Jetpack Plugin is one of the must-have plugins for your WordPress website. This free plugin can supercharge your WordPress blog with all its features. The best thing about this plugin is that all the features are modular — you can switch features on or off as you need. The features I love most are Photon and Infinite Scroll.
Complete Jetpack Features
- Publicize. Publicize makes it easy to share your site’s posts on several social media networks automatically when you publish a new post. Supported social media include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Path. Once you publish a new post, it will automatically be published on social media as well.
- Toolbar Notification — Toolbar Notifications allow you to view and moderate comments right from the toolbar, anywhere on your site or across WordPress.com. This feature lets you easily access your post comments and followers. Before using this plugin you may need to create a WordPress.com account and connect it with your blog.
- Stats — WordPress.com Stats makes the most popular metrics easy to understand through a clear and attractive interface. You can forget the other analytics and stats plugins or systems. You only need this plus Google Analytics to set up goals. I just use this and Google Analytics.
- Jetpack Comments — This feature replaces your blog comment box and integrates the comment system with your WordPress.com account. So if you have more than one WordPress website, you can moderate and reply to all comments from one place. The UI of the comment form is much better than the default one. Jetpack Comments also lets your visitors use their WordPress.com, Twitter, or Facebook accounts when commenting on your site.
- Subscriptions — Allow your visitors to subscribe to your blog. When you publish a new post, your subscribers will get a notification via email. With this feature you can collect loyal readers and grow your audience.
- Spelling and Grammar — This feature is one of my favorites. It can proofread your content before you publish it and give you suggestions to fix issues. Since my first language is not English, this feature really helps me reduce typos and grammar mistakes.
- VaultPress — This feature is really useful as well, but it is a paid service. With this feature you can do real-time backups of your WordPress website to VaultPress. It gives you peace of mind and lets you focus on growing your audience. The system takes care of backup and restoring your data by itself.
- Carousel Gallery — This feature adds more options to the gallery of images. If you create a gallery from the media library, you can turn that gallery into a nice carousel slider. Useful for publishing activity documentation on your blog.
- Omnisearch — This is an internal tool for you to search everything in your WordPress blog with one single search box. Just imagine it like a Google inside your backend, able to search through all the posts, pages, tags, menus, and widgets.
- Photon — This is one of the coolest features of Jetpack. Photon is an image acceleration and editing service for sites hosted on WordPress.com or on Jetpack-connected WordPress sites. You don’t need to pay or configure anything. Simply click the “Activate” button for Photon on the Jetpack page in your blog dashboard, and your images will be served dynamically from the global WordPress.com cloud.
- Infinite Scroll — Infinite scroll allows your visitors to read your list of posts without clicking any navigation/pagination button. The next page will automatically load when they reach the bottom of the page. I already have this activated on this blog — go to the homepage and scroll down to see what I mean. This feature needs a little bit of programming to use because every theme has a different structure and system. This feature needs to be adjusted so it works smoothly. Please find the documentation here.
- Mobile Theme — By activating this feature, your WordPress website will have a mobile theme. The theme will display differently from the desktop version because it is optimized for mobile resolution and features.
- Mobile Push Notifications — If you own an Android or iPhone mobile phone, Mobile Push Notifications lets you receive push notifications of new comments, making it easier than ever to keep up with your readers and moderate comments on the go. As soon as you get a new comment on a post you’ve published, a push notification is sent to your phone. You will see the name of the commenter, which post they commented on, and a short excerpt of the comment. Swipe the notification to view the comment.
- Gravatar Hovercards — Hovercards enhance plain Gravatar images with information about a person: name, bio, pictures, contact info, and other services they use on the web like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Hovercards are a great way to show your internet presence and help people find your own blog.
- Contact Form — This feature is most needed by WordPress users. Usually to show a contact form, you need a third-party plugin such as Contact Form 7, Formidable, or Gravity Forms. But with this feature you can use a contact form integrated with your WordPress.com account, so you can manage everything in one place.
There are still many features included with this Jetpack plugin, including many new shortcodes that may be useful for you. All you need is a WordPress.com account — then install this Jetpack plugin and boost your WordPress website with interesting features and better performance.
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