What is JetPack?
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that provides an all-in-one performance solution for your WordPress websites. It comes with free and premium features. JetPack is loaded with features on how to optimize website speed and contain cyber threat. You do not need to pay to use this plugin. Jetpack was developed by a five-person developer team at Automattic on March 9, 2011. Automattic are the developers of WordPress. The first version developed was Jetpack 1.0, which has consistently evolved in the last decade. Over the years, the plugin has helped businesses and individuals alike boost their website speed as well as optimize their site’s performance.
Why do I need jetpack?
Jetpack provides security features, speed tools, growth tools, and design tools. If you want to effectively manage your WordPress website, you will need Jetpack to provide multi-layered security, visitor stats, and monitor your website’s downtime.
What is the use of jetpack?
Let’s look at what Jetpack does for your WordPress website.
Security
Jetpack protects your WordPress website from brute-force intrusions, hackers, malware, and other security vulnerabilities you may not know about. It provides privacy settings to protect your website content.
Some of the ways Jetpack protects your website include:
1) Malware scans and spam prevention tools, e.g., Akismet
This feature provides an up-to-date scan against malware and other viruses you may not know about. Scans are performed on your root directory as well as the associated database.
Jetpack also uses Akismet to easily track, detect, and stop prolonged and pervasive spam while giving you the peace of mind you require. Most of these spams are from comments on your posts and could run into thousands. Akismet does the work while you concentrate on your blog.
2) Backups
There are automated real-time backups as you post or update your WordPress website. You can also schedule your backups daily, which happens once a day.
3) Downtime monitoring
With Jetpack, you can know when your website experiences downtime. This helps you quickly take action, consult your developer, or make adjustments. It keeps an eye on your website and reports on-the-minute downtime for your perusal.
4) Protection against brute force attacks
Hackers often use trial and error to crack passwords, login credentials, and encryption keys. This is what Jetpack does: protect you against brute-force attacks.
5) Two-factor authentication
Sometimes your password may not be enough to protect you against intrusions. A two-factor authentication system such as this one provided by Jetpack provides an additional layer of protection, requiring authentication by app or after successfully entering your password.
6) Your website activity log
Jetpack also helps you provide your website activity log for monitoring or bug fixes.
7) Plugin auto-update.
You can easily update your Jetpack on the go once there is a new update or version.
I do not advise my clients to use this feature. The reason is that in my over 14 years of WordPress web development, I have encountered innumerable bugs originating from plugin auto-updates. Aside from the advantages of auto updates, they can break your sites, and you may need an expert to fix such bugs.
Speed
Jetpack has several WorPress speed tools, as follows:
1) Smart search functionality
You can easily add a Jetpack smart search bar to your website to help users discover interesting content.
2) Unlimited video hosting.
Jetpack provides unlimited video hosting for your website. That means you can host your videos outside of your WordPress website. Please be informed that this is a premium feature. In the free feature, you can only upload one video. So there is no need to toggle on this feature if you are not running a video-rich site or if you are not ready to buy the premium feature. This is because it installs a bug that prevents you from uploading more than one video once it is toggled.
2) Content Delivery Network
This feature helps channel some of your traffic outside your own servers. It helps relieve your server of some burdens associated with repeated file requests.
3) Image lazy loading
This feature helps your users load contents infinitely as they scroll down your website. This smart feature helps boost your website load times.
4) Jetpack Boost
Jetpack Boost is a separate plugin that integrates seamlessly with the Jackpack interface. Once installed and activated, it optimizes the CSS structure and defers non-essential JavaScripts.
Growth
Jetpack provides several growth and customization tools for your WordPress website. Some of the features are:
1) A customizable customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
This Jetpack tool helps you improve service delivery, order fulfillment, and marketing for your customers.
2) Social media tools
With Jetpack’s social media tool, you can easily share your content automatically on the social media of your choice as soon as your posts are published. You can also add various social media buttons and sharing buttons to help users engage with your posts and share your contents on social media.
3) Payment solutions and advertising programs.
Jetpack now integrates some payment solutions to help you accept online payments for your business. This is a premium feature.
You can also place ads on your website if your traffic reaches a certain threshold, say, 25000 daily visits.
4) Google Analytics integration
Jetpack easily integrates Google Analytics into your website to monitor stats and other demographics.
5) Website stats
Jetpack provides integrated visitor stats on your WordPress dashboard once you are logged in.
6) SEO tools
With Jetpack’s SEO tool, you can easily generate XML sitemaps to help search engines easily crawl and index your website.
Website design
Jetpack has several options and features to help you design certain aspects of your WordPress websites, such as AI search, image galleries, business hours, etc.
Tutorials
Jetpack setup and customization
In this tutorial, I am using an example website I developed for a client in 2024.
1) Login to your WordPress dashboard using your administrator credentials.
2) Ensure you have installed and activated Jetpack. Once you have done that, ensure you have the latest version installed; otherwise, download or update to the latest version.
To see if you have the latest version of Jetpack, click on Installed Plugins. In this example, the latest version is not installed.
3) Next, click on “update now” just below the Jetpack plugin.
4) Notice that the plugin is updating, as seen in the image below.
5) The plugin is now updated with a green mark beside the word “updated.”
6) Scroll up to where you can find Dashboard and Jetpack below it.
7) Click on Jetpack. A window opens showing some Jetpack customization buttons. Click settings, and you will find yourself in the security area.
8) Toggle the downtime monitoring button directly below backup and security scanning. Backup and security scanning are premium features. Don’t worry about it unless you want to purchase it.
The black and white downtime monitoring button becomes green, as shown below.
9) Scroll down to Firewall and toggle the “protect your site with Jetpack application firewall” button as shown below. You can create automatic rules for the premium version. You can also allow or block list of suspicious IP address, Choose either share basic or detailed data with Jetpack.
10) Scroll down again and toggle the brute force protection button to protect your website against hackers. You can also select of you want users to login using their WordPress credentials by toggling the WordPress login button.
11) The next tab is performance. Jetpack also provides a search box which you can add to your website to help visitors search for content of their choice. The masterpiece plugin enables you to load pages faster, optimize images and speed up your visitors experience using cutting edge technology. This is a free feature.
12)Scroll down to performance and speed and toggle enable site accelerator, speed up image load times and speed up static file load times buttons respectively. Below these three toggle buttons, there is a media section where you can easily enable the VideoPress button. With this feature you can turn your WordPress website into video blog, uploading videos with a 1TB storage space outside your server. This is both a premium and a free feature. Once toggled on, you can only upload 1 video in the free version but the premium enables you to upload unlimited videos and a guaranteed 1TB storage.
13) The next tab is writing. Here you can display images in a full screen carousel, show photo metadata, and show comment area in carousel by toggling the buttons as shown below. Carousel is a smart way to display your images to users.
16) If you scroll down to composing there are several features you can choose from. The most important is Jetpack block which we have toggled by default. Other features include ability to copy entire posts and pages including tags and categories, writing posts and pages in plain text markup syntax (you may require knowledge of markup language), enabling markup language feature and composing using shortcodes as this helps you add content from popular sites.
We also activated the testimonial function which enables your users to write reviews about your website and say something about their experiences with your products or services.
The next feature when you scroll down is portfolio. Portfolio showcases your previous completed work to your intending customers to help them make informed decision about your experience and expertise. We have toggled this on by default.
Directly below portfolio is theme enhancement. We selected loading more pages using the default theme behavior. This means your theme settings and CSS determines how more posts or pages are loaded. You can select to allow more pages to be loaded by the click of a button or by automatically loading more pages as the user scrolls down.
Below is custom CSS which enables a customizable panel to help you style your website appearance to suit your needs. You need knowledge of cascading style sheet (CSS) to use this feature.
We have toggled the widgets button by default to enable more features such as subscription forms on your website. The widget visibility button allows you to decide where to display each widget such as on pages, portfolio or posts.
Below the widgets button is the post by email button which enables you to send your post by email for posting. The next feature here is the WordPress.com toolbar which replaces the default WordPress toolbar and gives you one click access to WordPress notifications and your WordPress.com profile.
The next Jetpack feature is sharing. To reach new features and increase engagement, you need to share your posts on social media. The first button when toggled helps to automatically share your posts to connected. To automatically convert images for compatibility, toggle the next button. This enables Jetpack to make image conversions according to the file type or required pixels, according to requirement set by different social media platforms.
When you scroll down the sharing tab, locate the sharing buttons and toggle it on. This makes it possible for your website visitors to share your contact to their social networking sites. Directly below it is the Like buttons which when toggled allows users to like your posts or pages.
The next tab is the discussion. This tab contains advanced comment settings that allows website uses to comment using their WordPress or Facebook account. The benefit of this feature is that users don’t have to create an account on your website to login and comment, they simply connect Facebook or WordPress.com and leave a comment. Once toggle on, it does the trick. You can adjust the color scheme to dark.
We have enabled comments likes by default. You can enable markup for comments and popup business cards.
This section covers optimizing your website for maximum traffic and engagement. You can display related content after a post for increased user engagements. We have toggled this feature on by default. Below this feature is the highlight button for related post which we have also enabled. The next button when toggled displays a related content thumbnail where it is available. The thumbnail is usually displayed directly above the related content heading to give your website a stunning appearance.
You can see how the thumbnail is displayed below.
Jetpack stats shows visitors metrics and analytics with their corresponding geographical locations. Here you can the number of visits per day, total visits per week and in the last 30 days. This feature also displays the posts read as well as traffic sources and top referers. One this is toggled on, you get access to this feature rich tool. We have toggled on the new Jetpack stats experience and the button below that includes a small chart in the admin bar with a 48-hour traffic statistics. You can also toggle on any user level with login credentials if you want to count their logged in page views. You can track page views from logged in users such as customers and subscribers if you run an ecommerce store or a news website respectively.
You can specify who can view Jetpack stats. In this case we only allowed the administrator. You may not need everybody to view this for security and privacy concerns.
We have toggled show post views for this site to allow Jetpack provide the metrics.
The following images shows typical Jetpack metrics.
Jetpack provides features to enable you customize your search engine optimization (seo) settings as show below when you scroll down. We have enabled the customise your seo settings by default. The Google Analytics button allows you to connect your site to Google Analytics, but this is a premium only feature.
The blaze button is for ads. This helps you get high quality traffic to your website using Jetpack’s Blaze. Below the Blaze button is WP.me shortlinks which generates shortened urls for simplier sharing. The sitemap features generates files which search engines require to index your website. Search engines such as Google. Bing, Yandex etc communicate with your website via sitemaps. We have toggled this on by default to emphasise how important this feature is help search engines effective crawl and index your website.
Site verification featurd when toggled helps search engines such as Google, Bing and Yandex to determine your authority level over a particular website so that you can receive traffic insights and metrics. Websites such as Pinterest and Facebook may require your site verification for some personalized metrics on their platform.
You can verify for Google, Bing, Yandex, Pinterest and Facebook as shown below. In this example we only verified on Google. This may require some expertise to configure.
The newsletter tab provides functionality to allow visitors to subscribe to your newsletters once toggled on. You can toggle on at your choice, the option to add a quick subscfibe bugton at the end of each post and a popup menu to help users to subscribe as they scroll down posts. We have toggled on the subscribe to post as well as the subscribe to comments by default.
This newsletter categories enables you users to choose from a string of categories you have specified when subscribing to your newsletters. When you toggle on the email notification feature. Once this is toggled on, you can specify if post excerpts or fu post should be sent to subscribers when a. New post is available. Newsletters are sent automatically to subscribers when you write a new post according to their selected categories.
You can customize welcome email messages to be sent to new subscribers.
The last section is the monitise tab where you enable ads to run on your website to earn money. You can collect payments for digial goods and services as well as collect donations and tips. This is a premium feature and hence you to purchase it.
An upgrade will also help you to accept paypal payments on your website
Drawbacks:
This plugin may be complex for some users to configure and that is why we have provided this tutorial. Some of the features here can be pricy and if you need several premium features, it could cost you more money than anticipated.
Conclusion:
Jetpack is a feature rich plugin with tons of extensions and functionality to give your website blazing fast speeds without any need for a developer. The features are so rich and it comes with no price tag. It is simply priceless and if you don’t have developer experience, this is a must have for you. Developers are also exploring the tremendous power of Jetpack in website speed optimization, search engine optimization, WordPress security and maintenance. This is the first plugin I install each time I develop a new website for my clients. In my over 14 years of developing WordPress websites, I have seen Jetpack evolve to become the single most import plugin in WordPress. Jetpack is a plugin that helps you to make front end and back end web development for personal or business use. Features are upgraded and new ones added on a timely basis. The only plugin that comes pre-installed is Akismet which protects your website from pervasive spam. So what are you waiting for, follow the tutorials and install Jetpack.
