Jetpack is well known for its image CDN, backup features, and stats, but did you know it also offers more than 30 other ways to customize your website? With a modular approach — no features are automatically enabled, and you choose which items to turn on individually — it adds features without loading unnecessary code, so your website runs efficiently.
Whether you’re a photographer, lawyer, private chef, or journalist, there are Jetpack tools to customize and enhance your WordPress site. Jetpack users can view all features in the Jetpack menu of their WordPress sites. If you’re new to Jetpack, find out more about the website design customization options.
Here are some of the most popular ways to customize a site with Jetpack:
1. Carousels
Jetpack’s built-in carousel feature turns a standard WordPress embedded gallery into an immersive, full-screen photo browsing experience. It can also display comments and exchangeable image file format (EXIF) metadata to provide information like camera type, shutter speed, and focal length.
Learn more about image carousels for WordPress.
2. Tiled Galleries
Tiled Galleries are another way to create eye-catching photo layouts, with four interesting graphic options — tiled mosaics, tiled columns, square tiles, and circles. As with Carousels, you have the option to display comments and EXIF data. Showcasing images in a unique, user-friendly format grabs visitors’ attention and keeps them on your site longer.
Learn more about tiled image galleries for WordPress.
3. Video Hosting
Folks with Jetpack Premium or Pro plans can add video content to their website right from the WordPress dashboard — upload videos to your media library or the WordPress.com cloud and the rest is taken care of. This saves you from worrying about bandwidth costs and mobile compatibility. And unlike third-party services such as YouTube, Jetpack’s video hosting is ad-free, unbranded, and doesn’t take visitors away from your site.
Learn more about Jetpack’s video hosting.
4. Custom CSS
Cascading style sheets (CSS) is the primary way to edit the style of a web page, like changing the background color of a section or the font style and size. With some CSS knowledge, you can make advanced customizations to your theme without modifying the original code.
There are plenty of plugins that allow you to insert custom CSS on your site, but the Jetpack module has some unique features that make it very powerful:
- Sass (SCSS syntax only) and LESS preprocessors — Take advantage of CSS extensions like variables and mixins.
- Version history — See a full history of your changes.
- Live preview — View edits before pushing them live.
- Start fresh — Disable your theme’s CSS and create a brand new style.
- WordPress Customizer integration — Edit CSS in a format you’re familiar with.
Learn more about customizing CSS with Jetpack enhancements.
5. Related Posts
Sharing related content with visitors keeps them on your site longer and helps them discover posts they’d otherwise miss. You usually have two options:
- Manually create links to related content. This guarantees that you provide users with content that’s highly relevant, but it’s time consuming and you’ll need to make regular updates every time you publish.
- Use a related content plugin. Traditional options are often database intensive and strain your web server, and some hosts ban them.
Jetpack users are all set: the related post feature analyzes your content and tags to create a contextual list of related posts, which is particularly useful for blogs and other content-rich websites. And because it does everything via the WordPress.com cloud, it doesn’t slow down your site.
Related Posts also automatically sets featured images, if needed. If you haven’t chosen a featured image, it will search galleries and images inside the post to display one alongside the related post information. Once you activate Related Posts, there’s very little required to display relevant, beautiful related content.
Learn more about Jetpack related posts.
6. Infinite Scroll
Infinite Scroll is a great way to increase website engagement; it automatically loads more content on archive pages as a site visitor scrolls. This means fewer barriers between users and your content, which leads to lower bounce rates, especially on mobile devices.
There are other infinite scroll plugins available, but Jetpack includes some additional benefits:
- It supports a footer that slides in once a visitor reaches the bottom of the page.
- You can choose between automatically loading more content or displaying a button to load more.
- It works out of the box with most themes.
- It can be activated in one click once Jetpack is installed, but does require theme support.
Learn more about Jetpack’s infinite scroll.
7. Sharing Buttons
Social media plays a critical role in distributing content. Social sharing buttons make it easy for site visitors to share interesting content with their own networks. Jetpack sharing buttons let readers print your content, email it to someone else, or share it via a custom button or one of the following platforms:
- Tumblr
- Skype
- Telegram
And as a site owner, you have lots of control over their appearance and layout:
- Pick and choose which buttons to show based on your website audience. For a business, LinkedIn might be an obvious choice, whereas Tumblr may not be as appropriate.
- Choose what content displays sharing buttons; for example, on posts but not pages.
- Add custom icons to match your theme.
- Control exactly where icons should be displayed within the theme (requires code knowledge).
Learn more about Jetpack’s social sharing buttons.
8. Extra Sidebar Widgets
Though WordPress includes a number of sidebar widgets, Jetpack extends this functionality by providing more options. From images to social media and contact information, Jetpack has you covered. Here are a few of the included widgets:
- Social Icons: Quickly display social icons integrated with all major social networks, like Twitter and Facebook.
- Cookies and Consent Banner: Help your site conform with GDPR (though this alone will not make your site compliant).
- Upcoming Events: Use an iCalendar feed to display upcoming events.
- Milestones: Create a countdown to or from an event. Perfect for launching sales or new features!
- Authors: Showcase your authors, alongside their avatar and a link to their posts.
- Google Translate: Visitors can choose from a dropdown of languages and content will be automatically translated.
- Contact Info: Show your location, opening hours, and contact details alongside an optional Google map.
- Top Posts and Pages: Automatically display a list of your most liked or highest trafficked posts from the past two days. Choose from three display settings — text view, image list, and image grid.
- Images: Display an image in any widget area on your website.
Learn more about Jetpack’s extra sidebar widgets.
9. Widget Visibility
Widget Visibility allows you to create widget display conditions based on category, author, user, role, tag, date, page, and taxonomy. For example, you could choose to show a list of recent posts only on blog posts, not on category pages. You can also choose multiple conditions, so you could add an image widget only to product pages that are in a specific category. Once you use Widget Visibility, you’ll never stop — it’s a powerful solution with endless flexibility.
Learn more about creating widget display conditions.
10. Forms
There are a lot of form options available, but many of them are more complex than most of us need. Jetpack provides a great solution for straightforward forms — you can add, edit, and move fields around quickly and easily. The following field types are available:
- Name
- Text
- Website
- Date picker
- Telephone
- Message
- Checkbox
- Checkbox group
- Radio
- Select (dropdown)
With Jetpack, you can create well-structured forms, easily choose whether or not a field is required, and if you use Akismet, your form submissions are automatically filtered for spam.
Learn more about easy WordPress contact forms.
Customize your WordPress site
Jetpack is an ideal solution to customize your WordPress site. Not only are most features free, but it’s updated monthly by a team of the world’s most advanced software engineers and is trusted by millions of sites worldwide. Its modular structure allows you to choose the features you need and leave the rest behind — keeping your site running fast and secure.
Get started with Jetpack today!
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