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
One key task that dedicated blog owners eventually need to address is how to boost site engagement. While encouraging your visitors to engage in discussions by leaving comments and showing them related posts can encourage them to interact with your site, there are a few other tactics that you can implement to increase their involvement even more.
Jetpack offers different sidebar widgets that can help keep readers on your site for longer periods of time, and can even increase your following. On the other hand, too many widgets can clutter your sidebar, which might lead to the opposite effect: poor user experiences.
As such, you need to be strategic about which widgets you add to your sidebar. Today, we’ll review three Jetpack widgets that will present your visitors with compelling information without overwhelming them.
Continue reading → How to Boost Site Engagement with an Optimized Sidebar
If multiple contributors write for your blog, your readers might want to know more about whoever wrote the articles they’re reading. Additionally, your writers will want to get the recognition they deserve. To satisfy your readers and writers with a single solution, you might want to create a WordPress author page.
A well-crafted WordPress author page allows site contributors to present their credentials and affirms their professional clout, as they can share personal information about their writing experiences and links to their portfolios or past work.
Today, we’ll learn why author pages are beneficial, and how you can use Jetpack to create WordPress author pages that will make your contributors proud to write for you.
Continue reading → Enhancing the WordPress Author Page with Jetpack
Note: Publicize is now auto-share and is part of Jetpack Social.
Whether you want more followers, brand awareness, or increased sales, you need to strengthen your social media presence.
Social media is the bread and butter of small business advertising and blog promotion. It helps you connect to and interact with others on a personal level by sharing posts and starting conversations.
Because of social media’s increasingly important role, Jetpack offers various tools to help you reach more people across those social networks. From sharing buttons, to social media widgets that can be directly inserted into headers or sidebars, these features — along with a smart social media strategy — will attract new customers, and keep your existing fans coming back for more.
Want to learn how to grow your social presence with Jetpack? Keep reading!
Engaging content keeps your new readers on your site the first time, but it’s up to you to keep them coming back for more. One of the best ways? Encourage them to subscribe to your content.
You might think you need to do something drastic to gain subscriptions, but small changes can have big impact. This is especially true if you’re just starting your site or are new to growing a subscriber base.
Let’s take a look at how you can earn more subscribers with three small but effective changes to your site.
Continue reading → How to Get Email Newsletter Subscribers in 3 Simple Steps
Following last month’s big redesign, we focused this next release on a few new widgets and several performance improvements and bug fixes.
This release makes three new widgets available for use on your site:
These widgets have been available to WordPress.com site users for a while. Their inclusion in Jetpack further improves compatibility between the two platforms, particularly for users choosing to switch from one to the other.
Included in this release are a number of small fixes and changes to improve compatibility and robustness, including:
As always, the changelog provides the full list of updates and changes in this release. We value—and respond to—your feedback so please get in touch or leave us a comment on this post with any questions or suggestions.
Install Jetpack on your site or upgrade your current version today and let us know what you think.
Thank you to the contributors to this release: Andrew Duthie, Brandon Kraft, Daryl L. L. Houston, Derek Smart, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Filipe Varela, George Stephanis, Ian Dunn, Igor Zinovyev, Jacopo Tomasone, Jeremy Herve, Jonathan Sadowski, Joseph Scott, Kerry Liu, Lance Willett, Marko Andrijasevic, Martin Remy, Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Payton Swick, Rob Landers, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Stephen Edgar*, Thomas Guillot, Xiao Yu, Yoav Farhi.
* Special kudos to these Jetpack users who helped us find and squash these bugs!
Pro Tip: Personal plan customers benefit from priority support and faster assistance.
Whether you’re a blogger, a business owner, or a developer – Jetpack comes with many different features you can use to build your site, write your posts, and promote them. However, you may not use all of these features. This month, we’ll discover how to use filters to customize the list of features added by Jetpack.
Photo: Andrewfhart / Flickr
Use filters to customize the Jetpack features available on your site
The new Jetpack introduces improvements for better performance under the hood and to allow you work faster.
WordPress 4.5 shipped with a new feature, Selective Refresh: if your theme supports it, widgets refresh in the Customizer as you edit them, letting you see changes instantly without refreshing the entire page.
We’ve updated Jetpack widgets to leverage Selective Refresh, and now they’ll update in real time as well!
A new tool lets you edit VideoPress shortcodes right in the Editor, with a fancy new modal window containing key playback options:
Plus, videos placed in the Editor now adjust themselves to your theme’s content width, so you can more accurately see how it will look in your post or page when published.
Use WooCommerce? You just got sharing options for each of your products:
Social icons are now placed under the “Add to cart” button in singular product views, making it easier for customers to share your products with their friends and fans on social media.
We’ve done a better job explaining the benefits of Jetpack and connecting it to WordPress.com when the plugin is installed but not yet connected.
We also added handy links to shortcode documentation to convey the types of media you can quickly and safely embed.
Jetpack protect helps safeguard your site against brute-force attacks, and now it’s got more muscle behind it. We’ve updated the code and routines that verify your site is protected to be more efficient. For folks using the Contact Form module, sweeping spam submissions out of your database is now faster.
Custom Content Types: a new CSS class on Testimonial featured images — has-testimonial-thumbnail — allows you to customize Jetpack custom post types as you see fit.
Theme Tools: improved schema.org microdata for breadcrumbs gives search engines an easier time knowing what page they are on, and how that page relates to the other pages in your site hierarchy.
Widget Visibility: get granular with your widget display:
Select widgets and specify to show or hide them right from custom post types, in both single and archive views.
We also fixed some issues…
Jetpack_IXR_Client class which caused fatal PHP errors in some server setups.responsive-videos.min.js in order to address a false positive virus alert in ClamAV. Expect it to be re-minified in 4.0.1 once we resolve the issue with ClamAV.Thanks to everyone who contributed to 4.0:
Alex Kirk, Barry Abrahamson, Bernhard Reiter, Biser Perchinkov, Brando Meniconi, Brandon Hubbard, Brandon Kraft, Christopher Finke, Dan Walmsley, Derek Smart, Drew Butler, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, George Stephanis, Igor Zinovyev, Ivan Kristianto, Jeff Golenski, Jeremy Herve, Jesse Friedman, Joey Kudish, Lance Willett, Matt Wiebe, Michael Cain, Miguel Lezama, Mohammad Jangda, Patrick Rauland, Philip John, Richard Muscat, RC Lations, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Tammie Lister, Thomas Guillot, Weston Ruter.
We’ve released 4.0.2 that fixes a fatal error that was caused by Jetpack not being able to find a library directory.
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