Jetpack Boost

Jetpack Boost is a plugin you can install to improve your site’s performance and Core Web Vitals, helping with SEO. It’s available for free on plugin-enabled WordPress.com plans, with optional paid upgrades. This guide walks you through how to install and use Jetpack Boost on your WordPress.com site.

Install Jetpack Boost

While Jetpack Boost is available to all customers on the Business or Commerce plan, you do need to install it. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Navigate your site’s wp-admin dashboard.
2. Navigate to Jetpack → My Jetpack (or Jetpack → Dashboard if using the default interface style).
3. Select the Products tab at the top of the page.
4. Click “Learn more” next to the the Boost option.

5. On the following page, select “Start for Free” or optionally purchase the paid plan that comes with additional enhancements.

6. After selecting the plan, you will be redirected to the Jetpack Boost dashboard (Jetpack → Boost) where your current scores for Mobile and Desktop will be calculated. This dashboard also contains the optimization options discussed below.

Optimization options

Jetpack Boost has several optimization options that you can enable:

• Optimize CSS Loading: Extract critical CSS to move important styling information to the start of the page, helping pages display your content sooner. You can regenerate critical CSS manually on the free version of Jetpack Boost or upgrade to automate this process.
• Defer Non‑Essential JavaScript: Run non-essential JavaScript after the page has loaded so that styles and images can load more quickly.
• Concatenate JS: Consolidate multiple JavaScript files into one comprehensive script and shrink it to reduce site loading time and number of requests. If needed, you can exclude specific JS strings from concatenation.
• Concatenate CSS: Combine multiple CSS files into a single, minified file to reduce site loading time and the number of requests. If needed, you can exclude specific CSS strings from concatenation.
• Image CDN: Deliver images from the Jetpack Content Delivery Network. This is the same Site Accelerator CDN provided with your WordPress.com plan, so toggling this setting on or off will also change the setting at Jetpack → Settings → Performance. Here’s a look at the corresponding CDN settings in Jetpack.

• Image Guide: This feature helps you discover images that are too large. When you browse your site, the image guide will show you an overlay with information about each image’s size. Learn more about how to use the Image Performance Guide.

Site speed can be affected by many factors, so we recommend testing different combinations of the features above to see what gives you the best overall score. If you’re using other optimization plugins, avoid enabling the same types of optimizations in both, as this can lead to conflicts or unexpected behavior without improving performance.