Jetpack has a feature called Photon which
Sounds pretty good right? The slight issue is the fact that they serve your images from their own CDN, in simple terms, they host your images off of your website.
While for some bloggers this might not be an issue, for others who are in the more visual side of blogging it could be.
If you’re doing something visual where you want people to be able to view your images in gloriously large results, you’re probably relying to some degree on google images. Now, what Photon does is when someone tries to view your media attachments page (the page where you just view the image) it redirects away from your site and off to the CDN where the images are hosted.
In general you really want to keep readers on your website, not be sending them off somewhere else, especially if those readers are clicking through to your site via google image search. If you let your users go off to another site to see your images they aren’t going to see any of your branding, or any of the other content that is on offer.
Photon does help speed up your images, but you could be losing out on potential readers because in some cases they won’t see your site at all.
I absolutely love Jetpack, it has some fantastic features, but it is definitely worth going through the options on offer and deactivating anything that you don’t want to use.
Do any of you guys use the photon feature? Did this post make you think about deactivating that feature? Or do you feel like it’s not really a big problem for your blog?
