Like a lot of people who run sites on WordPress, I use Jetpack with my site to provide benefits like CDN and security. Having used WordPress sites without it before, I can say pretty confidently that not having a CDN can be an absolute nightmare when it comes to performance, especially when using a lower tier of WordPress hosting.
One of my favorite aspects of Jetpack is Boost, which offers a variety of services to help speed up WordPress sites. It can concatenate, optimize, and defer things like CSS and JavaScript and offer a CDN for images so they can load from a globally distributed network rather than from wherever the heck your server happens to be. The function to optimize CSS is a bit funny to me because you either have to manually click a button for it after making changes to the site or you can pay $10 USD a month for it to happen automatically. Considering how rarely I change the style of my site, I sincerely don’t mind to go in and click a button every few weeks. While in the Boost settings to do this recently, though, I noticed a new option:
Jetpack Boost now offers to cache pages on the site in their rendered state so they can be served from the CDN immediately rather than having PHP process each one on the fly to serve it up whenever its requested. In theory, this could result in pages that load essentially on par with what I’ve had when using static sites in the past. The downside would be if it takes the cache an egregiously long time to update, meaning that changes to the site would take a while to be displayed for everyone. Since it was fairly harmless for a personal site like this, I figured I would toggle it on to test it out before determining if I wanted to use it for some other, more professional and important sites I manage.
Settings exist for whitelisting pages from the cache and enabling logging, but I just left the settings as-is and didn’t bother to tweak anything. Flipping the switch doesn’t result in any immediate change since it takes a little time for the cache to build out, but after periodically looking at my site later on I’ve honestly been blown away at just how quickly everything operates. Pages that used to take a moment to load up now appear immediately, and everything just feels so much snappier. If I had thought about it beforehand I would’ve captured some before and after metrics to have a concrete comparison, but since I didn’t do that I can only say that, by my own estimation, things are much better. To be clear, I wouldn’t say that my site’s performance previously was bad by any stretch, but now it’s downright amazing.
This seems like a killer Jetpack feature to me, and it didn’t take long for me to flip it one for another site that I manage as well. So far I haven’t noticed any issues with changes taking time to propagate through the CDN or anything like that. Changes all seem to be live more or less immediately, though I could see hiccups happening here and there since the service is in beta. If you have a WordPress site behind Jetpack, though, I would highly recommend giving this new feature a shot and seeing how well it could improve the experience on your own site.