How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress — 2023 Setup Guide

Using Google Analytics with WordPress provides some incredible insights. You can learn how people engage with your website, where traffic comes from, how visitors interact with content, and what elements and pages are popular with your audience. You can then use this to improve your site design, determine what types of content or products to create, and better target your advertising.  

The good news is that the information Google Analytics provides about your WordPress website is free. But adding it to WordPress can require some time and patience. 

As you’ll learn throughout this guide, manually adding Google Analytics to WordPress is certainly possible, but is often complicated for beginners. It also provides complex analytics and stats that might be way more than you need, especially if you own a small website and just want to discover more information about visitors and traffic sources. 

The focus of this guide is on how to add Google Analytics to WordPress, but we’ll also tell you a bit more about a tool called Jetpack Stats. This alternative generates simple data, charts, and graphs, can be easier to install, and also integrates with Google Analytics if you need. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is responsible for Jetpack Stats, so it’s a great choice for many WordPress site owners.   

Continue reading → How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress — 2023 Setup Guide

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Jetpack CRM and WooCommerce logos together

Jetpack CRM 5.0: More Power for Merchants, Free

Since its inception six years ago, Jetpack CRM has been a trusted tool for WordPress-based businesses, helping them better serve their audience and streamline their operations. And we’re always focused on making our products even more effective, shifting to meet the needs of the companies that we work with on a daily basis.

So to celebrate our sixth birthday, we’re rolling out Jetpack CRM 5.0, a version that’s even bigger and better!

Online merchants, this one’s all about you. WooCommerce connectivity is now included in Jetpack CRM for free rather than being a separate, premium extension. And integrating your online store with Jetpack CRM is easier than ever.

This means that you can harness the power of our WordPress-driven Customer Relationship Manager tool (CRM) to increase conversions, provide better customer support, and make your team more efficient at no cost to your business.  

Continue reading → Jetpack CRM 5.0: More Power for Merchants, Free

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WordPress CRM: The 7 Best Plugins Compared (Free & Paid)

Running a business involves managing a lot of moving parts, whether you sell services or products. And as you grow, tasks like nurturing leads, coordinating team members, sending quotes, and chasing down invoice payments can become time-consuming and prone to mistakes. 

And that’s exactly where a top-rated CRM can save the day.

CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management,” which is a very fitting name. It helps you organize all of your customer and client information, streamline processes like follow-ups and invoicing, and keep all of your team members in the loop. Ultimately, a CRM means happier clients, an informed team, and more conversions.

There are some great CRMs available that integrate with WordPress, and it’s important that you consider which one is the right fit for your specific business. So let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress CRM plugins and compare them based on their features, pros, cons, ease of use, and pricing.

Continue reading → WordPress CRM: The 7 Best Plugins Compared (Free & Paid)

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Jetpack Turns 10

Jetpack was born in March 2011. For the last 10 years, we’ve been happy to help you protect, speed up, and grow your business or hobby. Thanks for letting us travel with you on your journey towards success. 

Check out our birthday celebration site for an interactive exploration of how Jetpack has helped WordPress sites over the years. 

Here’s to the next 10 years!

Continue reading → Jetpack Turns 10

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How Enhanced Distribution Drives Traffic to Your Site

Many website owners and content creators seek to build their brands by reaching out to the widest possible audiences. The question is, how do you make potential customers aware of what you have to offer?

If your goal is similar to the one described above, then pay attention to Enhanced Distribution from Jetpack.

Let’s discuss what Enhanced Distribution does, and why you should apply it to your website.

The WordPress.com Firehose

Enhanced Distribution enables your website’s public posts to be included within the WordPress.com Firehose. This is made available to search engines and other entities that use real-time content streams in a variety of ways. You can be included in the Firehose even if you’re a self-hosted WordPress site owner.

With Jetpack, your site’s content is eligible for inclusion in the Firehose. Just enable Enhanced Distribution. If you ever want to disable this (or any other Jetpack) feature, you can do so from the Jetpack Debugging Center.

Increase traffic and backlinks to your site

The primary benefit of enabling Enhanced Distribution involves quickly attracting site traffic.

Take search engines, for example. Enhanced Distribution enables your content to be indexed almost immediately upon being published. This increases your chances of being discovered by target audience members.

In addition, other site owners can use the Firehose to display content on their own websites. Whenever they do so, they’re required to link back to the original source. This drives visitors to your site by increasing the backlinks leading to it. According to an analysis from Backlinko, backlinks are correlated with higher Google search rankings as well.

Support your site with Enhanced Distribution

Enhanced Distribution can help you generate more site traffic and build your backlink strategy. It doesn’t require any added effort besides consistently publishing content to your site. From there, it will automatically be shared to the WordPress.com Firehose.

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Improve Your Website Conversion Rates Using Jetpack

Website conversion rates are among the hardest metrics to optimize after you build a website. This is especially true if you’re trying to sell a product or service.

The average website conversion rate is only around 1.6 percent, according to Wolfgang Digital’s 2017 eCommerce Benchmark KPI Study. That’s not very high. You should do everything you can to increase the chances that a site visitor takes a specific action, whether it’s signing up for your newsletter or completing a purchase.

Many website conversion tips address tactical points like creating compelling call-to-action buttons; however, technical problems can keep readers from spending time on your site — or even from making a purchase.

Today, we’ll look at some of the more common technical issues that can affect website conversions and discuss how to overcome them.

Decrease your page load times

People are busy. They don’t have time to sit back and wait for your website pages to load. This means that your site needs to be as fast as possible, or you’ll risk losing readers and customers.

A big factor in minimizing page loading times is the ability to serve large files (images or videos) from an offsite service known as a Content Delivery Network (CDN). By storing these files on a CDN, you reduce the load on your web server. This will make your site load faster. Often, CDNs also have server locations around the world, so if your site is hosted in one country but your visitor is from another, the nearest CDN server can send the files to your visitor’s browser faster than your web host can.

Jetpack saves you the trouble of setting up and implementing a CDN by offering the Site Accelerator feature with every plan, as well as an unlimited video CDN for Premium and Professional plan users. You just need to enable the tool within your settings.

As an added bonus, Jetpack’s lazy-loading images is a free feature that will only load the images visible on a visitor’s screen. If there are other images further down a page, they will only load once a reader reaches that portion of the page. Since the browser doesn’t need to download all the images at once, your initial page load time will be faster.

Protect your visitors’ data

The rise of eCommerce has unfortunately yielded opportunities for hackers and other malicious players to steal important user data, like payment and contact information.

For these reasons, it’s important that your visitors trust the safety of your site. They should be able to interact with payment gateways without worrying about their information being stolen. Using globally trusted service providers — for example, PayPal to securely handle online payments — will give your site credibility. A site visitor already understands that PayPal is a trustworthy service, so they are more likely to take the leap and make a payment on your site than if you were relying on an unknown provider.

Jetpack’s security services contain brute-force attack protection, automated malware scanning, and expert priority support. Although largely invisible to your visitors, these tools will protect them as well as your site’s reputation.

WooCommerce is one solution that comes with a secure payment system, but you can explore other safe ways to accept payments online. For example, Premium and Professional plans support PayPal payments through Simple Payment buttons you can add to any post or page.

Jetpack PayPal Button

Leverage relevant content

Whenever a visitor comes to your site, a great way to keep them around (and eventually turn them into a buyer or subscriber) is to persuade them to read more content that’s relevant to their interests. Generally, this means manually adding links to content that’s related to a given post or page. Already a time-consuming task, this can also have a negative effect on your page load times.

Related Content for WordPress

This is where the Related Posts feature comes in handy. When you enable it, your content will automatically be indexed; relevant matches will pop up following the content of each of your posts or pages. Because the indexing is done via Jetpack’s servers, it has no effect on your site speed. The service will continue to index any new content you add to better serve your readers.

Enhance your search features

Imagine the following scenario: A visitor stumbles upon your content via a search engine results page. After they read your content, they decide to read more related posts about your products and services, which they also find interesting. They use your website’s search functionality to look for a specific topic, but the keyword they search for appears multiple times within your posts and pages. Your site becomes slow or doesn’t return relevant results, so the reader leaves in search of a better, faster site. Ultimately, you lose the opportunity to convert that potential customer.

To prevent this scenario, Jetpack uses Elasticsearch. Used by online publications like TIME, CNN, and People, Elasticsearch implements the power of a Google-like search engine into your website, but outsources the processing of that search to an external service. Elasticsearch provides relevant search results by using modern algorithms (similar to Google’s) to rank content. It will also prioritize recent content above older content in search results. Finally, if a user searches for an entire phrase instead of one word, Elasticsearch will return content that matches the full phrase, as opposed to content that only matches words within that phrase.

Available to Jetpack Professional plan users, Jetpack Search will deliver faster, more useful results to your visitors while cutting down on server resource requirements. It creates better experiences for your site visitors and increases the likelihood that you’ll convert them into customers.

Great website experiences increase conversions

To convince a site visitor to buy your product or service, you need to provide a user experience that gives them absolutely no reason to hesitate. This means eliminating long load times, questionable payment gateways, and breaks in website functionality. Not only will implementing the services outlined above provide that kind of experience, they will also decerase any doubts first-time buyers might have, helping you strengthen your conversion rates from both ends of the equation.

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Create the Perfect Barbershop Website with WordPress and the Jetpack Plugin

Whether you’re an established barber, are fresh out of school, or are just pulling together a business plan, creating an effective and beautiful barbershop website can be critical to your professional success. Let’s talk about standing out from the crowd, landing new clients, and extending your social reach by creating a website for your salon services with WordPress and the Jetpack plugin.

Desk with various barber utilities such as heairbrush, combs, etc.

Finding the perfect theme

Selecting an effective theme is the first step in the site design process, as it defines your brand’s overall tone.

You can browse more than 100 themes in the Jetpack theme showcase. If you don’t find exactly what you’re looking for, you can upgrade your plan for a wider theme selection that also come with enhanced features.

Whether you’re looking for a retro, 19th-century design (complete with a rotating barbershop pole) or a modern aesthetic, there’s a theme out there that’s perfect for your barbershop website. Once you find one that has the features you need, customize it to align with your color scheme and the layout you desire. After the customization process is completed, ensure that your site looks great across devices — while Jetpack themes are responsive, it never hurts to double-check that your images are properly sized for a smooth viewing experience. Help visitors get a feel for your business, which will make them more likely to book appointments.

Showcasing your skills through fast-loading images

Haircuts are all about the look, so your website should feature photos of your clients’ fresh cuts, your staff members, and your shop. With Jetpack, you can serve up your photos quickly and display them in a visually compelling way.

Jetpack’s Site Accelerator serves your photos through its global network, keeping load times low and reducing the burden on your hosting server. Your images will be automatically resized so that they fit perfectly with your theme, giving you an extra speed and efficiency boost.

This isn’t where the image optimizations end, however. Users expect websites to load extremely fast. Fortunately, with Lazy Images your site is ready to meet their speedy demands. Does it sound strange that “laziness” gets you speed? Here’s how it works: if one of your site pages contains images scattered throughout, they are typically all loaded at the same time. Your readers, however, likely want to start scrolling down a page as quickly as possible, and they don’t immediately need to view images that appear towards the bottom of that page. With Lazy Images, your site only loads the images when they need to be seen: once they scroll into view on a page.

Reaching customers with contact forms

Answering questions and responding to feedback are great ways to engage with customers. Those who ask questions and have them answered might be more likely to become customers, and anyone who leaves feedback — even if it’s critical — shows they are emotionally invested in your business.

To enable your customers to get in touch, have their questions answered, and their voices heard, consider adding a contact form to your pages or posts — it only takes seconds with the new Jetpack Form block. Each submitted form is delivered to the email address of your choice, and you can also view all replies within the Feedback section of your site.

After users submit a contact form, your site can redirect them to a “Thank You” page, where you can further incentivize interested individuals or appease critical feedback with special discounts. By adding a line of code to your theme’s functions.php file, you can add a customized message once your form has been successfully submitted.

Extending your reach with social media

Now that you have a theme for your site, images that load quickly, and contact forms to facilitate interaction, you can spread the word through social media integration. Help site visitors find your social media pages with ease in case they want to connect and share your posts to their own social channels. The Social Media Icons widget places links to your social media accounts on your sidebar. You can give viewers access to your YouTube or Vimeo clips, provide styling tips on Facebook or Twitter, or direct them to many other platforms where you maintain a presence, like Instagram.

You can also promote your Facebook page with the Facebook Page Plugin widget. This tool displays your profile photo on your website, as well as the number of “likes” your page has received. You can even configure this widget to display your latest Facebook posts on your website.

The possibilities are endless

The goal of any website is to make a business look appealing in order to attract customers and encourage audience engagement. For a business like a barbershop, which relies on sharp visuals and social buzz, Jetpack’s tools bring you one step closer to accomplishing your objectives.


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Let Jetpack Support You in Creating a School Website

If you’re a teacher, principal, or educator, you know how important creating a school website has become — some countries even require them. Parents visit the websites of their children’s schools to find information, students access their assignments, and prospective students and community members can learn about upcoming events.

Creating a school website requires more than just setting up a landing page. It will serve as a hub for communications, marketing, and resources.

Let’s explore the Jetpack features that can help educators create their school with WordPress, while ensuring they serve as assets for students, families, and communities.

Use photos to commemorate and promote events

Images can play two important roles on a school website:

  • They’re an effective way for parents to see what’s happening at school and how their children are performing. Images from award ceremonies, trips, and stage performances help students celebrate their successes as well as commemorate their milestones.
  • Images show off your school’s strengths to prospective parents who might enroll their children in the future. Photos of classroom learning and students enjoying activities on campus can bolster a positive image of your school and faculty.

Jetpack offers tools that can present your photos professionally and dynamically. When you create a gallery (have you tried the recently launched Gallery block in the WordPress Editor? You should!), you can specify how images will be displayed, from the number of columns to whether thumbnails are cropped or not.

Share updates to engage with your community

More and more schools are becoming active on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. They use these outlets to share updates and content with their communities. Although effective, this can become a time-consuming labor of love when done manually.

Publicize lets you automatically share new content to your social media channels as soon as it’s published. Just connect to your social media accounts and it will happen automatically. You can also tailor each post to your liking, or have Jetpack create descriptions based on the content of your posts. If you haven’t connected any social accounts yet, no worries — you can do that with a few clicks from the WordPress Editor’s sidebar — once you click Publish once, part of the confirmation process includes the option to add the networks you wish.

You can also encourage students and proud parents to share your school’s posts on their own social media accounts. Jetpack’s Social Sharing feature adds convenient buttons to each post, allowing visitors to re-share them in a matter of seconds.

If a robust social media presence isn’t the right choice for your particular school, keep in mind that you can still implement Social Sharing features so that your visitors can share your content to their personal feeds.

Create a calendar to keep everyone on schedule

Whether they’re looking for winter vacation dates, the summer school session period, or the graduation ceremony start time, your students, their parents, and even your own faculty members will turn to your school website for answers.

With the Upcoming Events Widget, you can add a list of forthcoming events along the sidebar or footer of every page of your site. This makes it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

If you link this widget to a Google calendar, it will automatically display the most up-to-date details.

Use site security to protect your data

To protect your students and their families, the security of school data should be taken very seriously. European schools were affected by GDPR legislation, and elsewhere, there are regulations in place to ensure that the data held by schools is stored and used appropriately.

Jetpack offers a number of security features to keep your site secure and accessible. These tools include downtime monitoring, automatic plugin updates, and malware blocking. You can also further enhance your site security with backups, spam protection, and security scanning, all features you can enjoy with a paid Jetpack plan.

Revitalize your school website

Your school website is a valuable asset. It can help you communicate with students and parents, allow you to share memories and accomplishments, and even attract new students. With Jetpack’s powerful features, you can enhance your school website, making it work even harder for your community.

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Why Bloggers Should Use the Markdown Online Editor

Do you write content in the WordPress editor? Many content creators start new blog posts outside of WordPress (using programs like Microsoft Word), attempt to move them over, then spend a lot of time scouring for formatting issues and discrepancies that result from this cross-platform translation.

What if you could create a better writing process within the WordPress editor itself? It all starts by adopting a slightly different way to write.

Today, we’ll learn how the Markdown online editor can support you in creating a streamlined writing and editing process all within the WordPress enterprise.

Markdown is like a translator

Markdown can be thought of as its own language, but that makes things sound more complicated than they really are.

There’s no need to take years of Markdown classes to become proficient in it, you just need to familiarize yourself with the formatting syntax that makes it tick. In fact, coder, author, and web developer, Brett Terpstra, says, “the syntax is so simple that you can barely call it ‘syntax.’ If you can use an emoticon, you can write Markdown.”

The inventor of Markdown, John Gruber, describes it as, “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.”

Here’s how Markdown works:

  1. A writer or blogger like yourself inputs plain text using Markdown syntax.
  2. The Markdown online editor converts the plain text into structurally correct HTML.

How to learn Markdown

The easiest way to pick up any new skill is to practice. Go through the Markdown Tutorial to learn about popular syntax formatting tricks, and to see how they work in real-time. CommonMark also offers its own interactive learning tutorial, as well as a quick reference guide for the Markdown online editor.

Markdown online editor example

WordPress.com offers yet another, even more comprehensive Markdown reference.

Markdown offers more ease with WordPress

Markdown unlocks greater usability within the WordPress visual editor.

Some bloggers begin writing posts using another editor (such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word) because they haven’t noticed great writing experiences within WordPress out-of-the-box. The problem with moving your writing from an outside editor over to WordPress is that a lot can get lost in translation.

Have you ever noticed some extra code when switching between the visual editor and the text editor after copying and pasting text from outside of the WordPress environment? Oftentimes, these discrepancies take the form of unnecessary tags that become tedious to manually remove. If you opt not to remove these extra code characters, it can actually hurt your ability to rank well in relevant search engine inquiries because of the “code bloat.”

Another usability problem that some bloggers run into is having to interrupt their typing to reach for the mouse and highlight text that needs special formatting. With Markdown, you won’t need to do this until you’re done writing, as it’s a completely portable syntax that you can use without having to draft your content within the WordPress editor.

So, if you write better while using a different platform, you can use Typora (a free Mac Markdown editor) or MarkPad (a free, open-source Windows Markdown editor) to draft your content using Markdown and then paste it into WordPress without breaking any code or adding unnecessary characters and formatting.

On that note, manually coding HTML can be extremely time-consuming. It’s also ripe with the potential for errors. Forgetting to close a tag or accidentally adding an extra character can cause a lot of problems. Markdown creates structurally sound HTML formatting while preserving syntax in the visual editor, so you can make changes to either type of code at any time.

Jetpack and the Markdown online editor

Jetpack uses Markdown Extra, which adds more functionality and introduces an ease in formatting with regards to inline HTML, tables, and ordered lists.

To enable Markdown functionality, navigate to Jetpack in the WordPress dashboard, then go to Settings > Writing > Composing, and toggle the “Write posts or pages in plain-text Markdown syntax” option, as such:

Markdown online editor on Jetpack

If you want to use Markdown for comments, you can also do so under the Discussion area of the dashboard. You can even enable Markdown for use with custom fields and custom post types.

Spend a little time learning Markdown to save a lot of time in the future

Like anything truly great in life, you won’t reap the benefits until you put in the work. The same can definitely be said about learning Markdown. Increasing productivity usually begins with a time investment to learn (or create) systems that run efficiently.

Luckily, learning Markdown is straightforward once you put forth the effort. With a minor time investment, Markdown can improve your blogging process, adding efficiencies that you might not have known were possible.

Are you excited to give Markdown a try? Leave any unanswered questions in the comments and our experts will help you get acquainted with this new skill!

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