Jetpack 6.7 is now available for download. This release brings you a few exciting new features that make your site faster and safer.
Continue reading → Jetpack 6.7: New Site Accelerator and Activity View
Jetpack 6.6 is now available for download. This release brings you two features that will make your website more attractive to readers and search engines alike (and a slew of the usual bug fixes and small enhancements).
Continue reading → Jetpack 6.6: Better Site Verification Tools
Let’s review how fast-loading images affect your site speed — and in turn, your placement in search engine results.
Sites that use too many images, or have images that are too large, have longer loading times. This can slow down your entire page, irritating visitors and actually hurting your site’s ranking in online search results. We may say that images are worth a thousand words, but if you don’t plan for fast loading times, they actually won’t be worth very much at all.
In this post, we’ll discuss why search engines like Google care about image load times, and how you can use Jetpack’s features to enhance your site speed by making those images load faster.
Continue reading → How Your Images Affect Your Site Speed and SEO
No one likes a slow site. Most visitors will click away if a page isn’t loading fast enough, and Google actually gives sites lower search engine rankings if they don’t load quickly.
Luckily, there are multiple ways you can improve your site’s speed. Images and videos are the biggest culprits when it comes to slowing down a site, but they can be forced to load faster by using something called a content delivery network (or CDN).
Let’s explore the CDN basics, and how you can use the CDNs that Jetpack provides to speed up your images, your videos, and ultimately your entire site.
Continue reading → How Does a CDN Work to Improve Performance & Site Speed?
As a photographer, you likely have a portfolio of gorgeous images that dazzle fans and customers. But you need to get those images out there so that everyone can see them.
Building your own WordPress site is a great place to start, and for photographers looking to do even more with their sites, there’s Jetpack. Jetpack will enhance your portfolio with gorgeous, user-friendly photo displays meant to attract new followers and photography fans. It also includes features that help large photos load quickly, which improves user experiences and boosts your search engine ranking.
Today we’re going to look at three specific Jetpack features photographers should use on their website:
Read on to learn how each one of these options will help your website stand out and draw more attention to your portfolio.
Continue reading → Set Your Photography Website Apart with Jetpack
Publishing content on a regular basis is a great strategy to increase your website’s organic traffic — website visitors who didn’t get to your site by clicking on an ad. But getting those readers is only half the battle.
If you want visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, make a purchase, or engage with your content in any way, you have to keep their attention long enough for a meaningful interaction.
Here are three tips that will help you publish engaging content.
Continue reading → How To Create Content That Keeps Your Readers Coming Back
It was 2012 and the holiday season was upon us. I was nestled in my cubicle and settling in for a long winter project. As the director of the web development team for an agency in Rhode Island, I was tasked with the development of a WordPress multisite that would power tens of thousands of websites. Jetpack had just been installed on our new network, and I was looking into all the tools we could use for these business websites.
Continue reading → The First Time I Used Photon for Business
Jetpack 3.8.2 is out! In this release, we focused on fixing a few specific and annoying bugs that popped up.
We fixed a regression created in version 3.8.1 where Photon did not respect some custom image sizes from other plugins or themes. Photon respects all image sizes again.
WordPress 4.4 made some changes to the way Shortcodes are parsed, which broke our YouTube shortcode. We’re now filtering this shortcode to output properly so you don’t need to go back update your shortcodes in your existing posts – we’ve taken care of that for you.
We’ve tightened up security in the Wufoo shortcode. If you use this shortcode, you should upgrade to 3.8.2 as soon as possible.
We’ve also cleared up a couple very minor bugs with Carousel, Publicize, Google+ widget, and Infinite Scroll.
Contributors for this release include Aaron Graham, Alex Mills, Alexander Concha, Brandon Kraft, Derek Smart, Eduardo Reveles, Elio Rivero, Eric Binnion, Igor Zinovyev, Jeremy Herve, Kat Hagan, Lance Willett, Miguel Lezama, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, and Takashi Irie.
Thank you for your contributions!
We always strive to make your sites run as quickly and smoothly as possible, both on the front end and under the hood. Our most recent improvement? All self-hosted Jetpack-connected sites who have the Photon image service activated can now enjoy seamless support for the WebP image format.
What does this mean for you and your audience? This new feature provides size reductions of up to 34 percent for served images compared to a JPEG image of an equivalent visual quality level. Your viewers will save a lot of time loading your pages — time they can better spend enjoying the content you publish.
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JPEG File Size – 43.84KB | WebP File Size – 29.61KB |
Visually identical images in JPEG and WebP format with their respective sizes.
While WebP isn’t currently supported by all browsers (see the WebP FAQ for more details), you don’t have to worry about anything. We auto-detect which browsers your readers are using to make sure they can enjoy your images in the best quality and highest speed possible.
We should note that by default, Photon is compressing the WebP images at a high quality setting. If you want to get the most out of this new feature, utilizing the quality parameter will yield the best results.
If you’d like to learn more about this fast-loading image format, check out the following links: