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
Ever wonder what it’s like being the Director of Innovation at one of the world’s most visionary companies? Wonder no more. We sat down with Jesse Friedman, Director of Innovation for Jetpack at Automattic. We picked his brain on all things Jetpack, WordPress, Automattic, open source, botnets, and woodworking.
Continue reading → Meet Jesse from Jetpack: Director of Innovation, Entrepreneur, Writer, and Botnet Fighter
Jetpack is well known for its image CDN, backup features, and stats, but did you know it also offers more than 30 other ways to customize your website? With a modular approach — no features are automatically enabled, and you choose which items to turn on individually — it adds features without loading unnecessary code, so your website runs efficiently.
Continue reading → How to Customize a WordPress Site with Jetpack
At Jetpack, our team members are usually busy tinkering under the hood to make sure everything is humming along and our customers are satisfied — but we interrupted one of them for an inside look at Jetpack and some valuable tips and tricks.
Meet Jeremy, a Happiness Engineer turned Jetpack Mechanic.
Continue reading → Meet Jeremy from Jetpack: Blogger Turned “Jetpack Mechanic”
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
Automating your WordPress website’s features can be a real time-saver. The time that website automation saves you can be put back into other site projects, such as increasing the size of your audience or building a strong social media presence.
From marketing tools and content sharing, to site backups and one-click ads, Jetpack offers numerous features that can automate or streamline many common site processes. Let’s take a closer look at these, starting with the website must-haves!
Continue reading → Save Time with Jetpack’s WordPress Automation Tools
The more that readers enjoy being on your site, the longer they’ll stay. And the longer they stay, the more likely they are to become dedicated readers, subscribers, or customers.
If you’re looking for a way to keep your website visitors engaged for even longer periods of time, Jetpack’s Related Posts feature can help. This feature works by analyzing all of your content and suggesting additional relevant pieces to your readers.
These suggestions are curated automatically, and are based on the article currently being read. And the best part is that Jetpack accomplishes this without affecting your website’s performance.
Websites with this feature activated generally experience increases in the average length of time that each visitor spends on their site. This ultimately results in longer visits, subscriber growth, or even purchases.
Let’s look at exactly how Jetpack’s suggested posts feature works, and how to make the most of it on your own site.
Continue reading → Keep Your Readers Engaged with Related Posts
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Jetpack’s Related Posts module is a simple and easy way to add contextual posts your visitors might be interested in when they reach the end of a post on your website. To use this feature, go to your site’s Jetpack settings and enable the module. All the magic happens behind the scenes, on the WordPress.com cloud: Jetpack’s natural language search engine scans all of your posts, analyzes all their content based on several factors, and returns a list of related posts for each one of your posts.
Now that Jetpack has worked its magic1, let’s discover how to customize those related posts or how to customize their display on your site.
Use filters to customize how Related Posts are displayed on your site
Website Customization: Renaming Sections on Your WordPress Site
Website customization is one of the best ways to ensure that your site reflects your brand’s voice, style, and personality. It typically involves incorporating your brand’s colors and fonts, uploading your logo as the header image, adding a background design, and including branded images in your posts.
However, the branding process of site development doesn’t have to stop with the basics. There are a few extra customizations that can get overlooked, even though they’re some of the easiest ways to add an extra touch of personality to your site. One of these customizations is the ability to rename site sections.
Today, we’ll explain why you want to rename your site sections, and the various tools and widgets available to customize the different parts of your website.
Continue reading → Website Customization: Renaming Sections on Your WordPress Site