What Does the Jetpack Plugin Do?

One of the greatest benefits of WordPress is its extendability — there’s a plugin for nearly any task you could imagine so you can build a website that accomplishes anything that you want. 

Does this mean you should load up on plugins? No. The more plugins you have, the slower your site loads, which negatively impacts your visitors’ experience. And some plugins can conflict with one another or with your theme, leading to errors or downtime.

That’s why Jetpack is a great option for WordPress sites: with dozens of tools in a single plugin, it provides a ton of functionality without weighing down your site.

So what does the Jetpack plugin do?

Jetpack boosts four key components of your site: security, design, performance, and marketing. Each of the dozens of features can be turned on or off with the flip of a switch, so you get everything you need and nothing you don’t. 

Security

Spam, malware, and brute force attacks lead to downtime, expensive repairs, and loss of customer data and trust. Security is a big component of Jetpack — so you have everything you need to protect your site and sleep well at night, like:

Downtime monitoring 

Your time is valuable, and you shouldn’t (and can’t!) spend it constantly reloading your site to make sure everything’s working properly. Jetpack keeps an eye on your site every second of every day, immediately alerting you if it ever goes down so you can troubleshoot and get back online right away.

Jetpack Backup

There are lots of reasons to backup your site: someone hacks it, you make a mistake, your host encounters an issue, or one plugin conflicts with another. The last thing you want is to be stuck without a backup when something goes wrong.

Jetpack Backup offers automatic daily or real-time backups of your WordPress site, so you never have to worry about not having files on hand when you need them the most. Your website is stored in multiple, off-site locations and it only takes a few clicks to restore it in full — no coding knowledge needed!

Real-time backups pair perfectly with Jetpack’s activity log, which keeps a chronological list of  every action taken on your site for up to a year. If you know your site broke around a certain time, check the activity log to see what took place at that time (like the installation of a new plugin) and restore your site to the way it was.

Jetpack Scan

Jetpack Scan automatically looks for malware and other vulnerabilities and instantly notifies you if there’s a problem. It’s your on-site, round-the-clock security guard.

The best part? It offers one-click fixes to many of the most common security issues, to neutralize threats as quickly as they’re identified. And since scans are run with Jetpack’s servers, they don’t slow your site down, and you can access the results even if your site crashes. 

Brute force attack protection

Brute force attacks are common — they’re easy to set up and are run by automated bots. Any size site can be a victim and experience the consequences: a slow site, embarrassing content changes, and stolen data. 

Jetpack automatically stops these attacks and reports the stats in your dashboard. 

Along with those four security fundamentals, Jetpack also offers:

• Secure authentication for an extra level of login security.
• Plugin auto-updates, so your website is always up to date.
• Jetpack Anti-spam to keep malicious spam comments off your site.

Performance

40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. That’s a lot of interested followers and potential customers to lose! Jetpack speeds up WordPress sites with:

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN is a robust site acceleration feature that copies, optimizes, and hosts images and static files (like CSS and Javascript) on a third-party server. This reduces the load on your host server and speeds up your website, and lowers your hosting costs if you pay based on server usage.

Video hosting

Videos are incredibly engaging and are an excellent way to demonstrate products or concepts. They can also add a lot of load time to your site. Jetpack video hosting stores and serves your videos on Jetpack’s servers so they load quickly for everyone, no matter where they’re located. And you’ll avoid the ads, branding, and distracting content from competitors that come with third parties like YouTube.

Lazy loading images

Images are often the first thing that draws someone’s eyes to your content. But high-quality, large images can also slow down your site, especially if you have a long page trying to load multiple images simultaneously.

Lazy loading waits to display images to your site visitors until they scroll down to the portion of the screen where images are located. This prevents your site from loading heavy content until it’s necessary, while still providing an excellent experience for all your visitors.

Marketing and revenue

Successful marketing requires the right tools. If those tools are built right into your website? Even better. Jetpack adds features like:

Related Posts

If someone loves a blog post on your site, why not encourage them to stick around by showing them more posts they’ll love? With Related Posts, Jetpack scans and categorizes all your content and uses that info to display other relevant posts that visitors might be interested in. This can dramatically increase page views — and the likelihood that a reader will want to do business with you.

(Unlike other related content plugins that put recommendations at the end of posts as an easily overlooked “P.S.”, you Jetpack can add recommendations at any point in a post.)

Social Sharing 

Take advantage of word of mouth: allow your site visitors to share your posts to their own social media accounts, where their friends and family can also read and share them. Reach an entirely new audience! 

Social Media Automation  

Sharing content to all of your social media channels is normally time-consuming but necessary. Jetpack’s social media automation tool, Publicize, speeds up the process by automatically sharing your new blog posts to Facebook, Twitter, and more. 

With a paid Jetpack plan, you can also schedule social updates at specific times to maximize exposure.

Site Stats

Jetpack Site Stats provides all the information you need to make informed decisions about your site: top posts, searches, and geographic locations; number of site visitors; popular times; and more. Everything is presented in easy-to-read charts and is filterable by specific time periods. 

Other marketing and revenue tools

Jetpack also includes tools to help generate leads and revenue:

• Ad Programs, for generating income through advertising.
• Payment buttons to sell products and services.
• Subscriptions to stay in touch with potential customers and site visitors.

Design

Your site design makes or breaks your conversion rate and impacts how easily site visitors find what they’re looking for. Use Jetpack to customize your site’s appearance with:

Galleries, Slideshows, and Carousels

With Jetpack’s design tools, you can display images in unique, eye-catching ways, no design experience needed. Arrange images in a gallery or grid, add a slideshow to your home page, or include carousels in blog posts — the sky’s the limit!

Special content blocks

Jetpack offers a variety of ways to expand the functionality of the default WordPress block editor. Insert these special blocks anywhere in your pages or posts to add content like:

• Calendars and events
• Business hours and contact information
• Ads
• Forms and email captures
• Social media posts
• Booking calendars
• Videos

Check out the full list here.

Contact forms

Forms are a great way for customers and site visitors to get in touch without having to pick up the phone or open their email. There are lots of contact form plugins available, many of them unnecessarily complicated. Jetpack forms are simple — add, edit, and reorder fields without touching a single line of code. 

Reduce plugins, not functionality 

An old adage says there can be too much of a good thing, and this can definitely be true of WordPress plugins! Why not keep it simple?

Jetpack provides all the tools you need for performance, security, design, and marketing without weighing down your site or causing conflicts. Get to know everything Jetpack has to offer.

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