On the morning of April 19th (Monday) Automattic released a new plugin called Jetpack Boost on the WordPress.org repo. The plugin is focused on performance and SEO issues users might have with their sites. 🚀
Boost has three “performance modules:”
- Optimize CSS Loading generates critical CSS for your homepage, posts, and pages. This can make your content show up on the screen much faster, particularly for viewers using mobile devices.
- Defer Non-Essential Javascript moves some rendering tasks to happen after the page loads so important visual information can be seen sooner.
- Lazy Image Loading only loads the images the user can see when they can see them.
Sarah Gooding took some initial benchmarks. 📈
Dan Walmsley, one of the engineers at Automattic who worked on Boost, shared how much XWP and WordPress VIP were involved in product development:
“We relied heavily on their expertise with high-end sites to distill the most effective, bulletproof optimizations for free for regular folks. It’s very hard to make performance optimization simple, but I really think we got the formula right.”
