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For any website owner security, performance and marketing are important tools needed to maintain a site online; Jetpack plugin offers all these tools, and more in a single package alleviating the need for multiple plugins with different features. In this article we look at the key Jetpack plugin features and how they enhance your website.
First of all, we need to make some things clear before proceeding; if your site is hosted on WordPress.com, then Jetpack is already installed on your website. But for self-hosted websites (i.e. you have a different hosting provider), you have a choice to install it (and choose modules in the plugin necessary on your site) or you may completely leave it out.
What is Jetpack?
This is a popular WordPress plugin with over 3 million installations, which adds security, performance, marketing, management and design features to your website. Jetpack offers more than what a typical plugin will do – it provides powerful features in suite like manner giving you the ability to activate and deactivate individual modules as per your needs. Thus, instead of installing different plugins to add different functionalities to your site, Jetpack provides all these in a single package. It is up to you to choose what you need from a single dashboard.
Jetpack being one of the tools provided by Automattic, the team behind WordPress, ensures seamless integration with WordPress CMS software, and high-level compatibility and support.
One thing I really like about Jetpack is its ability to run some of the features off your site reducing the load on your own server, this can be of great help especially if you’re on a shared server and you don’t want to affect your site performance. This separation enhances your site’s performance and reliability as some of the tasks are processed on WordPress.com’s managed cloud services.
With Jetpack plugin, you can access a range of free and paid features.
Jetpack Free Features
Some of Jetpack features available on free plan include:
- Brute force attack protection – this plugin protects your site from traditional and distributed brute force attacks. For those not familiar with this kind of attack, brute force attack is when an attacker tries many username/password combinations repeatedly until the correct one is found, usually done at scale using automated tools. Attackers usually go after login pages, admin panels, email accounts, SSH/FTP services, etc. If successful, brute force attack can lead to malware injection, data breach or theft, website defacement, your server compromised, and so on. Jetpack protects your site against these kinds of attacks.
- Site alerts – monitor your site downtime by receiving immediate notifications if your site experiences downtime.
- Single Sign On – makes signing into your site faster and secure. You use your WordPress.com credentials to register for and sign into your self-hosted WordPress site.
- Site Accelerator – this feature enhances your site speed by allowing Jetpack to optimize your images and serve these images and static files like CSS and JavaScript from WordPress.com’s servers around the world.
- Plugin management – makes plugin management easy by allowing you to choose which plugins update automatically.
- Subscriptions – allows your visitors to receive notifications of your latest posts or comments.
- Social media sharing – adds social media sharing buttons on your website encouraging your visitors to share your content.
- Related posts – this feature suggests other relevant content to your visitors after they are through reading the current post.
- Sitemaps – generate a list of pages to be indexed by search engines like Google and Bing.
- Site verification – verify your site for use with Google, Bing, and Pinterest.
- Enhanced distribution – allows your content to be included in WordPress.com ‘firehose’ of public blog content.
- Contact form – provides the readers the ability to get in touch, without giving out your personal email address.
- Image tools – tiled galleries, slideshows and carousels to enhance how your images appear on your website for better engagement.
- GIF block – allows you to easily search for and embed an animated GIF image directly into your post or page on your WordPress site.
- Markdown – this feature allows you to compose posts and comments with links, lists and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks.
- Free themes – Get access to over 100 free WordPress.com themes to make your site design better.
- Design customization – customize page elements like sidebar, widgets and image galleries. No need of programming or web development skills.
The Jetpack plugin features available on the free plan are more than what I have listed above. You can do more with this plugin at no cost to you but if you want even enhanced security of your site, then going for the paid features will be the better option.
Jetpack’s Paid Features
Upgrading to Jetpack’s paid plans enables you to access the following features:
- Automated backups – saves every change you make and enables you to get back online quickly with one-click backup restorer.
- Spam filtering – automatically filter out spam comments, product reviews, or contact form submissions.
- Security scanning – malware and threat detection for your WordPress site.
- AI assistance – AI tool for WordPress, to make your content creation smooth and easier.
- Jetpack social – automatically share new posts on social media or schedule future shares with custom messages.
- Site stats – provides you with a means to view site visits by date, as well as most popular Pages and Posts.
- Search – adds a more enhanced search capability to your site than the normal WordPress’ built-in search.
- SEO tools – features to enhance your site content in search engines. You are able to customize the site titles, metadata, meta descriptions, add proper schema, and so forth. There is no need for another plugin.
- Video hosting – upload videos without comprising the site performance.
- Payments – add a payment button for example; accept donations to your site.
- WordAds – generate income on your site by displaying high quality ads.
For those already using Jetpack free subscription and are self-hosted, you can upgrade your subscription to access these advanced features within the plugin from your site dashboard.
For sites hosted on WordPress.com, the advanced features are available on their business plan.
How Jetpack Enhances Your Site’s Security, Performance, Design and Marketing
Security Tools
Securing your website from cybersecurity threats is vital in order to protect site contents and users. Cybersecurity threats are on the increase and continue to evolve, and without a robust security protection in place against these attacks, your site faces high risk of malware injection, data breaches, downtime, permanent data loss or a complete loss of the site.
Jetpack security tools that include brute force attack protection, web application firewall (WAF), automatic malware scanning, real-time threat detection and spam filtering ensures your site is secure from hackers and your visitors are safe.
Automatic backups with real-time options – that allow you to restore your site quickly in the event of an issue such as data loss, or your site crashing.
Jetpack downtime monitoring feature – you get alerts when your site goes offline.
Performance and Speed Tools
A website with good performance and speed boosts user experience – your visitors are likely to stick around much longer and explore more on your site. Page speed affects Core Web Vitals which affect SEO. A faster website is likely to rank higher in search rankings of course keeping other SEO factors in consideration. Site’s speed also affects conversions and revenue. A slow ecommerce site will likely get fewer sales.
Jetpack plugin enhances performance and speed of your through features like lazy loading of images, site caching and the Site Accelerator (Image CDN) served from WordPress.com’s network of servers around the world. All these helps speed up your page load times and improve SEO. Additionally optimized video hosting allows you to embed your videos on your site without compromising the site’s speed.
Jetpack Boost which is a standalone performance and speed optimization tool can help you speed things on your website even more by improving key things that directly impact Core Web Vitals (measurements used by Google to assess website’s user experience). A good measure indicates your site is loading faster. This may improve your site’s search engines rankings.
Design Tools
Your website design matters a lot. A good website design will keep your visitors on your site longer and a bad design pushes them away.
Jetpack provides ways to design a professional looking website by giving you access to a wide range of themes that are mobile friendly. You can customize your by adding widgets, galleries and other media assets. You don’t need to have web programming skills to do these tasks.
Marketing and Growth Tools
To grow your site and reach a bigger audience, Jetpack has tools that can help you achieve this:
- Jetpack SEO tools that lets you customize posts titles, Meta description and more.
- Jetpack XML sitemap feature ensures your content is discoverable by search engines.
- Social media tools – adds social media buttons to your site to encourage visitors to share the content.
- Jetpack publicize feature automatically shares content on social media networks such as Facebook, X, LinkedIn, etc.
- Related posts feature – shows relevant articles to the current article. This helps retain visitors on your site a bit longer reducing bounce rate.
You may be wondering are these features too many for your website? You don’t need to worry as Jetpack provides a way to choose only what you need by activating and deactivating modules. If you think you don’t need a given feature you simply switch it off by deactivating a module for the same.
Getting started with Jetpack Plugin
For those on WordPress.com, Jetpack is already installed. If you have no access to the advanced features that we discussed earlier, maybe it is time to upgrade your account to business plan to access them.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, you can start using Jetpack’s basic features immediately by installing the plugin now or upgrade to a paid plan to get access to more advanced features.
Conclusion
Jetpack provides the simplest way to add more functionality to your website without comprising performance and speed. From security, performance, design to marketing, Jetpack takes care of them all avoiding the need to install multiple plugins to achieve the same.
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