How to Choose the Best CDN for Your WordPress Site

If you have a website with global visitors, high traffic spikes, or a lot of images or videos, your page load time may be less than ideal. Even after optimizing images, implementing server-side caching, and minimizing content, you may still want to make improvements to your site’s performance. One of the best ways to achieve this is by setting up a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN is a series of networked, geographically-distributed servers that store and deliver a site’s content using the server that is closest to each individual visitor. Normally, your host delivers content from a single server in a set place regardless of each visitor’s location. This can weigh down that server and reduce performance. 

A CDN distributes that weight more efficiently, improving page speed and reducing load on your server. 

Once you’ve determined that your site needs a CDN, you’ll want to find the provider that best fits your needs. There are a variety of things to consider including ease of use, performance and reliability, useful features, and cost. 

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Five Reasons Your Blog Needs a WordPress Search Plugin

Maintaining a positive user experience is a huge part of what makes a WordPress blog successful, especially if you’ve created a lot of content. However, it can be tough to keep in mind, especially if your site has hundreds or thousands of articles. How do you find that happy balance between a seamless user experience and a flow of fresh, new content?

The secret? Implementing site search for your WordPress blog

A WordPress search plugin creates a more positive experience for your visitors. Check out these five reasons why you need to add a search plugin to your site:

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Severe Vulnerability Patched In WooCommerce Currency Switcher

During an internal audit of the woocommerce-currency-switcher plugin, we uncovered a very severe local file inclusion vulnerability. 

This security flaw could enable attackers to leak sensitive information like database credentials, cryptographic keys, and may allow arbitrary code execution in some instances.

We reported the vulnerabilities to the WOOCS team via email last week, and they released version 1.3.7 to fix this issue. If you are using an older version of this plugin, we encourage you to update immediately.

Continue reading → Severe Vulnerability Patched In WooCommerce Currency Switcher

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Finding the Best WordPress Speed Plugin: 6 Plugins and 6,000 Real Websites Tested

A study by Google states that if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, the probability of a bounce increases by 32%. Given this, website performance is crucial for eCommerce stores or any other type of website.

A natural cost of adding features to your site through plugins could have an impact on site speed. Even so, some plugins are designed to speed up your site. In turn, this can boost conversions, reduce bounce rate, and improve your organic search rank.

WordPress speed plugins can work in multiple ways; some optimize your content by compressing images or minifying JavaScript, while others move your content to servers that are “closer” to the user through a Content Delivery Network (CDN). There are also some plugins that let the browser prioritise the most important parts of a page.

In the past, a lot of emphasis was put on faster hosting for performance. For the modern web, bottlenecks such as the end-user’s device and network are crucial. This is why performance plugins can potentially have a much bigger impact than switching hosting providers. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at some top-notch solutions to determine the best speed plugin for WordPress.

We’ll be including Jetpack Boost in our testing. This is our product and we love it, but we encourage you to dig into the numbers and judge for yourself. In short, the numbers put Boost ahead in every category – we’ll have more about this next.

Continue reading → Finding the Best WordPress Speed Plugin: 6 Plugins and 6,000 Real Websites Tested

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The Ultimate WordPress Site Migration Checklist

There are a variety of reasons you might want to migrate your WordPress site. You could be unhappy with your current hosting provider. Or you may be launching a new version of your website. Either way, Jetpack Backup makes it easy thanks to the website cloning feature.

We want the entire process to be as simple as possible, so this WordPress site migration checklist will walk you through all the considerations for a seamless move.

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Behind the Scenes of Jetpack Search: An Exclusive Interview

Jetpack Search has proven to be quite popular among WordPress site owners — and for good reason. This relatively new tool has the magical ability to understand the true intent of a visitor and serve up exactly what they’re looking for, all in a split second. Sometimes the perfect result is displayed even before the searcher has finished typing.

The outcome? People stay on sites longer. They read more, view more pages, and buy more products. 

If you haven’t read Kylie M. Interiors’ story, you should make the time. This incredible business from a small town in Canada receives more than 50,000 page views each day. They needed a reliable search plugin and their dreams came true with Jetpack Search. From the article:  

Kylie’s husband of 15 years, Tim, handles business operations and runs their WordPress site.  “At the end of it all, Jetpack Search was the best solution I found,” Tim said. “We’re euphoric over how well it works.” 

“Tim didn’t tell me that he changed the search function,” Kylie added. “One day I made a search and was like, ‘I got what I wanted!’”

Kylie described the new search functionality as a ”game changer” for her business. “Now you can find any of the 300 articles you’re looking for in a hot second,” she said. “I’m advertising it in my client consultations and telling people to use it because it works.”

Given the success of the plugin, we wanted to shine a light on the heroes behind the scenes. How exactly does it work? What’s the story behind it? 

We interviewed Jason Moon, who wrote most of the code for Jetpack Search, as well as other team members Chris Rosser and Robert Felty. We also got feedback from Greg Brown, who helped architect Jetpack Search and bring the idea to fruition.

Continue reading → Behind the Scenes of Jetpack Search: An Exclusive Interview

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Multiple vulnerabilities in Workreap theme by Amentotech

Recently the Jetpack team found some infected files in one of our hosted customers’ sites, and quickly traced the source of infection back to the Workreap theme by Amentotech. We started an investigation and uncovered a number of vulnerable AJAX endpoints in the theme; the most severe of these was an unauthenticated unvalidated upload vulnerability potentially leading to remote code execution and a full site takeover.

We reported the vulnerabilities to the Amentotech team via the Envato Helpful Hacker program, and the issues were addressed promptly by them. Version 2.2.2 of the theme was released on June 29, 2021 that fixes the found vulnerabilities.

TL;DR

Due to the seriousness of the vulnerabilities, we highly recommend all users of the Workreap theme to upgrade to version 2.2.2 or later as soon as possible. 

Download the upgrade from the theme website and install it manually, or upgrade automatically via the Envato market plugin.

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Jetpack 9.9: Make your best photos shine

At Jetpack, we are continuously working to develop a better product for you and your website. This month, we launched a revamped Carousel and made improvements to compatibility with WordPress 5.8.

Continue reading → Jetpack 9.9: Make your best photos shine

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Fake Plugin Alert: WordPress Plugin and User Backup Tool

Earlier in 2021, I shared how an attacker could leverage leaked or weak credentials to install fake plugins on a compromised site. Although the plugin featured in that blog post has shown some small changes since it was posted, attackers can upload a variety of malicious software using the same method; so in this article, I’ll share with you another recent example (thanks to Luke Leal for sharing it with me).

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