Jetpack is one of the popular plugin available in WordPress repository. Jetpack comes with a tool called ” photon ” which optimizes as well as speeds up the Images using CDN. But the question is Does Jetpack Photon Decrease SEO? Jetpack provides many features like Traffic growth & Insights, Security, Image Performance, Centralized Management and many more.
Jetpack plugin is free to download from WordPress plugin repository. One can upgrade the plugin to get access to it’s premium features like Daily Backups, Malware scans, Security reports and Bullet-Proof spam filtering with Akismet.
What is Jetpack Photon ?
Photon is one of the feature that comes with Jetpack Plugin. As you know that Jetpack acts as a Free CDN for WordPress Blogs. What actually does this Photon do is it optimized the Images that are uploaded to a WordPress blog. The uploaded images is either a Featured Images or Images in a blog post it doesn’t matter. Photon compress the Images and optimizes them.
The Images uploaded are saved into the Hosting Space present in your WordPress Blog and Then Jetpack makes a copy of them and stores them in WordPress Repository
As Jetpack acts as a CDN but it is somewhat different from other Paid CDN’s out there. Unlike CloudFlare and MaxCDN what Jetpack does is it stores a copy of Images that have been uploaded to WordPress blog and caches them. When an user request a blog post which has enabled Jetpack Photon.
The Images are served from Jetpack WordPress Repository has a different set of URL. Blogs/websites which haven’t enabled Photon has normal URL pattern where URL starts with the Domain Name and the path of the resource Image. Whereas Photon enabled Images are cached and served with URL pattern :
i0.wp.com/image.jpg
i1.wp.com/image.png
i2.wp.com/image.gif
Does Jetpack Photon Decrease SEO ?
According to SEO, images in a particular page plays a major role to rank in Search Engines. When we talk about Image SEO in particular the image URL is main key factor for the Images to Rank. Google Image search drive huge traffic when we are able to rank our Images too in Google.
The images what we upload to WordPress blogs follows this Image URL pattern ( http://www.domain.com/Image.jpg ) . when compared to Photon cached Image URL pattern ( http://i2.wp.com/http://www.domain.com/Image.jpg ) the URL of the image is completed changed. Which affects SEO
I’ve personally observed that one my blog Image SEO decreased a lot after enabling Jetpack Photon. There are 2 cases in which Jetpack can harm or improve your SEO. So lets look into it.
Also Read : Trick Google Plus to Boost Traffic by 400% {Guide}
Cases of Jetpack Photon Decrease SEO
Case #1 : Use of Jetpack Photon
Caching Images using Jetpack Photon Applications surely improves load speed, According to SEO speed is one of the main Factor to rank. The Faster the page the better it’s rank is. Caching it using Jetpack Free CDN is good option but sometimes it’s not worth trying.
I’ve tested a number of pages with contains rich images by comparing them using many Online Page Speed tools like GTmetrix , Varvy and Pingdom etc., and also tried the manual method to find the Page Size by saving the entire page as an Complete Web page and found that major part of the Page size like around 70 – 80 % is due to Images present in the page
Jetpack Photon does a very good job here. It’s caching made webpages snappier and helped users that they never felt page loading lag. Jetpack Photon is a Great feature for some people who doesn’t require rankings in Google. Like some authority blogs doesn’t follow SEO techniques because they’re having loyal readers and Social Media to drive Traffic
For this type of authority blogs and some Website Jetpack Photon is real deal and as we all Know Jetpack Photon is Free to Download.
Case #2 : Remedy to Jetpack Photon Decrease SEO
If we use CDN’s like MaxCDN or any paid one, we can gain speed as well as improve SEO because for example these CDN caches images but not change the URL pattern. So image SEO is perfectly safe. Many authority blogs like GSMArena & WPBeginner are using Paid CDN’s to avoid these simple mistakes.
There’s also a free solution for those who can’t afford Paid CDN. Use CloudFlare, it’s the best free CDN out there. CloudFlare intelligently caches all the data from Web Server and stores in their respective servers, when an user requests a page it’ll will be served from CloudFlare but not origin server.
Case Study on Jetpack Photon Decrease SEO
Also Read : Trick Google Plus to Boost Traffic by 400% {Guide}
I’ve personally tested out Jetpack Plugin by enabling Photon. See the results above , around 98% images are not indexed in Google. Which is very Bad for a blog. Most of the Image Traffic is reduced.
After disabling Jetpack Photon to the testing blog we have observed around 59% growth in traffic and most of it is from Google Image Search. Meanwhile I got many backlinks naturally from many other blogs who shared my Images in their websites which is new after Disabling Jetpack Photon
Conclusion : Whether to use Jetpack Photon Free CDN or Not ?
If you are not using any CDN like CloudFlare and your Web Hosting server is very slow then 100% I recommend you to use Jetpack Photon because it improves page speed a lot which in turn reduces Bounce Rate and user interaction.
If you’re using any CDN’s out there and your’e using a Fast SSD Hosting then don’t enable Jetpack Photon and lose SEO. If you make sure not to enable Jetpack Photon in this case you might end up gaining around 50% more traffic than usual.
Do let me know if you are having any doubts in comments section below. If you like this article don’t hesitate to share this Article because sharing is SEXY! Thank you.