Jetpack sponsored this video, which goes into what Jetpack is and can do for your site.
These are my words though! I’m a big Jetpack fan and I run Jetpack on all my self-hosted WordPress sites. It does a ton both feature-wise and performance-wise.
In this video, we look at a WordPress site I recently spun up where Jetpack was essentially the first plugin I installed. This is what we went over:
- Installing it is as easy as any other WordPress plugin. Then you connect it to your WordPress.com account, which is good foreshadowing because much of the power of Jetpack comes from leveraging the powerful WordPress server infrastructure rather than your own.
- Jetpack does a lot of security stuff. Blocks malicious login attempts for one thing. But a way bigger deal is that it literally scans your whole installation for problems and lets you know about them. That’s the kind of stuff that helps you sleep at night.
- Writing in Markdown, and offering Markdown for your commenters, is an awfully nice thing to have and be able to do with the flip of a switch.
- How Jetpack helps with images is a big deal.
- Just by using WordPress, you get responsive images out of the box.
- Use Jetpack, and now your images are all CDN hosted as well.
- Use Jetpack, and those images are optimized as well.
- Use Jetpack, and you can lazy load them as well.
- Connecting social media accounts, so that new content can go out to them as you publish, is very easy to configure and a built-in feature. It also helps you add sharing buttons in your theme.
- Your comment form can be modernized with social logins, something that users almost expect these days, by having Jetpack handle that.
- Your theme can have infinite scrolling for more content with the flip of a setting.
- One of my personal favorite features is how Jetpack can handle related posts for you. As simple as it seems, this is a particularly difficult task. Particularly because it’s database intensive and a performance burden, and partially because it’s algorithmic and has to be done right to get good results. By letting Jetpack do it, there is no performance penalty and the results are great.
That’s a lot, and it’s not even everything in this video, or everything that Jetpack can do.
