If WP is using only to create a site without a blog, is Jetpack really needed?

If you are making a web site with WordPress and do not intend to include any blogging features – there will be no posting or comments involved, WP will only be used to create pages is there any real need for a plugin like Jetpack?

I’m concerned about the overhead and simply not loading the site with things that aren’t needed.

I’m asking for someone who had a site created for her and she asked me to take a look at it because it runs really slow.

The server is a problem, TTFB is often as high as 20000ms (20 seconds) but I also see a lot of stuff being downloaded that isn’t really needed.

It looks like the server the creator uses for client sites is very overused, not well configured, or simply overpowered by the traffic load and can’t handle the bandwidth involved.

The creator created the pages with big images which are sized in the HTML, rather than resizing the image to make the file smaller and the image the size they want.

An example is a image which is 249.59 KB, with size of 689px × 634px, and it is scaled to 77px × 71px on the page. There an image used as a background which is 120.67 KB and is 1,920px × 800p and is a simple black image with a tiny bit of texturing. They could have used a solid black background instead of an image – a waste of bandwidth.

I know, I know, files are cached but I noticed a lot of files that would normally be cached are not being cached.

This issue with using large images and scaling them in the HTML is simply laziness on the part of the site create. Rather than create a properly sized image, they scale a large image down to a small size. Creating a smaller image file is no big deal.

Back to Jetpack – I see a several of URLs (CSS and JS, etc) which contain jetpack.

I also see that most of the images are being served from the CDN servers that Jetpack’s image feature uses. The owner of the site would prefer not to have her images out on servers she can’t control.

So, if the site will not have a blog, is there any real reason to add Jetpack to the site?

There will be a contact page but there are numerous ways to create that sort of page without using Jetpack.

The real question is “Should WP be used to create a non-blog web site?”

Given that the owner will not be making any changes herself, she doesn’t need any of admin features for that purpose.

Funny thing – every time I see a web site with a big image covering about 1/2 of the page, above the fold, I check it out and find, 80% or more of the time, it was created with WP.

So – does Jetpack offer anything that would of use on a non-blog website?

I haven’t been able to look around the site as the owner doesn’t have an admin signin and has to get one from the creator.

I expect to see a lot of unneeded plug-ins installed.

I can only think of two which she might need – Akismet to catch SPAM on the comments page and something like Duplicator to backup up the site and allow it to be moved easily if needed and a contact form plugin of some sort.