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Jetpack is, quite simply, one of the best WordPress plugins ever created. Not only is it made by one of the most reliable, trustworthy and competent companies in the industry (Automattic – the company behind wordpress.com), it’s incredibly powerful. In fact, although technically just one plugin, it’s actually more like an entire set of plugins in one…
Allow us to explain:
What is Jetpack for WordPress? And what can it do?
– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)
Video Transcript:
Hi! This is Topher with WinningWP. In this video we’re going to take a look at the questions “What is Jetpack for WordPress and What Can It Do?” Before we get started on those questions though I’d like to look at one more. Who makes it? Jetpack is a product of a company called Automattic and Automattic is the largest WordPress based company in the world. They make many many things, they employ hundreds of people, and it’s a very large business. Because of that you can expect quality and long-term availability. They put a great deal of resources into Jetpack they’re not going to let it die and they’re not going to let bugs and poor quality code work their way in. So the fact that Jetpack has made my Automattic is a pretty big deal; it lends a lot of credibility to it. Now let’s move on to our question of What Is Jetpack For? Jetpack was built to leverage the power of the servers at WordPress.com. Leveraging the power of the servers at WordPress.com reduces strain on your server and can save you time and money. So let’s look at the last question. This is the home page for Jetpack and it talks at the top right about security essentials but it does many many more things. It deals with traffic and SEO tools, security and backup services, it helps you make elegant, fast, and rich content, and it’s always there for you. It works behind the scenes to prevent malicious attacks on your site and to ditch spam. Let me show you the backend of WordPress with Jetpack installed. This is the Jetpack dashboard and I have enabled some stats so you can see here my blog stats. It tells me all-time views and all-time comments. It tells me that Jetpack has blocked over , attacks on my site. It’s also blocked nearly , spam comments. That’s really dramatic and saves me an enormous amount of time. If we click here in the settings you can see there’s a whole section of tools for helping you with writing. It has a spelling, style, and grammar checker built in. Here’s a tool to help speed up images and photos. I don’t know if you realize this but when you upload an image to WordPress, WordPress actually makes multiple copies of it in different sizes so that you can use them in different sizes. With Jetpack it uploads the image to the WordPress servers and it’s processed there. Additionally it can even serve it from there like a CDN or Content Delivery Network. That makes the whole process feel much much faster and again make your site actually run much faster. There are some great tools for sharing. You can add sharing buttons, like buttons, and you can even have it automatically share your posts to social networks. If you wish you can use Jetpack’s Discussion and Comments tool and it replaces the one built into WordPress. There are a lot of reasons to do this namely it helps filter spam even better and it keeps your comments off your site so that if something happens to your site you don’t lose your comments. You can also set it up so that people can subscribe to your blog so that when you do a post they get notified via email. Here’s the site stats section we looked at earlier. If you use the pay version of Jetpack, you can optionally put ads on your site and then make money from those ads. There’s a great related posts tool and again with the paid version there’s some great SEO tools and Google Analytics tools. The paid version has backups and security scanning built in but the free version has spam filtering built in as well as brute force attack protection. And if you wish you can activate -step authentication which can greatly enhance the security of your site. I haven’t even gone over all the tools in Jetpack and you can already see that there’s a number of things here lots and lots of different tools. Jetpack can process store and serve media like images and video. It can filter spam. It can integrate your site with stats and other SEO tools and it can work as a security firewall as well as many many more things. Jetpack is an extremely diverse tool and probably no-one is going to use every tool. But most people are going to use many of the tools because Jetpack covers so many areas. If you haven’t tried it yet I strongly recommend you give it a shot. if you’d like to learn more about WordPress check out WinningWP.com.
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