Videos are a powerful form of communication. They’re attention grabbing, fun to watch, and even more fun to share — people are twice as likely to share videos than any other form of content. And, when used correctly, they can reduce customer service calls and increase traffic, leads, and sales.
Continue reading → How to Host Videos on Your Website (Best Way Explained)
Slow websites lead to lost traffic and revenue. According to Pingdom, load times are directly correlated with bounce rate — the percentage of people who leave your website without visiting more than one page.
More and more people browse the internet on mobile devices, which often have less-reliable internet connections. And not everyone lives in an area with good connectivity. If your website’s load time is long, you’re inaccessible to them.
Continue reading → Is Your WordPress Site Slow to Load? Try These 7 Steps to Fix It
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are a lot of little details that go into creating a WordPress website. You want to be sure that you’re displaying the right content, including related posts, responses, and comments, so that your website can become a place where your followers get to know you and engage with a wider community.
There are times, however, when sharing too much information can be detrimental to your site goals and its user experience, or UX. By using Jetpack’s Related Posts feature, you can ensure that you’re showing visitors high-value items that attract — and not distract — a growing following.
Today, we’ll teach you how to manage your WordPress website’s related content with Jetpack, and why it’s important to show it in the first place.
Continue reading → Use Related Posts to Decrease Load Times and Improve UX
Note: Jetpack’s Lazy Loading feature was first introduced in 2018. At the time, few other tools offered such functionality. It offered a much needed performance boost to WordPress sites, especially those with a large number of images.
A couple of years later, a new lazy loading web standard was introduced, and WordPress itself started supporting this standard. Today, modern browsers all support lazy loading, and WordPress itself comes with built-in lazy loading functionality for images and videos.
Considering this positive change, Jetpack’s Lazy Loading feature is no longer necessary. You have the option to disable it on your website, and you will immediately begin benefiting from the native lazy loading feature offered by WordPress itself.
To facilitate this transition, Jetpack’s feature will be deprecated and eventually removed from both the Jetpack plugin and the Jetpack Boost plugin in November 2023.
When someone visits your website, you probably want them to be dazzled by your photos or wooed by its background images. You want to share visuals that will capture and hold their attention.
However, sometimes your images can take a long time to load, which might lead to decreased site traffic and lower search engine rankings.
According to Pew Research Center, the share of Americans that own smartphones is now 77%, up from just 35% in Pew’s first survey of smartphone ownership conducted in 2011. With a growing number of visitors having access to WordPress sites from their mobile devices, performance optimization is more important than ever before. If you’re not paying attention to your website’s performance, it’s like leaving money on the table.
Fortunately, you don’t need to settle for a slow site; Jetpack’s Lazy Loading images feature has got you covered.
This useful feature helps to improve the performance of your website by only loading images once they actually appear on your viewer’s screen. Enabling this tool helps reduce the total resources used by your website, which will speed it up significantly.
Today, we’ll learn more about Lazy loading images by discussing what it does to improve your website, why performance optimization is so important for WordPress websites, and how to enable it with Jetpack.
Continue reading → Speed Up Your Jetpack Site with Lazy Loading Images
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 Images Affect Your Site’s Page Loading Speeds 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 Improve Performance & Page Speed?
This article was originally published on the BruteProtect blog. BruteProtect was a plugin designed to stop malicious IPs from accessing WordPress websites. The technology behind BruteProtect is now part of Jetpack’s security features, protecting millions of website from brute force attacks every day.
Thanks for all the feedback and shares on Part 1, see that post for more info on which modules in Jetpack are activated by default and which “Other” plugins we used to test against.
There have been a number of requests for us to show what WordPress core (with no plugins) and Jetpack activated but all modules deactivated looks like, so here we go.
Note that all of the numbers have changed a bit because we re-ran all tests from scratch with an updated version of WebPageTest.
| Other Plugins | Jetpack (with default modules) | Jetpack (with no modules) | WordPress Core, no plugins | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First load, TTFB | 1103ms | 569ms | 470ms | 408ms |
| First load, Fully loaded | 2742ms | 1970ms | 1756ms | 1620ms |
About our testing methodology:
Tests were run from a private instance of WebPageTest, run from an EC2 instance within 1ms of our test subject server. Each test was run 27 times, and we used the median score for each factor. The test server had no other traffic on it while these tests were being performed.
Still have questions about the Jetpack plugin? Contact support or search documentation for quick answers.
