My Favorite Jetpack Features

If you have a WordPress website, there’s a good chance you are using Jetpack. Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that gives you a number of additional tools for your self-hosted WordPress site. You install it, and connect it to your WordPress.com account (which I know is super confusing) and then you can enable a number of different features. I thought I’d take a minute and share some of the Jetpack features that I really like.

• Stats: Yes, of course, I run Google Analytics. But I like having the Jetpack stats too. They are right there in my Dashboard, ready to view, with info about how many hits I’m getting and more.
• Widget Visibility: Want to control which widgets get shown on which page? Here’s the tool to do it.
• Publicize: Connect your blog to your social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc) and share your new content automatically. This saves me time since we publish new content almost daily.
• WP.me Shortlinks: This is for sharing, it gives all my posts a pretty little short link into my social media portals so we use less characters. Easy for emailing links too.
• Monitor: I get an alert as soon as my site goes down, so I can find out what’s going on. Super handy. You don’t want to find out hours later that your site has been out.
• Photon: This loads your images from the WordPress.com CDN, speeding up your site.
• Enhanced Distribution: Wanna make sure your new content gets shared across the search engines? This is how. Super useful.

There are a few Jetpack features I don’t use too.

• Contact Forms: I like Gravity Forms, it gives me a lot more features and options than the Jetpack forms. If you only need a simple contact form, this will cut it, but if you need anything more complex you’ll need to get a different plugin.
• Subscriptions: In the past, I have used this. But now that I’m delivering my posts via a weekly RSS feed, I turned off the daily post notifications through subscriptions. It was too confusing to have some people receiving weekly emails and some receiving daily emails.

Jetpack offers a lot of features, and it’s worth a look to see if any of these will be useful. I like the concept of getting most of these options from one plugin, rather than using a bunch of get the same features.

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