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In efforts to simplify and improve the performance and efficiency of Meandering Passage, I recently disabled the WordPress JetPack plugin. The JetPack plugin has a lot of functions and I was only using a few of them. Just my opinion, but I didn’t and don’t feel the extra complexity and slight performance hit of the JetPack plugin was worthwhile in my case. Even though I have no negative experiences or evidence I was also a little uncomfortable it requires connectivity to the WordPress commercial site.
The downside of removing JetPack is that it did remove those two functions of the plugin I was using, new post notifications via email and post/comment like buttons. I know a few of you were subscribed to the new post email notifications so my apologies for any inconvenience my changes have caused.
I’ve since found alternatives and simpler replacements for those functions and they are active on Meandering Passage as of now. At the moment the Like Buttons and Email Notifications are not as “polished” as those in JetPack but I’ll continue to try and improve both the appearance and functionality of each as we go along.
For those who were subscribed to the new post email notifications please resubscribe via the form on the Home Page or in the sidebar on individual posts.
Thanks
I got all your test posts. All seems good here.
Sorry about all those test posts, Monte. I didn’t know of any other way to work out the bugs and confirm things were working. Take care and thanks.
Hello Earl – I’m following via good old RSS so this change had no effect on me (thankfully). I don’t want to change your mind regarding Jetpack, but its effect on site performance is not as bad as it often seems. This https://mattreport.com/jetpack-speed/ is an older article – the most interesting thing in it to me was how adding three stand-alone plugins that do the same thing as Jetpack modules is actually making the site slower than doing the same things with Jetpack. I understand that this highly depends on WHICH modules you’re using, but I thought I’d share this with you.
Thanks for sharing the article on JetPack’s performance, Alexander. I actually totally agree with the article on the performance hit of JetPack. In the referenced testing, it appears a very simple WP theme was used with little or no data. With some themes, designs, and lots of historical data there can be some differences in interaction and performance. But we’re probably talking about fractions of a second. :-) I use GTMetrix for benchmarking and on Meandering Passage I was seeing somewhere around a .3 to .4 second hit with JetPack. At this time, I’ve decided the only function of JetPack that was useful to me was the new posts by email notifications. So, I have installed a new single function plugin for the email notifications. In my case, testing didn’t indicate any performance hit from this particular replacement plugin.
As a side note, which I’m not even sure is important, both the Pagespeed and YSlow scores for Meandering Passage increased with the removal of JetPack, but that might also be somewhat site-specific.
Thanks again. I appreciate the feedback and information. Take care and stay well!
I suppose I should get in the habit of an RSS feed reader. But I do rely on email notifications for new posts on a lot of different blogs. I’ll sign up again with the new system though. Good luck with the tweaks.