At Jetpack, our Happiness Engineers are usually busy supporting our customers to ensure that they have everything they need for a successful website — but we interrupted one of them for an inside look at Jetpack and some valuable tips and tricks.
Meet Joen, a Jetpack Happiness Engineer who grew up in Viking territory but now works remotely under the sunshine and blue skies of southern Spain.
One of WordPress’s biggest benefits is plugins, which let you expand your site’s functionality to meet your exact needs. There are no limits to the type or number of plugins you can install and activate — there are currently thousands available in the WordPress repository.
But with this unlimited flexibility comes responsibility, since each plugin introduces its own set of potential issues, from site slowdowns to crashes. With a little knowledge and a little Jetpack, you can resolve the three most common challenges — or prevent them from happening in the first place.
You’ve been thinking about changing the look of your site for a while now. You found a WordPress theme that you like, but you’re a bit nervous about what will happen to your site after you activate the new theme.
You’re overcome with questions: Will you lose any of your site data? How do you pick and customize a new theme? How will a new theme impact your site layout, and will widgets that you installed remain intact?
There are many things to consider before making the switch to a new theme. Knowing what to look for is half the battle, but we’re here to help guide you along the way.
Let’s explore exactly what you should keep in mind when changing your WordPress theme to make it a smooth transition.
Continue reading → What to Consider When Changing Your WordPress Theme
You just set up an email subscription sign-up form on your website. What should you do next? Email marketing can seem like an overwhelming concept for those just getting started, but it doesn’t have to be this way!
One of the most popular forms of email marketing is sharing a weekly or monthly newsletter. Let’s take a look at two of the most pressing decisions for beginners: what newsletter content should you create and how should you format it to achieve your goals?
Continue reading → Six Newsletter Ideas to Connect With Your Readers
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
With the WordPress 4.4 Release Candidate now available, we wanted to release our fully-compatible version of Jetpack a little early. So here it is, along with some minor bug fixes and accessibility improvements.
Photon + Responsive Images
There are some cool things coming in WordPress 4.4, such as responsive images. To take full advantage of this, we made sure that Photon serves responsive images as well.
Twenty Sixteen
If you’ve had the pleasure of testing out Twenty Sixteen, we’ve included some compatibility styling to make sure Jetpack features such as Related Posts, Share Buttons, Likes, and Infinite Scroll all look great.
Accessibility Enhancements
WordPress made some adjustments to the heading levels in 4.4 to improve accessibility. We scrubbed Jetpack to make sure our heading levels are semantic and accessible to screen readers as well.
More Streamlined
We went through and optimized the images that we display within the Jetpack Admin, which dropped our image directory from 1.8 MB to 856 KB. Every little bit counts!
Bug Fixes
Fixed some minor bugs with Carousel, Markdown, Single Sign On, and Subscriptions.
Contributors for this release include Adam Heckler, Alex Kirk, Brandon Kraft, Chris Wiegman, Derek Smart, Eduardo Reveles, Enej Bajgoric, Ian Dunn, Igor Zinovyev, Jake Jackson, Jeff Golenski, Jeremy Herve, Joey Kudish, Konstantin Obenland, Michael Cain. Miguel Lezama, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Scott Grant, and Takashi Irie.
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
Jetpack vs. WordPress Core without Plugins
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.
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.
To date, the majority of the feedback we’ve received about our acquisition by Automattic has been positive, but we’ve continued to hear from some of our users that they’re concerned about being forced to use Jetpack if they want to continue to receive the protection offered by BruteProtect. Most of these objections are due to the perceived “Bloat” of Jetpack, a plugin that has the capability to add over 30 discrete features to your WordPress site.
We’ve just passed the four-month mark as a part of the Jetpack team at Automattic, and I’d like to address the “Bloat.”
The power of Jetpack is its ability to provide functionality which can’t (or shouldn’t) be included in core for one reason or another. The primary reason for many of the features is their need to be connected to outside servers in order to function well – tools like Photon (which provides a free content delivery network to your site using WordPress.com’s extensive global infrastructure), Related Posts (which uses Automattic’s large Elasticsearch cluster to calculate similarity between your posts), Monitor (which provides uptime monitoring from a number of servers around the world), Stats, Publicize, Subscriptions, Single Sign On, etc. Most, if not all, of these are features are tools that make your site faster, more secure, keep visitors on your site longer, create a better user experience, help you build more traffic, and help you know more about the traffic that is currently coming to your site.
On top of those core heavy-duty features, Jetpack adds a number of smaller but still useful features – items like Custom CSS, Omnisearch, Beautiful Math, Markdown, Spelling and Grammar tools, Widget Visibility, integrated notifications, contact forms, and more. These are features that add no weight to your WordPress install if you choose not to utilize them.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the new site management features. You can now manage plugins, posts, and pages on all of your WordPress sites from one interface, keeping your sites automatically up to date and secure.
It’s worthwhile to consider the fact that nearly all of Jetpack’s functionality shares a codebase with the same functionality on WordPress.com, so this code is under constant load and testing by tens of millions of users around the world and is being written by some of the best WordPress developers in the world including public contributors (everything we do is public on Github). Every line of code has eyes on it from multiple developers who are looking at it to be both well-performing and secure.
Since joining Jetpack, Derek and I have written a series of 35 tests which are run against Jetpack EVERY TIME there is a commit to the master branch. This tool will immediately raise red flags if there are any code changes which negatively impact the performance of the a WordPress site running Jetpack. We’ll be releasing all the results of these tests to the public in the near future. Every member of the Jetpack team is committed to making sure that performance is a high priority for the project.
Time for Testing
In an effort to look at exactly what effect Jetpack has on a site, we decided to create a test site and run tests against it in two situations. In situation 1, a user is running only Jetpack, with the 19 Jetpack modules that are activated out of the box (After The Deadline, Contact Form, Custom Content Types, Custom CSS, Gravatar Hovercards, Latex, Notes, Omnisearch, Post By Email, Publicize, Sharedaddy, Shortcodes, Shortlinks, Stats, Subscriptions, Vaultpress, Verification Tools, Widget Visibility, Widgets). In situation 2, a user is running five plugins that replicate some of our most used functionality: Contact Form 7, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, Simple Custom CSS, Share Buttons by AddToAny, NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster. Each of these plugins has the most downloads in the WordPress.org plugin directory for its functionality.
The results:
Jetpack, First load, TTFB: 773ms
Jetpack, First load, Complete page load: 1876ms
Jetpack, Repeat view, TTFB: 143ms
Jetpack, Repeat view, Complete page load: 322ms
Other Plugins, First load, TTFB: 797ms
Other Plugins, First load, Complete page load: 2609ms
Other Plugins, Repeat view, TTFB: 460ms
Other Plugins, Repeat view, Complete page load: 529ms
The only place running the standalone plugins even gets close is time to first byte on a first page load. Complete first page load is 28% faster, complete repeat page load is 39% faster, and time to first byte on a repeat page load is 69% faster! So you can see that Jetpack (with 19 active modules) offers SIGNIFICANT load time improvements over these five other tools combined. If you start replicating additional functionality, these improvements get even more pronounced.
At the end of the day, it’s very easy to have a negative reaction to Jetpack because of its size and scope, but, thankfully, those fears don’t tend to be realized in the real world.
As to the questions about if we’ll keep supporting BruteProtect as a standalone tool, the answer is “not forever.” If you are currently running BruteProtect Shield’s botnet protection on your site, it will continue to function until at least the end of 2015. At some point during the year, we’ll remove the ability to generate new API keys from BruteProtect, and at some point in 2016 we will completely discontinue BruteProtect as a standalone service.
If you’ve had issues with Jetpack in the past, please don’t write it off – come back and give it another shot, I’m pretty sure that you’ll be glad you did.
Reach New Customers and Boost Your SEO With a Quality Blog
Continue reading → Reach New Customers and Boost Your SEO With a Quality Blog