Supercharge WordPress with Jetpack

When I first looked at Jetpack I didn’t get what all the fuss was about but now I’m a Jetpack convert. Over the years Jetpack has seen a lot of changes and now offers much more.

JetPack, by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is a suite of plugins that brings wordpress.com features to your self-hosted WordPress .org site. You can select which features to configure for your own purposes.

To use Jetpack, sign-up for a free WordPress.com account and connect it to your website.

Jetpack Comments

Jetpack takes the big Leave a Comment box and gives you a little streamlined box.  You can personalize the Leave a Comment greeting in Settings -> Discussion

When a visitor clicks on the comment box it pops open. Jetpack Comments lets visitors use their WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus accounts to comment on your site.

Jetpack Subscriptions gives visitors the option to follow your new blog posts by email, a great way to keep engaged site visitors coming back. The subscription option appears at the bottom of comments, there’s also a Jetpack widget that you can drag to a sidebar widget area.

Jetpack Adds More Available Widgets

There are now eight widgets added by Jetpack.  In addition to the blog subscription widget, you can add images, your Facebook and Twitter streams, display your Gravatar profile, and link to your most popular content and your site’s RSS links to your sidebar.

Jetpack Sharing

Jetpack Sharing gives readers the tools to post your content to their networks from the bottom of each post and/or page.  If you want to display a service that isn’t included, you can add your own custom services by clicking on ‘Add a new service’. You will then be able to add the service name, a URL, and an icon.

NEW! The latest update to Jetpack includes integration of Google services and products.  Go to Settings -> Sharing and connect your Google+ Profile

This will display Your Google+ Follow button below the Jetpack Sharing buttons

Jetpack Publicize

makes it easy to share your site’s posts on several social media networks automatically when you publish a new post. For Facebook, you can choose to publish the post to your wall or to a page. Publicize supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Path.

Widget Visibility

I’ve used the dynamic widget’s plugin to control which widget’s display on which pages, this can now be done through Jetpack’s NEW Widget Visibility tool.  To control visibility, expand the widget and click the Visibility button next to the Save button, then set the visibility options.

there’s more to love Jetpack for, including …

• WordPress Stats
• Related Posts
• Contact Forms
• Infinite Scroll
• Custom CSS
• Spelling & Grammar
• check out the full (and growing) list here

Turning off features you don’t need….

If there are Jetpack features that you don’t want to use you can turn them off. On the Jetpack configuration page click “Learn More” under any of the features . The “Configure” button beside the “Learn More” button will now change to a “Deactivate” button.

Whenever Jetpack update, be sure to check out what’s new.

What do you think?

Which of the Jetpack features do you like the best?