Jetpack 5.8. Advanced Search and lazy loading

Improve Your SEO with Sitemaps

Embarking on a new WordPress project is incredibly exciting. You’re probably full of ideas for your site and what you hope it will achieve. You may even have content or products for an online store ready to go.

It’s tempting to only focus on the creative side of things, or the business aspects of building a site. But there are some equally important technical tasks that you should spend some time fine-tuning, and one of those is building a sitemap.

In this post, you’ll learn what a sitemap is, why you need one, and how to create it. Most importantly, you’ll learn how Jetpack does a lot of the heaving lifting for you!

Continue reading → Improve Your SEO with Sitemaps

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Improve Your SEO with Sitemaps

Jetpack 5.3: PHP 7.1 Compatibility, Ad Placement Control, and Visual Editor Improvements

Today’s release of Jetpack 5.3 includes support for PHP 7.1, greater control over the placement of your ads, and several enhancements to the experience viewing and managing your Jetpack site with the WordPress.com visual editor.

Here’s everything you’ll find in this update.

PHP 7.1 compatibility

Sites running PHP 7.1.x with opcache enabled will no longer have any issues when managing their Jetpack site from WordPress.com.

Choose where and how you display ads

Jetpack Premium and Professional customers now have more control over the placement of the ads on their site. We’ve added new options to control where ads appear, along with the option to show multiple ads if you wish.

Visual editor improvements

When managing your Jetpack site from WordPress.com (and using the visual editor), you’ll now have the option to preview it without leaving WordPress.com.

We’ve also updated the WordPress.com Toolbar to include a link to your comments in the My Sites menu.

Various bug fixes

Finally, we’ve resolved a few smaller issues and bugs, including:

  • Addressing compatibility issues with plugins using TinyMCE.
  • Fixing Contact Form submission emails for sites hosted by SiteGround.
  • Fixing an error with the Sitemaps feature when posts or images had special characters in their titles.
  • Re-adding a filter for the Widget Visibility feature that was accidentally removed.

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 your current version today and let us know what you think.

Thank you to the contributors to this release:

Andrew Munro, Artur Piszek, Ben Dwyer, Brandon Kraft, Copons, Daniel Walmsley, Derek Smart, Derek Springer, Devin Samarin, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Filipe Varela, George Stephanis, Igor Zinovyev, Jacopo Tomasone, Jeff Bowen, Jeff Golenski, Kirk Wight, Marcin Bot, Marek Hrabe, Marko Andrijasevic, Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Mohammad Jangda, Nicole Kohler, Richard Muscat, Rodrigo Iloro, Ryan Kanner, Rocco Tripaldi, Shaun Andrews

Posted in Releases | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

5 Minutes to Better WordPress SEO with Jetpack

Bringing traffic to your website isn’t as easy as waiting around for the right people to show up. To get them to come to you, you need to make sure your site shows up in the places they’re looking — like search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technical term for tactics that you can use to attract more readers, clients, or customers from search engines. SEO is usually thought of as a complicated, time-consuming series of tasks, but with the right tools it’s well within your reach.

With Jetpack, you can optimize your WordPress site for search engines… and do it in less time than it takes to brew a cup of coffee. Here’s how.

Continue reading → 5 Minutes to Better WordPress SEO with Jetpack

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Jetpack 3.9 — Sitemaps, a new Skype Sharing Button, and More

With the release of Jetpack 3.9, we’re introducing a brand new module, as well as a lot of improvements for several existing Jetpack modules.

Jetpack’s new Sitemaps Module

Jetpack already includes features like Subscriptions and Publicize, to let your readers know whenever you publish a new post on your site. You can now let Search Engines know, too!

What are sitemaps? Sitemaps are files that list each post and page that should be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing.

Once this new module is activated, two sitemaps will be created: a generic sitemap, available at yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml, as well as a News Sitemap, available at yoursitename.com/news-sitemap.xml. The News sitemap is useful if you want your posts to appear in Google News.

You can learn more about this new module here.

A new Skype Sharing Button

Skype Sharing Button

Now that Skype offers a Skype button, we’ve added it to Jetpack’s Sharing module. To add it to your site, head over to Settings > Sharing in your dashboard, and drag the new Skype button to your list of sharing buttons.

Social Menu

Social Menu is a new tool that is available for all theme developers. It allows site owners to create a new menu location which is used to display links to Social Media Profiles.

To learn how to add Social Menu support to your theme, you can follow the instructions on our support page.

And More…

This release also adds its fair share of improvements to existing modules, as well as bug fixes:

  • Added new options to allow management of users on your site directly from WordPress.com or from the WordPress.com Desktop app.
  • Made several changes to Photon to improve compatibility with WordPress 4.4. Custom image sizes are handled better now and all responsive image sizes will be properly displayed when using the Photon module.
  • Photon is now enabled by default on sites using HTTPS. You don’t need to use a filter to enjoy Photon on your HTTPS site anymore!
  • Added support for Wistia oEmbeds.
  • Fixed some issues with long album and track IDs in the BandCamp shortcode. Also added support for two new parameters: tracks and esig.
  • And a lot more! You can check the full changelog here.

Once again, a big thank you to all Jetpack Contributors:

Alex Shiels, Andrew Duthie, Andrew Ozz, Andy Peatling, Biser Perchinkov, Brandon Kraft, Dan Robert, Derek Smart, Dion Hulse, Miguel Polfliet, Eduardo Reveles, Elio Rivero, Eric Binnion, George Stephanis, Hiroshi Urabe, Igor Zinovyev, Jeff Golenski, Jennifer M. Dodd, Jeremy Herve, Jesse Friedman, Joen Asmussen, Joey Kudish, Jonathan Sadowski, Joseph Scott, Justin Shreve, Kat Hagan, Kelly Dwan, Lance Willett, Matt Wiebe, Michael Cain, Miguel Lezama, Rachel Baker, Richard Muscat, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Scott Grant, Steve Seear, Stéphane Boisvert, Takashi Irie, Thomas Guillot, and Xiao Yu.

Posted in Releases | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments
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