Last Chance

As #SmallBusinessWeek comes to a close this is your last chance to take advantage of our exclusive 20% discount off all our paid plans.

Just use the code SMALLBIZ at checkout.

If you’re still on the fence, read our recap or dive into the detail about:

  1. Free, elegant, and professional WordPress themes.
  2. Cost-effectiveness and affordability.
  3. Bulletproof security for your business site.
  4. Straightforward SEO and marketing tools.
  5. World-class support.

As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in small business | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

#SmallBusinessWeek Day 5: Spotlight on Expert Help and Support

In the last installment of our #SmallBusinessWeek round-up, today we focus on the service that underpins every other service we provide.

“Turn it off… and on again.”

This is a phrase you’ve probably heard often from your cable company or internet service provider. Or variations on the theme from your host or developer such as “uninstall it and install it again.”

Our support approach is the opposite of that.

Every support request we receive gets personalized attention and a relevant response. (We may, sometimes, ask you to “turn it off and on again” but you’re guaranteed that that’s because we genuinely think it will help resolve your issue.)

The customer support that I’ve received from Jetpack has exceeded all of my expectations. The folks at customer support have replied to my questions extremely fast. They also work quickly to identify and provide a solution to the problem. I can only hope that when my website grows up that I will be able to offer the superior customer service provided to me from Jetpack. Thank you again! Dave at DQ’s WebSolutions.

Comment by Dave.

Jetpack’s high ratings, of which over 65% are 5-star ratings, are primarily due to the excellent support we provide. We are able to do this because, although we care about things like ticket volume and response times, the main thing we care about is customer satisfaction — which averages at a steady rate of 85% full satisfaction — which is why our support staff call themselves Happiness Engineers.

This is rarely achieved by simply asking users to turn it off (and on again) by default. It is achieved by having an amazing support staff who practice user empathy, are experts in their field, and have a direct line to our development teams.

Can you get cheaper security services? Sure. But as you know, cheaper isn’t always better and having an expert in your corner when the chips are down is the clever option.

Whistler

25 of Jetpack’s Happiness Engineers, September 2016

The Jetpack Advantage

Installing Jetpack means forming part of a community of people passionate about WordPress.

These are the benefits you will experience:

  1. Expert opinions.
    Every person you interact with when contacting our support staff is an expert in WordPress, Jetpack, and security. We have 30 Happiness Engineers (and constantly hiring) dedicated to Jetpack all of whom interact on a daily basis with our product developers and designers.
  2. A direct hot line.
    While we provide support to everyone, customers on a paid plan — starting at just $39 per year — get priority.
  3. Your suggestions are listened to.
    At Jetpack, Happiness Engineers are our primary “voice of the customer”. We take serious note of bugs, requests, and issues that you report and do our best to address them in future Jetpack releases.
  4. Global coverage.
    Our support staff are spread out across different timezones to be able to serve you better, wherever in the world you are.

Bonus: Exclusive Discount

Just for this #SmallBusinessWeek, in celebration of all the small businesses that keep the world turning, we’re offering a 20% one-time discount on all our paid subscriptions.

Just use the code SMALLBIZ at checkout.

And of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in small business | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

#SmallBusinessWeek Day 4: Spotlight on SEO and Marketing Tools

Today the focus of our #SmallBusinessWeek series is on marketing and search engine optimization.

The Hard Part Should Be Writing Your Content

One thing that hasn’t changed in decades (centuries?) of marketing — online and offline — is that as an entrepreneur, consultant, or small business owner you need to be found and you need to communicate your message.

The Internet has in many ways facilitated those things. But it’s easy to get bogged down in technicalities, numbers, and red herrings that distract you from talking to your customers, explaining your message better, and ultimately selling more.

featured-image-stats

A sample of Jetpack’s stats.

The Jetpack Advantage

For many WordPress sites, Jetpack provides the baseline starting point you need to make sure the “tech” is sorted while you focus on writing about your services.

These are the benefits you will experience:

  1. Simple and concise stats.
    Available in your dashboard, on WordPress.com, on your mobile browser, and the official WordPress apps, Jetpack tracks your visitors, where they come from, and gives you insights that help you work out what content is resonating with your readers.
  2. Get the SEO basics right.
    You don’t need expensive consultants to get your basics right. Jetpack automatically generates sitemaps for Google to understand your site and helps you verify your site with official search engines. Professional plan customers get some more advanced tooling to see search engine and social media content previews.
  3. Expand your reach.
    Straightforward tools help you promote your message and capitalize on your existing audience. Jetpack makes it trivial to add sharing buttons, automatically promote content on Facebook and Twitter, use Related Posts to keep readers on your site, and allow visitors to join your mailing list.
  4. Expert support.
    All Jetpack users, free or paid, are able to get in touch with our support staff to receive assistance with any of the Jetpack features. Paid customers receive priority support for much faster resolution.

Bonus: Exclusive Discount

Just for this #SmallBusinessWeek, in celebration of all the small businesses that keep the world turning, we’re offering a 20% one-time discount on all our paid subscriptions.

Just use the code SMALLBIZ at checkout.

And of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in small business | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

#SmallBusinessWeek Day 3: Spotlight on Securing your Business Site

Continuing with our #SmallBusinessWeek celebration, today the spotlight is on how Jetpack protects your business site from unwelcome attention and, more crucially, how using Jetpack means you can recover from problems.

How Does Catastrophic Site Failure Occur?

Neglect.

Day by day, week by week, month by month, if a building is not maintained cracks will appear, rust will take hold, and eventually, the roof will cave in when you least expect it to.

A website is not much different. The consequences will be less dramatic but no less real.

If content, comments, code, passwords, and plugins are not being regularly tested, audited, cleaned, and updated cracks will appear in the form of vulnerabilities and spam. The metaphorical roof will “cave in” when your website security is breached and hackers gain access to your site dashboard, content, and user data. It only needs to happen once for your hard-won reputation to be undermined.

Needless to say, it is much cheaper in the long run to keep the roof in good shape than deal with the fallout and expense of rebuilding.

featured-image-security

The Jetpack Advantage

Jetpack has both free and paid services that maintain your site for you and provide you with an “insurance policy” should something go wrong.

These are the benefits you will experience:

  1. Prevention (much better than cure).
    Jetpack protects your site from brute force attacks (free), provides secure authentication with WordPress.com accounts (free), automatically updates your plugins (free), and monitors your site every 2 minutes for downtime (free). Paid customers are protected from spam and affiliates links that aim to steal traffic and undermine your brand.
  2. Daily code audits and scans.
    Premium plan customers benefit from automatic, daily scans of their entire site code for suspicious code. Jetpack looks for and identifies known security threats from the thousands in our regularly updated library. Professional plan customers also benefit from automated fixes not just notifications.
  3. A backup plan.
    All our paid plans, starting from just $39 per year, provide you with the ultimate backup plan: daily, automated, and unlimited storage backups of your entire site with the ability to restore at the push of a button. Professional plan customers also benefit from real-time backups.
  4. And a fallback plan.
    If all else fails, you can rely on our team of WordPress experts. Priority support, available to all paid customers, gets you personalized assistance with restoring or migrating your site, dealing with identified threats, and other website security issues and best practices.

Bonus: Exclusive Discount

Just for this #SmallBusinessWeek, in celebration of all the small businesses that keep the world turning, we’re offering a 20% one-time discount on all our paid subscriptions.

Just use the code SMALLBIZ at checkout.

And of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in small business | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Jetpack 4.9: New Widgets and Many Small Improvements

Following last month’s big redesign, we focused this next release on a few new widgets and several performance improvements and bug fixes.

New Widgets

This release makes three new widgets available for use on your site:

  • EU Cookie Law Banner widget: allows you to display the standard confirmation required by EU law that gives site visitors the ability to accept site cookies.
  • Flickr widget: allows you to show a stream of images from a Flickr account.
  • Internet Defense League widget: allows you to add a widget for visitors to show their support for the Internet Defense League.

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.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

Included in this release are a number of small fixes and changes to improve compatibility and robustness, including:

  • Removing unused code and increasing our unit tests and overall code coverage.
  • Plugin updates now trigger the in-built WordPress maintenance mode for additional security.
  • Protect doesn’t conflict with other plugins using the login form and better supports IPv6 addresses.
  • The Contact Form doesn’t auto-activate if Ninja Forms is already activated.
  • Fixed a problem where some Tiled Gallery images were appearing distorted when using Photon.
  • Better MultiSite support for Stats and displaying full list of sites.

Full Changelog and Thanks

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.

Posted in Releases | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

#SmallBusinessWeek Day 2: Spotlight on Affordability and ROI

As part of our #SmallBusinessWeek celebration, today the spotlight is on how Jetpack’s services — including the free ones — help keep your costs under control and free up your time.

What Does a Website Really Cost?

You already know the basics: you’ve paid for a domain name and web-hosting. And if you’re not using our free WordPress themes, you’ve probably paid for a theme as well.

But there’s more:

  • If your website traffic spikes (yay!) you might unexpectedly end up paying your hosting provider more money to allow for the additional load (boo).
  • Even the most basic of websites needs maintenance. At a minimum, plugins will require updating to make sure you’re covered against security breaches.
  • Just like a physical shop, as soon as your website is online you are a potential target for hackers and spammers. Should they be successful, cleaning or restoring your site can be, to put it mildly, challenging.

If you do end up requiring someone to help you will also incur expenses there but, the elephant in the room is always time.

Automattic Grand Meetup 2016

The Jetpack Advantage

Installing Jetpack on your site helps you be in control of your time and expenses and, ultimately, allows you to focus on what you do best: running your business not your site.

These are the benefits you will experience:

  1. No unexpected traffic costs.
    Jetpack hosts your images and photos (free) and optionally your videos (paid). This means that if your site suddenly experiences a spike in traffic, your host is bypassed and you will not incur additional costs for the extra bandwidth you use up.
  2. Automated updates (and fewer plugins in the first place).
    You can set up Jetpack so that it automatically updates your installed plugins (including itself!) without you having to ever lift a finger. Because Jetpack bundles so much functionality, you will also most likely have fewer plugins to worry about.
  3. Protection from spam, data loss, hacks, and attacks.
    Jetpack protects you from brute force attacks (free) and monitors your site for downtime (free). Starting from just $39 per year you also get spam-filtering, automatic site backups, and priority support. A small upfront cost (less than 11 cents a day) that will bear fruit if you ever (don’t) need to pay a professional to restore your site.
  4. Expert support.
    All Jetpack users, free or paid, are able to get in touch with our support staff to receive assistance with any of the Jetpack features. Paid customers receive priority support for much faster resolution.

Bonus: Exclusive Discount

Just for this #SmallBusinessWeek, in celebration of all the small businesses that keep the world turning, we’re offering a 20% one-time discount on all our paid subscriptions.

Just use the code SMALLBIZ at checkout.

And of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in small business | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

#SmallBusinessWeek Day 1: Spotlight on Jetpack’s Free Themes

As part of our #SmallBusinessWeek celebration, today the spotlight is on how Jetpack’s free themes enable small business owners to get going faster, professionally, and cheaply.

The Common Factor

Every site is different but there is one thing that every website, no matter what it’s for, needs: a design.

If you’re a small business owner, freelancer, or consultant choosing to create a WordPress site for your business this is most probably something you’ve been thinking about.

And possibly worrying about because themes don’t come cheap: you either pay good money for them or you pay a designer to build one for you.

featured-image-themes

Six of Jetpack’s 165 free themes.

The Jetpack Advantage

By installing Jetpack on your site you get immediate access to 165 multi-purpose, elegant, professionally built, and free WordPress themes.

More usefully, these are the benefits you will experience:

  1. You can get going.
    At no additional cost or waiting on third-parties you can pick a design, write some content, and have a first version of your site online in record time — and then get back to running your business.
  2. Hedge your bets.
    You don’t have to commit to one theme right away while you learn the ropes. You can try different ones and any settings or content you create are automatically applied to any theme you switch to.
  3. Understand what you really need.
    You might still choose to hire a designer (or purchase a premium theme) but, instead of doing that blindly, you will have hands-on experience of what you actually need.
  4. Expert support.
    All Jetpack users, free or paid, are able to get in touch with our support staff to receive assistance with any of the Jetpack features.

Bonus: Exclusive Discount

Just for this #SmallBusinessWeek, in celebration of all the small businesses that keep the world turning, we’re offering a 20% one-time discount on all our paid subscriptions.

Just use the code SMALLBIZ at checkout.

And of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in small business | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Learn Why Jetpack is the Ideal Solution for Small Businesses (And Get Your Exclusive #SmallBusinessWeek Discount)

There’s a reason millions of small businesses use Jetpack for their WordPress sites.

Actually there’s five reasons.

As part of #SmallBusinessWeek we’re highlighting the features and benefits Jetpack brings to small business. Read on to learn about them or scroll to the bottom for the discount code!

featured-image-smallbiz

Reason #1: Free, Elegant, and Professional Designs

Whether you run a bookstore, cafe, restaurant, consulting firm, or are a freelancer, choosing a site design can be the hardest — and most expensive — first step.

Jetpack provides 165 free, professionally designed WordPress themes that you can then customize with Jetpack’s own design tools. Most small business owners find this is an easier way to get started than purchasing expensive themes and then hiring a designer or developer.

Read more about Jetpack’s free themes…


Reason #2: Cost-Effective and Affordable

The majority of Jetpack’s features are free. That’s already a great starting point for any business, especially since all our free features include most of what a typical website needs likes stats, related posts, an image CDN (saving you hosting costs), sharing tools, and email subscriptions.

And our paid plans start from an affordable $39 per year: less than 11 cents a day.

Read more about Jetpack’s cost-effectiveness…


Reason #3: Bulletproof Security

If you’re like most small business owners you don’t have the time — or the expertise — to be taking backups and auditing your site daily for hackers, malware, and spam.

Our free security tools — including brute force attack protection and uptime monitoring — make sure you never miss out on traffic and business leads because your site is hacked or being overrun by spam.

Our paid plans provide expert security support, automated backups (so if your site goes down you can get back up and running quickly), and security scanning to identify hacks and intrusions.

Read more about Jetpack’s security services…


Reason #4: SEO and Marketing Tools

Out-of-the-box and for free Jetpack gets you going with making sure your site has a sitemap so that Google can list your site accurately. You also get social media sharing tools, automatic promotion to Facebook, Twitter and other sites, email subscriptions, and related posts so that readers stick around your site for longer.

The main benefit most of our business users see here is not requiring a multitude of plugins to achieve these simple things and, just as importantly, not having to pay for them.

Read more about Jetpack’s marketing tools…


Reason #5: World-Class Support

If you asked our customers what they rave about, most of them will mention our support. At last count we have thirty WordPress experts all over the globe ready to provide assistance — even to free users.

Paying customers get priority which, when you compare the $39 minimum yearly cost to what a developer might charge, is significantly more affordable.

Read more about Jetpack’s support…


Bonus Reason #6: Exclusive Discount

Just for this #SmallBusinessWeek, in celebration of all the small businesses that keep the world turning, we’re offering a 20% one-time discount on all our paid subscriptions.

Just use the code SMALLBIZ at checkout.

And of course, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in small business | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Not All Website Backups are Created Equal (and Why Automatic is Better than Manual)

Whether your website has one page or thousands, you should back up all of your content regularly. Automation is the foolproof way of making sure you’re never caught out.

The Manual Approach

A lot of website owners rely on external hard drives, USB flash drives, or CDs. Any backup is better than none, but storing your files and backups in the same physical place leaves them vulnerable to damage, theft, or loss.

Not to mention that you need to remember to do it and handhold your computer and server throughout the process.

Saving a copy of your files in a separate physical location, also called an off-site backup, is the best way to ensure your site is properly backed up. If something happens to your house or office and your main files are compromised, your off-site backup will be safely stored somewhere else. In case of data loss, you’ll be able to restore your site.

Enabling Automated Backups

The easiest way to perform backups on your website is to install a plugin that does it for you. Jetpack does this by using the same infrastructure that reliably serves millions of WordPress.com sites every day.

Jetpack backs up your WordPress database and any files in your plugins, themes, and uploads folders. This includes all the unique and irreplaceable data in WordPress, and everything properly integrated into the WordPress installation.

The process is automated, regular, and verifiable.

Managing Your Backups

Our most affordable backup solution for WordPress sites is Jetpack’s Personal plan. At just $39 per year, your site is automatically backed up daily, you get a 30-day archive, and unlimited storage (as well as spam filtering and priority support).

For business or news sites that post new content or product updates multiple times a day, the Professional plan also offers real-time backups. Every time you update your site, Jetpack gets notified and immediately backs up your site, making sure your changes are replicated and synchronized. Jetpack Professional also scans your website for security threats, so your website is always safe.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in Security Series | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Protect Your Website From This Common Form of Hacking

Your login page is the most vulnerable part of your website. It is the perfect target for a brute force attack — the most common form of online hacking.

What is a Brute Force Attack?

A brute force attack is the most rudimentary form of hacking: it employs bots that try different combinations of usernames and passwords until they find the right one. These are called malicious login attempts and can affect your website’s performance.

Each time a visitor lands on your website, their IP address makes an HTTP request to your website’s server. When bots are constantly visiting your login page in an attempt to crack your password, the number of HTTP requests spikes. All this website traffic will slow down your site, or worse, cause your server to run out of memory.

Secure Login Credentials

Choosing strong login credentials is the first step to better web security — on any site. Change your username from “admin” to something unique. “Admin” might be simple to remember, but it’s also easy to hack. Avoid using passwords that contain a version of your own name or a word in the dictionary. Choose a passphrase with a mix of numbers and letters or use a password manager that will generate secure passwords and save them for you.

If you have Jetpack installed on your site, you can enable Secure Sign On and use the same credentials you use for WordPress.com to sign in to self-hosted WordPress.org sites quickly and securely. You can choose to make this the only way to log in and disable the default login form completely.

Jetpack Brute Force Attack Protection

It’s not just your blog content at risk during a brute force attack. If a hacker successfully accesses your administrator account, your entire server could be compromised. That’s why every Jetpack Protect plan includes protection from brute force attacks, including distributed attacks that use many servers against your site.

When an IP registers too many failed login attempts, Jetpack will block that IP from accessing the login form, quickly limiting HTTP requests before they slow down your site. Your site will be protected, and you can see the number of attacks that Jetpack has stopped with a widget in your self-hosted site’s dashboard.

Next Steps: Compare plans and choose the right one for your site.

Posted in Security Series | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

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