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 pagesMD

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 additional pages.

Read more about Jetpack Boost plans.

Manage Cornerstone PagesMD

To manage your Cornerstone Pages:

1. Go to Jetpack → Boost in WP Admin.
2. Under Optimize your speed, expand the “Cornerstone Pages” section.
3. Expand the “Customize pages list” panel.

Your homepage is included automatically and appears separately above the custom pages list.

Include default pagesMD

Boost can automatically add eligible default pages to your Cornerstone Pages list, including:

• Your shop page if you use WooCommerce.
• Pages marked as Cornerstone Content in Yoast SEO.

Select the “Include default pages” link to add any eligible pages Boost detects.

If no eligible default pages are available, Boost displays No default pages available. Add pages manually.

The number of pages you can add depends on your Jetpack Boost plan.

HomepageMD

Your homepage is included automatically and appears separately from the custom Cornerstone Pages list.

You do not need to add your homepage manually.

Add or edit Cornerstone PagesMD

Add one URL per line in the Custom field.

You can enter a full URL, such as https://yourjetpack.blog/shop/, or a relative URL, such as /shop/. Relative URLs are automatically expanded to use your site’s domain.

Only URLs from your site can be included.

After making changes, select the Save button.

Trailing slashesMD

Jetpack Boost handles trailing slashes automatically.

If you add a URL with a trailing slash, Boost may display it without one. When saving the URL, Boost follows your site’s permalink structure.

Remove Cornerstone PagesMD

To remove a custom Cornerstone Page, delete its URL from the Custom field, then select the Save button.

You can remove all custom URLs from the list. Your homepage remains included automatically.

How Cornerstone Pages affect Boost featuresMD

Page Speed scoresMD

Page Speed scores are still measured using your homepage.

Critical CSSMD

Jetpack Boost generates Critical CSS specifically for each Cornerstone Page.

This is useful when an important page has a different layout from the rest of your site. For example, if your About page has a unique design, adding it as a Cornerstone Page allows Boost to generate Critical CSS tailored to that page.

Page cachingMD

Jetpack Boost preloads the cache for your Cornerstone Pages every 30 minutes using WordPress Cron.

This helps keep cached versions of these pages ready for visitors.

Prerender Cornerstone PagesMD

If your site runs WordPress 6.8 or later, Jetpack Boost can prerender Cornerstone Pages using WordPress’s Speculative Loading feature.

To enable prerendering:

1. Go to Jetpack → Boost in WP Admin.
2. Under Optimize your speed, expand the “Cornerstone Pages” section.
3. Turn on the “Prerender Cornerstone Pages” toggle.

When enabled, supported browsers may begin loading a Cornerstone Page in the background when a visitor hovers over a link to it. This can make the page load faster when the visitor selects the link.

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.

Troubleshoot Cornerstone Pages errorsMD

Boost won’t save changes to the Cornerstone Pages list until any errors are fixed.

Issue	Cause	Solution
Too many Cornerstone Page URLs	You added more pages than allowed by your plan.	Remove URLs until you are within your plan’s limit.
URL belongs to a different site	The URL does not match your current website domain.	Use a URL from your website’s domain.