sharing – Jetpack

3 Tips to Increase Your Site’s Traffic and Engagement

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Brenda Barron

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

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Tips & Tricks | Tagged engagement, Search, SEO, sharing, Social Media, traffic | 8 Comments

New to Blogging? Install These Five Jetpack Features First

Posted on November 17, 2016 by Jessica Lawlor

You just started a blog and you’re ready to share it with the world. (Welcome to the wonderful world of blogging!)

Lucky for you, you’ve stumbled onto our blog, so hopefully you’ve been given the good advice to install Jetpack. Jetpack is a plugin for WordPress with many features (cough, cough, more than 40) to make your life as a blogger a whole lot easier.

With so many features to explore, where to begin? We’ve got you covered.

If you’re new to blogging (or to Jetpack), activate these five features first.

copy-of-get-people-to-stay-on-your-website-longer_-2

1. Keep your site safe and secure with Brute Force Protection.

When you’re new to blogging, the last thing you want is to worry about your site’s security. Breathe easy knowing that your site is secure with Brute Force Protection.

This feature allows you to protect your site against brute force attacks, which sadly, are becoming more and more of a frequent concern for website owners. By enabling Brute force protection, your site will automatically block unwanted login attempts.

2. Spread the love on social media with Sharing.

Make it super simple for your blog readers to share your posts!

Sharing lets you add buttons to blog posts to give readers the ability to share a post to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and a host of other social media/web services to amplify your message.

Screen Shot 2016-08-19 at 7.53.36 AM

3. Keep readers on your website longer with Related Posts.

Help readers better navigate your site by pointing them to related content you know they’ll love based on the blog post they’re currently reading.

related-posts-configs

Related Posts scans all of your posts, analyzes them, and selects at least three related archived blog posts to showcase underneath or above your post. This helps readers figure out what to read next and keeps them on your site even longer.

4. Be the first to know when your website experienced downtime with Monitor.

Ugh. Dreaded website downtime. It’s never fun when your site goes down. Monitor keeps tabs on your site and alerts you the moment downtime is detected.

Fun fact: Monitor checks your site every five minutes and notifies you as soon as a problem arises. We’ll also email you when your site is back up!

5. Make your blog a beautiful place to visit with Site Accelerator (Photon).

Photos are an incredibly important piece of the puzzle when it comes to finding success as a blogger. Compelling visuals help keep site visitors interested and engaged.

Screen Shot 2016-08-19 at 7.56.40 AM

If you don’t size your photos properly though, you can seriously slow down your site. That’s where Jetpack’s Site Accelerator comes in handy. Site Accelerator (Photon) is an image acceleration and editing service. What does this mean for you? Less load time on your host and faster image loading for your readers.

Seasoned bloggers, what do you think? Which Jetpack features would you recommend to a new blogger?

Don’t have Jetpack installed yet to try out these features? If you don’t currently have Jetpack, be sure to install it so you can begin taking advantage of all the plugin’s features. The easiest way to install Jetpack is via your site’s Dashboard. Please follow these instructions to install and connect Jetpack.

Posted in Tips & Tricks | Tagged Monitor, Photon, Protect, related posts, sharing | 10 Comments

Jetpack 4.0: WP 4.5 Customizer compatibility and more

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Elio Rivero

The new Jetpack introduces improvements for better performance under the hood and to allow you work faster.

Real-Time Widget Customizing

WordPress 4.5 shipped with a new feature, Selective Refresh: if your theme supports it, widgets refresh in the Customizer as you edit them, letting you see changes instantly without refreshing the entire page.

We’ve updated Jetpack widgets to leverage Selective Refresh, and now they’ll update in real time as well!

VideoPress Made Simpler

A new tool lets you edit VideoPress shortcodes right in the Editor, with a fancy new modal window containing key playback options:

Plus, videos placed in the Editor now adjust themselves to your theme’s content width, so you can more accurately see how it will look in your post or page when published.

WooCommerce Sharing

Use WooCommerce? You just got sharing options for each of your products:

Social icons are now placed under the “Add to cart” button in singular product views, making it easier for customers to share your products with their friends and fans on social media.

First-Time User Support

We’ve done a better job explaining the benefits of Jetpack and connecting it to WordPress.com when the plugin is installed but not yet connected.

We also added handy links to shortcode documentation to convey the types of media you can quickly and safely embed.

Performance

Jetpack protect helps safeguard your site against brute-force attacks, and now it’s got more muscle behind it. We’ve updated the code and routines that verify your site is protected to be more efficient. For folks using the Contact Form module, sweeping spam submissions out of your database is now faster.

And there’s more

Custom Content Types: a new CSS class on Testimonial featured images — has-testimonial-thumbnail — allows you to customize Jetpack custom post types as you see fit.

Theme Tools: improved schema.org microdata for breadcrumbs gives search engines an easier time knowing what page they are on, and how that page relates to the other pages in your site hierarchy.

Widget Visibility: get granular with your widget display:

Select widgets and specify to show or hide them right from custom post types, in both single and archive views.

We also fixed some issues…

Comments: we fixed a mistake where a comment subscription checkbox appeared on custom post types — despite the fact you couldn’t actually subscribe to those types of comments.
Contact Forms: we fixed a bug where the telephone field (which can only be added manually) rendered incorrectly, breaking some forms in the process.
General: we blocked direct access to the Jetpack_IXR_Client class which caused fatal PHP errors in some server setups.
Shortcodes: we removed the frameborder attribute in the YouTube embed code. It was deprecated in HTML 5. Unminified responsive-videos.min.js in order to address a false positive virus alert in ClamAV. Expect it to be re-minified in 4.0.1 once we resolve the issue with ClamAV.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to 4.0:

Alex Kirk, Barry Abrahamson, Bernhard Reiter, Biser Perchinkov, Brando Meniconi, Brandon Hubbard, Brandon Kraft, Christopher Finke, Dan Walmsley, Derek Smart, Drew Butler, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, George Stephanis, Igor Zinovyev, Ivan Kristianto, Jeff Golenski, Jeremy Herve, Jesse Friedman, Joey Kudish, Lance Willett, Matt Wiebe, Michael Cain, Miguel Lezama, Mohammad Jangda, Patrick Rauland, Philip John, Richard Muscat, RC Lations, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Tammie Lister, Thomas Guillot, Weston Ruter.