When you have a lot of AJAX calls on your website, especially ones that return a list of data, it can be quite expensive processing time on the server to retrieve the results, format them with HTML, and return them to the browser to display – not only that, your bandwidth costs can be quite high as well. With jQuery templates, you can alter your AJAX calls to return JSON, and then populate the content client-side providing faster response times and less server processing as well.

If you already have a lot of AJAX calls that return HTML, do not fear; it is not a lot of work to convert them to jQuery templates and improve the speed of your website. If you are just getting started, glad to see you're thinking ahead!