layouts, which meant a wider chunk of CSS on the page.

Page Caching

Jetpack Boost automatically generates cache files for your Cornerstone Pages every 30 minutes via a scheduled WordPress Cron.

This Cache Preloading mechanism ensures your Cornerstone Pages maintain optimal performance by ensuring a cache file for all Cornerstone Pages is always available for visitors to your site.

Prerendering Pages

If your site runs WordPress 6.8 or later, Jetpack Boost includes a toggle to prerender Cornerstone Pages using WordPress’s new Speculative Loading feature.

When enabled, supported browsers (like Chrome, Edge, and Opera) may begin loading Cornerstone Pages in the background as soon as visitors hover over a link. This can result in near-instant page loads when they click.

You can toggle this setting on and off in the Cornerstone Pages section of the Boost dashboard. It’s off by default.

Prerendering pages can be unsafe in certain circumstances. Since the browser fetches the page and renders it in an invisible browser tab, any JavaScript on the page will execute. If the page makes changes on the server, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a mailing list, hovering over a link to that page will be enough for those actions to take place. The MDN web documentation here is a good resource to find out more about this.

Troubleshooting Cornerstone Pages errors

Boost does not allow the list to be updated if there are errors present, so if you encounter any of these errors, you need to correct them before saving any further changes.

Error	Cause	Solution
Page list limit exceeded	You added more pages than allowed by your plan.	Remove extra pages from the list or upgrade.
URL from a different domain	The URL does not match your current website domain.	Use only URLs from your website’s domain.

Feedback

Your feedback is invaluable in helping us improve Boost. If you have feedback about Cornerstone Pages, please don’t hesitate to share it with us!