When Brandon Kraft was in kindergarten in 1990, his dad had a hunch that computers were going to be a big deal. So he trudged off to the local Sam’s in Wichita Falls, Texas, and bought a computer he could afford — an Intel 386 with 16 MHz of processing power and 8 MB of RAM. It’s probably safe to say that day sealed Brandon’s fate as a geek (his words) and a brilliant Automattician (ours).
Continue reading → Meet Brandon from Jetpack: Supporting people from ministry to development
This month’s release is packed with improvements to the features you love. We’ve also ensured that your favorite plugin will work seamlessly with the newest version of WordPress, scheduled for release in just a few weeks.
Continue reading → Jetpack 7.9: Better blocks and a peek at the future of Jetpack Search
Google provides a number of free tools that seamlessly integrate with Jetpack-powered WordPress websites. These tools can help you deliver even better experiences to your website visitors.
In turn, this can position you to accomplish your long and short-term goals, whether they’re increasing your site engagement, boosting your conversion rate, or successfully reaching a new audience segment.
Let’s take a look at five Google tools that can help cater to your site visitors’ needs, and position you to reach your goals faster.
Continue reading → Try These Five Google Tools for Your Website
Note: Publicize is now auto-share and is part of Jetpack Social.
Imagine that you’re opening up a riding camp for horse enthusiasts. How can you encourage more campers to participate? This isn’t your typical business, so you wouldn’t expect its success to depend on website traffic; however, every business grows or fades due in part to the popularity of its website. To succeed, your riding camp’s website must attract and engage its visitors.
Whether you’re a blogger or a business owner, producing valuable content for your visitors is a must — but it’s only the first step. If you want your hard work to pay off with tangible results, you’ll need to find ways to place interesting content in front of your ideal audience members to keep them coming back.
So, how do you get started? There are several ways to promote your content, including sharing posts on your social media channels or improving your site’s search engine optimization.
Continue reading → 3 Tips to Increase Your Site’s Traffic and Engagement
Jetpack 5.4: Date Picker in Contact Form, Comment Improvements, and Welcome Screens
Today’s release of Jetpack 5.4 includes the addition of a new field to our Contact Form editor, display improvements to Comments and how they integrate with themes, and welcome screens for users of our paid plans. We’ve also added a new search feature, currently in beta, that Jetpack Professional customers can help us test.
Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve included in this update.
Date picker added to Contact Form editor
We added a new field to the Contact Form editor that allows you to add a date picker to your forms.
You can now create forms with date pickers.
This allows you to ask visitors to submit delivery dates, their birthdays, the best day to contact them, or anything else you can think of.
Improvements to Comments and theme compatibility
We’ve made some improvements to how the Jetpack comment form is displayed in some themes.
When enabled on your site, the Comments feature should now display a form with a default height. There should also be no extra white space below it. Comments entered into the form will cause the height of the form to expand automatically.
Welcome screens added to paid plans
When purchasing a Jetpack Personal, Premium, or Professional plan, you’ll now see a welcome screen with some tips to help you make the most of the plan you just purchased.
Here’s what you might see if you purchase a Personal plan.
Jetpack Search (Beta) available for Professional plan customers
If you’ve purchased a Professional Plan for your Jetpack site, this new release will give you access to a new feature we’re currently still testing: Jetpack Search, powered by Elasticsearch.
To get started, go to Settings > Traffic on WordPress.com, and select a site using Jetpack 5.4 and a Professional plan. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and enable the search feature.
This feature is still in beta, and we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you give it a try.
Miscellaneous updates and fixes
Finally, here are a few more updates we’ve made in 5.4:
Full changelog and thanks
The changelog provides the full list of updates and changes in this release. If you have questions or feedback, please get in touch.
Install Jetpack on your site or upgrade to 5.4 today and let us know what you think!
Thank you to the contributors to this release:
Alexander Concha, Allen Snook, Andrew Duthie, Anthony Bubel, Daniel Walmsley, Derek Smart, Donna Peplinskie, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Erick Hitter, George Stephanis, Igor Klimer, Igor Zinovyev, Umang Vaghela, James Fraser, James Nylen, Jeremy Herve, Justin Shreve, Kirk Wight, Lance Willett, Marko Andrijasevic, Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Nick Daugherty, Nicole Kohler, Oscar Lopez, Paul Sieminski, RC Lations, Rastislav Lamos, Rob Landers, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Scott Stancil, Stanimir Stoyanov, Steve Seear, Takashi Irie, and Thomas Guillot.