Benefits of using Jetpack for WordPress

What happens when the people behind WordPress.com, get together to make a WordPress plugin? You get Jetpack.

With over 5 million active installations, Jetpack is designed to be an all-rounder plugin for people using WordPress, regardless of their expertise. Think of it as an all-in-one plugin, with features ranging from performance enhancements, security protocols, theme customization and many more.

People who are new to WordPress can use Jetpack’s site stats, contact form and other useful modules – without having to install a separate plugin for each feature. On the flip side, power users can take advantage of features such as related posts, lazy loading, and CDN – all for free! Though upgrading to Jetpack premium adds even more useful features for Google analytics, advertising, priority support and more.

Let’s start with the discussion of Benefits of Jetpack.

1. Free Content Delivery Network (CDN) for WordPress

The very first feature that comes to mind is the free content delivery network provided by Jetpack. Unlike other CDN providers, Jetpack CDN does not require any signup, gives you unlimited CDN bandwidth, and is completely free – for life!

2. Lazy Loading of Images in WordPress.

Lazy Loading is a feature that has found a mention in every credible WordPress performance optimization post. You see, the idea behind lazy loading is simple. Load images only when the visitor sees it instead of all at once when your page loads.

3. Subscribe to New Posts via Email in WordPress

Jetpack’s email subscription feature enables visitors to subscribe to your blog posts via email. It’s displayed as a Notify me of new posts via email checkbox. People who click on it are asked to share their email address in order to subscribe or follow your blog’s posts.

Additionally, you can use the Subscribe to Comments feature to give your readers the option to subscribe to your blog’s comments via email. This is displayed as a secondary checkbox to Notify me of new comments via email.

4. WordPress Site Uptime & Downtime Monitoring

The downtime monitoring feature from Jetpack periodically monitors your site and notifies you via email whenever there is a downtime.

Not just that, it keeps on monitoring and sends you emails reminding you that your site is still down. Finally, once your site is back online – Jetpack sends yet another a confirmation email – informing you that your site is online again!

5. Related Posts for WordPress

The Related Posts feature automatically suggests related content after every post in your WordPress site. It’s a great way to keep your visitors engaged, improve time-on-site and decrease bounce rate (to an extent).

6. Infinite Scroll in WordPress

Infinite Scroll is a feature that automatically loads new posts without refreshing the page, as the visitor scrolls down to the bottom of the current post. Similar to Related Posts, this feature is designed to increase visitor engagement and time on site.

Furthermore, Jetpack gives you the ability to configure how the next posts are loaded. For instance, you can configure them to load automatically – according to the theme/user behavior. You can also present the visitors with a “read/load more” button, which upon clicking loads the next set of posts.

7. Build a Contact Form in WordPress

This Jetpack module enables you to build WordPress contact forms with custom fields directly from the default editor. With a single click, you’re able to insert and customize contact forms directly from the WordPress editor.

8. Publish Posts via Email in WordPress

Imagine you’re in a remote location and you have to publish an article in your WordPress site. Media-rich sites like the WordPress editor won’t load due to the slow Internet connectivity. There aren’t any WiFi cafes nearby. The only thing that does seem to work is email. You barely have enough Internet speed to send out an email.

This is where Jetpack’s posts via email feature comes in handy. It gives you a dedicated email address for you to publish in your WordPress blog. You can find this under the WordPress Dashboard > Jetpack > Settings > Writing tab.

9. Automated Social Sharing with Publicize

The Publicize module from Jetpack enables you to automatically post your freshly published content to your social media sites. It saves you the hassle of having to manually post in each social media network.

10. Secure Authentication and WordPress.com Login

Jetpack’s secure authentication module enables you (or your users) to login to your WordPress site using WordPress.com account. To activate this feature, go to WordPress Dashboard > Jetpack > Settings > Security and toggle it on under the last section for WordPress.com login.

You can also configure the module to only allow users to log in if their WordPress.com account email address match with the email ID used to create the user account in your WordPress.site.

11. Media Embeds in WordPress

This is one of those features that are enabled by default in Jetpack. It essentially helps you paste media-rich content such as YouTube videos and SoundCloud audio files – in their native form – without writing a single line of code/shortcode.

All you have to do is copy-paste the link in your post in the WordPress editor, and Jetpack will take care of the rest.

Jetpack has evolved to support multiple websites with media-rich content including Instagram, Slideshare, Twitter, Google Docs, TED, DailyMotion, CodePen, Medium, Pinterest and more. For a detailed, up-to-date list, check out their official documentation on content embeds.

12. Site Verification and Sitemaps in WordPress

I’ll be straight up with you – Jetpack isn’t the best SEO plugin out there. For starters, the SEO module itself (which includes meta tags, SEO settings, Google analytics integration, etc) is a paid feature in Jetpack. Yoast SEO is a far better, free plugin with a plethora of features and tutorials, trusted by over five million WordPress websites.

That being said, for users who aren’t ready to spend time with a dedicated SEO plugin can use Jetpack’s site verification modules to verify their site with multiple search engines including Google, Bing, Pinterest, and Yandex. Simply visit WordPress Dashboard > Jetpack > Settings > Traffic.

13. Widgets, Widgets and More WordPress Widgets

Widgets are one of the most popular features offered by the Jetpack plugin. It provides a plethora of uniquely useful widgets that can be used in multiple ways. They range from social media feeds, GDPR cookie notifications and more.

14. Multiple Sites from a Single Dashboard at WordPress.com

Remember how we spoke of using WordPress.com to reap the full benefits of Jetpack? Well, you’re going to love this feature.

Once you connect your sites with Jetpack, you can manage all of them from your WordPress.com dashboard. This includes things like viewing site stats, publishing posts, responding to comments, updating plugins and much more.

15. (Premium) WordPress Backup and Restore by Jetpack

WordPress backup and restoration is a serious matter. Over the years we’ve seen a lot of WordPress backup plugins and services that specialize in hourly backups, incremental backups, and more.

Backup from Jetpack is a premium module. It takes automatic backups and supports one-click restoration. What’s interesting is how the backup is made.

Jetpack essentially takes a backup whenever an event occurs. An event can include page and post creation/modification, comment submission/modification, plugin and theme installations, modifications, or updates, and additions of or changes to user accounts.

Jetpack also maintains an Activity Log of all the events, listed in chronological order. Every entry in this Activity Log serves as a restore point. Just click on an event and choose between downloading the backup, or restoring your site to that point.