JetPack For WordPress – The Many Features

Jetpack is one of the most useful WordPress plugins that you can have. It provides a lot of features. Some web hosts do tell webmasters to avoid using it because it’s a resource hogging plugin.  I do a agree that it is a resource hogging plugin, but provided you are not hosting with Hostgator.com or GoDaddy.com which do seem to have slow servers, you should be fine.  However, the plugin provides lots of useful features because you don’t need a lot of other plugins.

Here is a good video I found on YouTube about Jetpack for WordPress:

So, the question that you should be asking yourself is should you install an all-in-one plugin that provides all the benefits or multiple plugins?

You can find many good looking social sharing plugins. Most of them are similar. You can have custom social media icons or the official buttons.  You also have the option of choosing where your sharing buttons appear – posts, pages, media etc. The only disadvantage is you can’t configure the position. You only have the option of adding
the buttons below the post.  There are no shortcodes or anything which doesn’t make them easy to place them anywhere.

Custom CSS is probably one of my favorite features among all the benefits that you get with Jetpack.  Bare in mind, you are going to need to know how to find CSS on your website.  You can use Web Developer (for Firefox) or Web Developer (for Chrome). You can use it to make some changes over the original theme file. Basically, you will have another css file that will load after your theme css loads. Whatever changes you want to make to CSS id or class, you can write them down in the custom CSS. Those changes will reflect on the blog, once you save it.

This is one of the most powerful features of Jetpack. This feature will help integrate your blog with WordPress.com and will give you analytics on the visitors who have visited your blog.  Instead of having to login and go to Google Webmaster Tools you can do it all in the backend of your WordPress dashboard. Not only will you be able to see how many visitors you had on your WordPress site, you will also be able to see what pages they visited. You also get details of referral traffic – whether they came from search engine or from any of the social media sites.  I really do like this feature with Jetpack!

Jetpack comments will replace your default commenting form with a customized one. The commenters will have the option of commenting by logging in through WordPress, Facebook, Twitter etc.

The commenting form is very compact. When someone goes to comment, the form expands. It’s very useful in saving space on your blog.  Personally, I hate the ones that come with WordPress.  They are way to generic and really don’t like how they work.  This is a huge upgrade from the generic one.

Photon is very helpful when you have lots of images on your WordPress site. It will load the images through the WordPress.com CDN. It will speed up the loading of the images by a considerable margin.

Photon also somewhat helps in compressing the images. So, you get two functionalities in one feature and in this all-in-one plugin.

You also have the option of letting your audience subscribe to your blog posts and comments.  It’s actually a great way to get repeat traffic.  When your user subscribes to your blog posts, they will get a notification in their inbox when you have published a new article or a new comment was made.

This is another great feature for a WordPress site which is image oriented. You can easily turn your images into a carousel.  The carousel will be a full screen slideshow which is very attractive to look at. This feature is especially useful for photographer sites who like to showcase their work.

Jetpack also comes with a feature that allows your site to be converted to a mobile site. Your mobile theme will only work when a visitor opens your site from a mobile device.  With mobile traffic now increasing more than ever, it’s a good idea to have a mobile theme enabled for your site. The theme is very user friendly and easily navigable.

This is one of the most useful features that you get with Jetpack. You get extra sidebar widgets that proves really helpful. For example, you get the Facebook Like Box widget. You just have to add your Facebook page url and add it to the widgets section and it will appear on your WordPress site.

You also get a Twitter timeline widget. You just need to add the App ID and add it to the sidebar and your timeline will be displayed on your site. For both of these, you can configure the width and height of the widget.

You can also use a popular post widget. You can display your most popular posts based on different timeframes – daily, weekly, monthly and all time.

That’s about all the features that are easily available with this plugin. There are still a few more features that you get with Jetpack. Such as infinite scroll, post by email, shortcode embeds, markdown, beautiful math, spelling, contact forms, VideoPress, security settings, etc.  This plugin is 100% free and you can download it at https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/.

You can always find more information on it at https://jetpack.me.  For the most part webmasters do seem to praise this plugin.  But, I would really like to hear what you think of this WordPress plugin.  If you could leave a comment down below and let me know what you think of Jetpack.