JetPack for WordPress is a plugin created by Automattic that tries to bring a lot of features available on WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress sites. The plugin contains multiple modules, in fact 34 at the time of this article and has lots of functionality built into it. Here are 7 feature of the plugin you should start using today to improve your site.
Site Management
The site management module allows you to create posts for all your sites from a central spot on WordPress.com. In addition to that, and the feature I’m most excited about, is the Site Management module allows you to control plugins and autoupdate plugins on a per-site basis or in bulk. So no more having to log into all your sites when you favorite plugins are updated. Just turn on autoupdates and they get updated without you having to lift a finger. How cool is that?
Monitor
When your site is down you lose money. The Monitor module is crucial for anyone wanting to know when their site goes offline. The module will ping your site every five minutes and if it sees it as being down it will notify you so you can take action. If you need to check your site more than every five minutes check out Pingdom as a paid solution.
Photon
Are you running a CDN on your site? If you are not then you should be. CDN’s offload your site’s static content like images, css and javascripts file to a server from various geographic locations closest to the visitor. This in turn dramatically speeds up your site because your site’s server is now doing less work. Photon is a one click CDN for images on your posts and pages for WordPress. If you do not have a CDN currently for your site this should be a no-brainer.
Related Post
There are many related post plugins for WordPress. The problem is that these plugin tend to be resource intensive. There are many calculations that have to be ran to determine if a post is related or not and on a shared host this can bog down the database. JetPack’s Related Post modules offloads this process to WordPress.com servers so there is no resource issue on your server. Also it does a great job at accurately finding related post. So if you want to keep readers on your site longer use this module for an easy win.
Publicize
Want to broadcast your posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks automatically after you publish them? Then activate this module from JetPack. After activating the module you’ll want to connect the various social networks you’ll be broadcasting to. Then it’s just a matter cresting post and publishing. When you publish the post will automatically be shared to the social networks you have selected. Wow, that was easy!
Stats
Everybody wants to know how many people are coming to their site, where they came from and what they are looking at. The stats module does just that. While Google Analytics is free and contains all this information, it can become overwelling because there is so much other information in Google Analytics as well. If you or your client just need basic stats then the JetPack stats module is perfect for that. Plus you get a nice summary of all your activity at the end of the year.
VaultPress
VaultPress is a backup solution for your site. If you are not backing up your site then get ready for a world of pain. Because it’s not if you will lose your site, it’s when. Imagine a hacker getting into your site and deleting all it’s contents, or an employee that made a mistake, or a server hardwall failure, or a corrupt plugin and so on. All these thing can cause your site to disappear in a blink of en eye and if you are not prepared your site will be gone. Start backing up your site today if you are not already. There are many plugins that do this but I think VaultPress is one of the most elegant. It a simple install and forget plugin. It’s also a paid plugin ($5 per month) but it’s well worth it. I like the fact I don’t have to think about it, it just works and restore are just as easy too. One click to you get your site back.
These are just a few of my favorite modules in JetPack. There are many more like the auto embeds and markdown modules. I suggest you install the plugin today and start exploring all the features the plugin has to offer.