Andrea is a long-time WordPress user and runs the popular WordPress blog wpAndMore aimed at Italian WP users and developers. We got in touch with him recently to find out what he thinks about our Jetpack plugin. Andrea lives in Italy and can be found on Twitter @Andrea_AndMore.
Who is Andrea?
What do you do for a living?
For the last five years I’ve been developing WordPress themes and plugins. Recently I began to teach other people how to develop with this platform via articles and video tutorials on wpAndMore.info.
What’s the best thing about your job?
In a nutshell, that I can use WordPress to satisfy the requests of my clients 🙂
How did you first start using WordPress?
I’ve been using WordPress since version 2.7. At the time I was looking for a framework/platform able to help me speed up my develop process and give more power to my clients – WordPress was the best fit.
Thoughts on Jetpack
How’d you first find out about Jetpack?
I always keep myself always updated about WordPress news and I think I read about it on the WPTavern blog (even if I can’t be so sure!). Since then I’ve installed it on more than ten WordPress sites.
What’s the one Jetpack feature you couldn’t do without? Why?
My favourite is the Related Posts feature. I like it because it decreases my bounce rate (I can show more articles to my hungry readers when they finish reading one post) and because it does not stress my server in doing so.
What do you think of the the Jetpack setup process: Easy, hard?
The setup process is very simple, all you need is a WordPress.com account and you’re ready to go!
What do you value about Jetpack?
Based on the kind of site, Jetpack helps me in many ways. First and foremost it helps me keep my installations more organized and streamlined, since I have to install less plugins. Jetpack also helps me run the sites even faster with the CDN options (Photon) that it provides.
Working with Clients
Do you generally recommend Jetpack?
Well, looking at the latest improvements, in my opinion Jetpack is a must-have plugin. The various features improve our WordPress installations in many ways, starting from the social aspect (like the social buttons or the amazing Publicize feature) to the more text based ones (like LaTeX and the After the Deadline integration).
Does Jetpack help you with client work?
Sure! Unsurprisingly, my clients are usually happy to install something for free that will give them loads of features. Photon, Carousel and Tiled Galleries are always welcomed by them and the social feature integrations I mentioned previously are very useful in helping them with promoting their sites and content.
Jetpack Frustrations
What frustrates you about Jetpack? Why?
If I have to be honest, the only thing it frustrates me is right after install. By default Jetpack activates several modules that I do not need and I have to disable them one by one each time I install it. But I mean, it’s not a big deal 😉
What would you like to improve?
Apart from the above (ie: letting me activate only the modules I need) I’d love it if you could implement a bit of AJAX technology, so I do not have to refresh the page each time I activate or deactivate a module.
Get involved!
Try it out
If you’ve not used Jetpack before, read our step-by-step installation guide here to try it out for yourself.
Contribute
If you are a Jetpack user already please tell us what you think in the comments and, if you’d like to get involved yourself by writing a guest post about Jetpack or being interviewed yourself, get in touch!
How to increase your blog’s traffic with Jetpack
Jetpack comes with a set of features specifically designed to help you increase your site’s traffic and grow your audience. That is after all the reason we build websites and blogs and write content – for people to see them, read them and enjoy them 🙂
Jetpack helps you tackle this along two fronts: attracting new visitors to our sites and encouraging the existing ones to keep coming back.
Getting more traffic
Its worth mentioning what countless people have said before: writing well-written, useful and targeted content is eighty percent of the job. Neither Jetpack nor any other plugin, is a silver bullet that can ever be a substitute for that. However, if you’ve got that nailed, these features will help you with the other twenty percent:
The Sharing feature, when enabled, places share buttons at the bottom of your blog posts. This allows (and encourages!) your readers to share your content with their own networks giving you broader reach. Currently we support Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Print, and Email. Additionally you can define your own custom services.
Verifying your website with external services like Google, Bing and Pinterest. This means you will be rated as “safe” by these services (e.g. by getting a “Verified” badge) and gives you to access advanced features (e.g. Webmaster tools).
At WordPress.com we have a service called “Firehose” which is a stream of the public data (public posts, comments, etc.) that flow through WordPress.com as well as Jetpack blogs that enable Enhanced Distribution. The firehose in turn is used by companies and people to display your content at which point they are required to link back to your blog. This means that you get both traffic back to your site as well as building up quality back-links.
Keep them coming back
The other side of the coin is staying in touch with the visitors who’ve seen and read your content so that they don’t forget about you and come back to see what else you have to say. You may not necessarily want to use all of these of course as it depends a lot on the kind of site or blog you’re running. But because Jetpack makes it easy to turn these on and off some of our users opt to try things one at a time to test out their effect.
RSS is used by millions of people to keep track of blogs they like. When you enable Extra Sidebar Widgets in Jetpack you can show widget that allows you to add links to your blog’s RSS feeds in your sidebar. This makes it easy for your readers to stay updated when you post new content or receive new comments.
Easily allow any visitor to subscribe to all of your posts via email through a widget in your blog’s sidebar. Every time you publish a new post, WordPress.com will send a notification to all your subscribers. Depending on their preferences this notification will either show up on their WordPress bar (top right) or they will receive an email directly in their inbox.
Example of a comment Push Notification from the WordPress for iOS app
Finally, this last one is for you, the site owner. With Notifications enabled you will be instantly notified when somebody comments on any of your posts or previous comments. This means that you can instantly comment back making your interaction with your readers feel more personal and in real-time.
And of course, Jetpack also gives you great stats so that you can see the effect of your work! If you’ve not used Jetpack before, read our step-by-step installation guide here to try it out for yourself.
If you are a Jetpack user already please tell us what you think in the comments and, if you’d like to get involved by writing a guest post about Jetpack get in touch!