Share the Power of Jetpack: Join Our Affiliate Program!

Posted on March 15, 2018 by Linda Scott

As a developer, designer, or business professional, you probably recommend different tools to clients and colleagues every day. But what if there was a way to make money from your recommendations?

The WordPress.com affiliate program, which includes the Jetpack affiliate program, can help you do just that. Becoming a Jetpack affiliate is a great way to earn extra money through commissions while helping clients and site builders discover how Jetpack can improve their sites.

This post will explain what a Jetpack affiliate is, how the affiliate program works, and what benefits affiliates can expect to receive after signing up. Read on for more!

Continue reading → Share the Power of Jetpack: Join Our Affiliate Program!

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Keep Your Readers Engaged with Related Posts

Posted on March 13, 2018 by Nathan Reimnitz

The more that readers enjoy being on your site, the longer they’ll stay. And the longer they stay, the more likely they are to become dedicated readers, subscribers, or customers.

If you’re looking for a way to keep your website visitors engaged for even longer periods of time, Jetpack’s Related Posts feature can help. This feature works by analyzing all of your content and suggesting additional relevant pieces to your readers.

These suggestions are curated automatically, and are based on the article currently being read. And the best part is that Jetpack accomplishes this without affecting your website’s performance.

Websites with this feature activated generally experience increases in the average length of time that each visitor spends on their site. This ultimately results in longer visits, subscriber growth, or even purchases.

Let’s look at exactly how Jetpack’s suggested posts feature works, and how to make the most of it on your own site.

Continue reading → Keep Your Readers Engaged with Related Posts

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Jetpack 5.9: General Maintenance

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Nicole Kohler

Today’s release of Jetpack 5.9 includes some general maintenance items, many of which are included due to feedback received after the release of our search and Lazy Loading Images features in 5.8. You probably won’t find anything surprising in the list below, but it’s still worth a read to see what we’ve improved!

Here’s everything you’ll find in 5.9:

Improving the behavior of Jetpack Search

We received some great feedback about the Elasticsearch-powered search feature in our Professional plans that helped us make some important changes to its behavior in this release.

First, we’ll now implicitly activate this feature when the Jetpack Search Widget gets added to a sidebar. Also, the link from the Jetpack Search settings card will now properly direct you to the Widgets section in the customizer, so it’ll be easier to add and customize your search widget.

Another change we’ve introduced: any active Jetpack Search widgets will be moved to the inactive list if you disable the search feature.

Adding a filter to the Lazy Loading Images feature

We now allow images to be ignored by the Lazy Loading Images feature (introduced in 5.8) if they contain a reserved class name — by default, skip-lazy, or a custom one you define via the new jetpack_lazy_images_blacklisted_classes filter.

To use this on your site, apply the like skip-lazy class to a post or page with images, and verify that they do not load in a deferred fashion when visiting the content from the frontend.

Signing out from the WordPress.com Toolbar no longer logs you out of WordPress.com

Previously, when your site had the WordPress.com Toolbar enabled and you signed out of your site, you would also be signed out of WordPress.com. This would potentially create a strange experience if you just were trying to sign out to your site in order to perform testing.

With Jetpack 5.9, if you sign out from the toolbar, you will only be logged out of your site — not WordPress.com. You will still be able to configure Jetpack from WordPress.com if you wish to.

Additional performance enhancements

Finally, here are a few additional changes you may want to be aware of:

  • We improved the way we handle characters for the minor conditions dropdown of the Widget Visibility section. For example, categories containing names with an ampersand will now be properly shown.
  • We added support for excerpts to the Portfolio and Testimonial custom post types.
  • A new filter, jetpack_twitter_image_default, was added to allow themes and plugins to customize twitter:image when no suitable image is found automatically.
  • We removed an error that would occasionally appear when attempting to connect a site after clicking the Jetpack banner in the WordPress Dashboard.

Full changelog and thanks

As always, the changelog provides the full list of updates and changes in this release. If you have questions or feedback, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

Install Jetpack on your site or upgrade to 5.9 today to try out the latest improvements!

Thank you to the contributors to this release:

Alex Mills, Anna Magdalena Kedzierska, Ben Lowery, Bernie Reiter, Brandon Kraft, Daniel Walmsley, Derek Smart, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Greg Ichneumon Brown, Igor Zinovyev, James Nylen, Jeff Bowen, Jeff Golenski, Jeremy Herve, Jonny Harris, Marin Atanasov, Matt Wiebe, Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Mikael Korpela, Nicole Kohler, Oscar Lopez, Paul Sealock, Rebecca Hum, Richard Muscat, Rob Landers, Robert Elliott, Rocco Tripaldi, Ryan Barrett, Steven Lin, Stephen Edgar, Umang Vaghela, Yaroslav Kukharuk and Žiga Sancin.

Posted in Releases | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Increase Your Site’s Revenue with Ads

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Linda Scott

Are you looking for a simple way to make extra money from your WordPress website? If so, many bloggers and business owners use advertising to bring in income, and you may want to consider doing the same.

Ads provide a straightforward process for diversifying your income, without taking time and effort away from your day-to-day site management. And with a Jetpack Premium or Professional plan, you can show ads from major advertising networks on your site without having to put on your suit to pitch an advertising firm.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of adding ads to your WordPress site, learn about Jetpack Ads, and how to activate and customize it the advertisements on your site to make the maximum amount of money possible.

Continue reading → Increase Your Site’s Revenue with Ads

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Why You Should Create Offsite Backups

Posted on February 16, 2018 by Brenda Barron
Jetpack Offsite Backups

You may already have backups, but are they stored in a safe location?

Creating and managing a website is easier than it once was, but things still go wrong. Sites still get hacked. Updates might break certain features, or bring entire websites down. Mistakes get made, sometimes right before a really important, high-traffic day.

To avoid these situations, making a backup of your site on a regular basis is critical. It’s even more important to ensure that this backup happens outside of your host. But many of us are guilty of failing to prioritize this important task.

In this post, we’ll cover why you need to perform regular backups, why they should be made offsite, and offer a solution so that you won’t have to worry about losing your data in the event of a mistake or emergency.

Continue reading → Why You Should Create Offsite Backups

Posted in Security Series | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Ways to Boost User Engagement with Videos

Posted on February 13, 2018 by zachwills

Do you have any videos on your site? If not, you probably should consider adding some.

When it comes to getting the attention of a potential customer or fan, few things are more effective than a captivating video. In fact, Marketing Land reports that people are typically more likely to make purchases after watching product videos.

The use of video content on a business site captures visitor attention and reduces bounce rates. Videos give visitors an incentive to stay and interact with your site longer, leading them to become more interested in your brand in the process. The more invested a person is, the more likely they are to transition from a potential customer to an actual one.

Despite the many benefits of video content, most small business sites don’t use it. This is a huge missed opportunity. Fortunately, it’s never too late to add videos and help your site stand out among the crowd!

Continue reading → Ways to Boost User Engagement with Videos

Posted in Tips & Tricks | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Jetpack 5.8: A Focus on Speed with Faster Search and Lazy Loading Images

Posted on February 6, 2018 by Nicole Kohler

Today’s release of Jetpack 5.8 includes several features that have graduated from beta testing. We are very excited to bring them out for you to try.

Let’s take a closer look at what we’ve included in this update, and how today’s additions will help you speed up your site and deliver faster, more relevant content to your visitors — always a good thing!

New search service exits beta

The most exciting news first: all Professional plan customers will now be able to use the new Jetpack search service, which replaces the default WordPress search functionality with an Elasticsearch-powered service. This delivers more relevant results with powerful filtering options and unmatched scalability for sites with large amounts of content.

For sites that have a large number of posts, pages, or products, you will see significant improvements to both the speed of searching through the site, as well as to the relevance of the results returned.

For site builders, you can configure our sidebar widgets so that users can refine their search by any categories, tags, month/year, post type or any taxonomy. For developers, we expose the full power of Elasticsearch under the hood — send custom queries or use our template tags to customize the end-user search experience. Learn more about this feature on our support page.

Jetpack Elasticsearch-powered Search on a Photography blog

We received a ton of fantastic feedback from customers who tested this during the early stages, and we’d like to give our heartfelt thanks to everyone who submitted their feedback, test results, and ideas for improving this integration prior to today’s official launch.

Lazy loading images

Sites that have a large number of images — like photo blogs, travel sites, and online stores — have a new feature to try out that may significantly speed things up and lower their bounce rates. We’ve implemented a lazy loading images feature into Jetpack 5.8, which significantly reduces page load times for end users.

Lazy loading images work in this way: instead of waiting for the entire page to load before displaying it to a visitor, Jetpack will instead show the page’s non-image content as quickly as possible (usually instantly). Jetpack then requests and downloads images on the page when the user scrolls down, so they’ll appear right as the user gets to that point on the screen.

Here’s a short video showing the difference between a site with this feature and one without:

Combined with our existing image CDN, this has the potential to speed up media-heavy sites dramatically. We’d love to hear your feedback on it if you give it a try.

Get more for your money with Jetpack Premium

About a week ago, we quietly rolled out some changes to our Premium plan. The keen-eyed among you may have already spotted the changes or new features in your dashboard, but if you missed it, here’s what’s new.

Previously, there were some minor differences in the security offerings between our Premium and Professional plans. But now, Premium customers have access to on-demand security scanning and automated threat resolution.

We’ve also lifted the 13GB restriction on video uploads for the plan, so Premium customers now get unlimited video uploading and streaming services.

Jetpack’s video hosting service is designed and optimized for WordPress, integrates directly into the media library you use on a daily basis, and—best of all—is completely ad-free. It uses the same CDN as our images, so it’s blazing fast. If you haven’t already tried it, now’s a great time to experiment!

Jetpack Premium customers can now experience all our Jetpack SEO tools.

Finally, we’ve made all of our SEO tools available to Premium customers. You can now preview and optimize your site content, or get in-depth stats with our seamless Google Analytics integration.

We think all of these additions make our Premium plan an even better value for WordPress users. At just $99 annually, it’s the most affordable way to get best-in-class security tools, super fast photo and video hosting, features that will improve your site traffic and search engine rankings, and so much more.

Not a Jetpack Premium customer? We also have a major improvement coming for Jetpack Personal that we’ll be ready to announce in just a few weeks. Keep an eye on your dashboard for an important notice soon!

Additional enhancements and improvements

Finally, here are a few smaller changes we still think are worth mentioning:

  • We’ve significantly reduced CSS and JavaScript assets that Jetpack requires when using features like infinite scroll and embedding rich content with shortcodes. Our payload has been reduced by 500kb.
  • Support has been added for site language and timezone settings.
  • We’ve improved the display of notices inside the Jetpack dashboard.
  • The GettyImages shortcode has been updated to use the new format required by GettyImages.
  • For Premium and Professional customers using our ad program, we’ve now enabled the ads in the header by default. We’ve also added filters so you can control the display of the ads via code.
  • We’ve improved the display of the Development Mode notice.

Full changelog and thanks

As always, you can see a list of the additions, updates, and bugfixes in this release by reading the changelog for 5.8.

If you have any questions about these changes or feedback on the new features, please get in touch and one of our Happiness Engineers will gladly lend a hand.

Install Jetpack or upgrade to 5.8 today to see just how fast your site can go!

Thanks to the contributors to this release:

Adam Zielinski, Alex Mills, Anna Magdalena Kedzierska, Bernie Reiter, Daniel W. Robert, Daniel Walmsley, Derek Smart, Derek Springer, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Greg Ichneumon Brown, Igor Zinovyev, James Nylen, Javi Alvarez, Jeff Bowen, Jeff Golenski, Jeremy Herve, Joell Lapitan, Jon Surrell, Marin Atanasov, Matt Wiebe, Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Mikael Korpela, Nicole Kohler, Oscar Lopez, Peter Westwood, Richard Muscat, Rob Landers, Rocco Tripaldi, Rodrigo Iloro, Sam Hotchkiss, Sanket Parmar, Scott Hartley, Simon Prosser, Stephen Edgar, Umang Vaghela, Victoria Holland, Jonathan Sadowski, and Philip John.

Posted in Releases | Tagged , , , , , | 30 Comments

How Your Images Affect Your Site Speed and SEO

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Panagiotis Synetos

Let’s review how fast-loading images affect your site speed — and in turn, your placement in search engine results.

Sites that use too many images, or have images that are too large, have longer loading times. This can slow down your entire page, irritating visitors and actually hurting your site’s ranking in online search results. We may say that images are worth a thousand words, but if you don’t plan for fast loading times, they actually won’t be worth very much at all.

In this post, we’ll discuss why search engines like Google care about image load times, and how you can use Jetpack’s features to enhance your site speed by making those images load faster.

Continue reading → How Your Images Affect Your Site Speed and SEO

Posted in Tips & Tricks | Tagged , , , , , , | 13 Comments

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