Jetpack has a ton of features (more than 30) that help you improve your WordPress site or blog in many ways – both for yourself as administrator as well as for your readers. Today I’m going to focus on eight Jetpack features that you can use to improve the User Experience of your site so that visitors find it easier to navigate and stick around longer.
Performance and Stability
It can seem like a no-brainer but the absolute worst user experience when visiting a site is when the site doesn’t work at all or takes a long time to load. Jetpack comes with two must-have features that stop this from happening:
- Photon
Turning on Photon means that all your images get automatically served to users from the WordPress.com content delivery network (CDN) which means faster images for your readers (and less load on your host). To turn it on all you have to do is go to the Jetpack page in your blog dashboard and click the Activate button for Photon. And if you’re a developer, you can also speed up your theme with Photon. - Monitor
All sites go down once in a while. It could be your database, your host, some rogue code – whatever the reason, your visitors don’t really care, they just want to see your stuff! Jetpack Monitor will keep tabs on your site, and alert you the moment that downtime is detected so that you hear it from us first.
Mobile Devices
If you keep tabs on your traffic you’ve probably noticed you’re getting more and more visitors browsing your site from a mobile device: smart phones and tables of all shapes and sizes. Jetpack provides two features that help you make the reading experience on these devices significantly better:
- Mobile theme
Jetpack comes with a responsive theme that works instantly on all mobile browsers. It also comes with various options and settings that enable you to choose exactly how you’d like your mobile browsing experience to work. - Custom CSS
Jetpack’s Custom CSS feature lets you tweak your site’s appearance to your heart’s content in a way that doesn’t break your theme when an upgrade is released. In addition, you can also create custom CSS for your mobile theme, further refining your mobile experience.
Interaction
Finally the last set of features deal with enabling your visitors to interact with your site, content and the community in a smoother fashion:
- Likes
This feature puts a “Like” button on your posts and is a way for people to show their appreciation for your content. Enabling it is a short two-step process. - Related Posts
This feature pulls relevant content from your blog to display at the bottom of your posts. If the feature is enabled, a section of related posts appears just underneath your Likes (if you’ve turned these on). Just activate the feature from your Jetpack dashboard to turn them on but you can also customize how they display. - Infinite Scroll
Infinite scroll simply means that when a visitor scrolls to the bottom of your posts page Jetpack will automatically load the next set of posts without requiring clicking on any buttons. Activating it is similar to “Related Posts” above but not every theme supports it. - Jetpack Comments
When someone reads an article on your site and wants to comment, they can now use one of their existing social networking accounts to post a comment. No longer do they need to create yet another account and profile! You can also customize how Jetpack Comments display.
That’s it! Eight Jetpack features that can help your visitors have a more pleasurable experience when visiting your site. 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!
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We should organize the settings screen in some way like this. Right now it’s just a long, long list of stuff – and its function isn’t always clear from the name.
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I agree Dave. Even I find it frustrating sometimes to browse through them. The good news is that that’s something we’re working on right now because we feel the pain!
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You could use the filters on the right of the list; they allow you to sort the modules per “category”, much like Richard has done in this post!
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Good call, never even noticed those links.
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The lack of documentation on the CSS options and Mobile Theme API is quite frustrating.
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Hi Douglas,
Do these links help?
Custom CSS: http://jetpack.me/support/custom-css/
Mobile Theme: http://jetpack.me/support/mobile-theme/
Richard
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Do you guys have any metrics on Photon’s impact?
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Hi there, I don’t have stats handy (although I should – noted!). There’s some developer documentation available here if its useful to you: http://developer.wordpress.com/docs/photon/
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how can I use reblog feature within Jetpack still if I’m a self hosted please?
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This option is only available for WordPress.com blogs at the moment. You can, however, use WordPress’ “Press This” button to quickly publish posts with a link to the original post.
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Hello Richard,I’m into trying the things you suggested re: mobile phone exposure. However, I ran into a slight problem. For some reason when I put in my Word Press password it bounces and says it’s the wrong password. That’s funny because it gets me into Word Press. Is there a reason? Please help me by giving me a way to satisfy the password problem. Are they asking for the same password?
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You’ll need to log in with your WordPress.com account. If you’ve forgotten your password, you can request a new one here:
https://wordpress.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword
To clear up any confusion, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two different entities, as explained here.
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Reblogged this on WordPress Awesomeness.
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