Configure Jetpack For Your WordPress Site

Jetpack is marketed as an all-in-one plugin that addresses a variety of needs, including WordPress security, performance optimization, marketing tools, and analytics, among others. Automattic, the company behind major WordPress services and products including WordPress.com and WooCommerce, is responsible for the plugin’s upkeep.

Jetpack has earned a reputation as a large and useless plugin that isn’t required for most sites, particularly those hosted on managed WordPress hosting like Kinsta.

In this post, we’ll look at the benefits and drawbacks of Jetpack’s wide feature set to see if it’s right for your WordPress site.

Contents Table of Contents
How to Install Jetpack
How to Change Jetpack’s Preferences
Do you like to watch the video?

Installing Jetpack is simple.
Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that may be downloaded directly from the WordPress plugin repository. Jetpack has over 5 million active installations and a 4-star rating at this time.

Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that you may get from the WordPress plugin repository.
You’ll be prompted to check in with a WordPress.com or Google account after enabling Jetpack.

To use Jetpack, sign in with your WordPress.com or Google account.
You’ll be provided with Jetpack’s several plan tiers after logging in. The annual costs of Jetpack’s paid plans range from $39 to $299. A monthly membership is also available.

If you’d want to upgrade to a paid plan, go ahead and do so right now. If you don’t want to pay, scroll down to the bottom of the page and select the free option.

The tiers of Jetpack’s plans.
How to Change Jetpack’s Preferences
Dashboard, Settings, and Site Stats are the three sidebar tabs in Jetpack.

Before we look at the dashboard and site stats sections, let’s look at how to configure Jetpack for your site.

The settings page for Jetpack is divided into six tabs.
Downtime monitoring, auto-updates, brute force protection, and more are all included in the security package.
Search functionality, speed optimization, and media offloading are all examples of performance.
Full-screen slideshows, Markdown/LaTeX compatibility, and more are all available when writing.
Sharing options include social media sharing, like buttons, and more.
Additional commenting capability, subscriptions, and more are available in the discussion section.
Ads, related content, shortlink creation, sitemaps, and more all contribute to traffic.
Security Options in Jetpack
Jetpack allows you to integrate backups, security, downtime monitoring, and other features into your WordPress site. Let’s have a look at the security aspects of Jetpack.

Security Scanning and Backups (Paid Plan Only)
Only paid Jetpack plans have access to the “Backups and Security Scanning” feature. A backup and security policy should be in place for every WordPress site. If your host does not provide backups or security screening, Jetpack’s solution is a wonderful alternative.

We don’t advocate enabling this functionality in Jetpack if your site is hosted on Kinsta. We offer a downloaded backup option that enables you download a ZIP file containing your WordPress files and database, in addition to automatic daily backups that can be restored at any moment on the MyKinsta dashboard. Our external backups add-on allows sophisticated users to back up their sites to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.

In terms of security, our sysadmins are continually monitoring our system and preventing attacks before they occur. Our team will sanitize your site for free if it is hacked while on Kinsta. Here’s where you can learn more about our security assurance.

Monitoring of Downtime
It’s crucial to have a downtime monitoring strategy in place if you’re running a mission-critical website. In terms of monitoring and notification configuration, Jetpack’s downtime monitoring function isn’t extremely configurable. Jetpack currently only supports sending notifications to your WordPress.com email address; it does not support Slack, SMS, or phone calls.

Settings for Jetpack’s downtime monitoring.

We recommend using a more purpose-built tool like UptimeRobot or Pingdom if you’re searching for a downtime monitoring solution for your WordPress site.

Plugins that update themselves
Jetpack’s “auto-update plugins” function appears to be a time saving at first appearance, but we don’t suggest automatic updates for WordPress plugins in general. We’ve seen our fair share of plugin updates cause PHP code clashes and 500 errors over the years.

Jetpack allows you to update your plugins automatically.
We always advocate testing plugin updates in a staging environment before making changes to your live production environment, whether you’re a hobbyist running a personal blog or a manager for a global corporation using WooCommerce.

While most plugin developers thoroughly test their upgrades before releasing them, it’s hard to account for every potential WordPress configuration. As a result, it’s up to you to double-check that an update is compatible with your WordPress site – which is why we don’t require automated plugin updates for Kinsta sites.

Is Jetpack still necessary if you’re using a managed #WordPress hosting platform? Learn about the advantages and disadvantages of this all-in-one plugin.
CLICK HERE TO TWEET Brute Force Attack Defense
WordPress is by far the most popular content management system on the planet, making it a prime target for hackers and other bad actors. Bots designed to brute force your login credentials frequently attack WordPress endpoints like /wp-login.php and xmlrpc.php.

While brute force protection is vital, it is best to install it at the DNS (Cloudflare or Sucuri) or web server level (Nginx or Apache) rather than at the application level (WordPress).

Jetpack provides defense against brute force attacks.
Our Nginx configuration at Kinsta is specifically built to defend the most common WordPress endpoints against brute force assaults. We also take it a step further and secure SSH and SFTP connections from brute-force attacks. If your server does not offer brute force protection, we propose using Cloudflare to secure your site and setting rate limits for your login URL.

Login to WordPress.com
You can use your WordPress.com login credentials to log in to your WordPress site using this option. We don’t advocate using this feature because it adds no more functionality and exposes your site to another attack vector.

You’re already logged in if you’re configuring the Jetpack plugin. With this in mind, there’s no reason to introduce another login option solely to be different. Instead of adding WordPress.com as a login option, we recommend using the default method, altering your WordPress login URL, and activating two-factor authentication (2FA) to improve security.

Performance Options for Jetpack
In 2022, it will be vital to ensure that your WordPress site loads rapidly for both user experience and SEO. Jetpack includes a number of performance-enhancing features such as search engine optimization, picture optimization, content delivery network (CDN), and video hosting. Let’s have a look at the performance options in Jetpack.

Look into it (Paid Plan Only)
First and foremost, there’s Jetpack’s search optimization. The basic search functionality can be slow in some circumstances, depending on the size of your MySQL database and WordPress configuration. Jetpack Search is an alternative solution that uses Elasticsearch, a sophisticated open-source indexing engine that allows you to search your WordPress database without having to query it.

If your site has a lot of search capabilities, an Elasticsearch-based solution like Jetpack Search could help visitors find what they’re looking for faster. Remember that Jetpack Search cost is determined by the quantity of records in your WordPress database. You could be looking at a $200 monthly bill if your site has over 100,000 records.

Speed & Performance
Jetpack’s “site accelerator” reduces the time it takes for images and static files (JavaScript and CSS) to load. The image optimization feature resizes images using the width and height parameters of the img element. It also compresses pictures and transforms them to the WEBP format for browsers that support it.

On Jetpack’s CDN, the static file optimization function caches certain JavaScript and CSS files. But there’s a snag, and it’s a major one. Jetpack only caches static files in WordPress Core, Jetpack, and WooCommerce at the moment.

Other plugins’ JavaScript and CSS files, as well as your WordPress theme, are not served.

Performance and speed options for the Jetpack

Jetpack’s site accelerator isn’t the ideal way to speed up your WordPress site, thus we don’t recommend it. The image optimization feature does not support cache invalidation and does not allow for much customisation.

If you want to remove a picture from the cache, you must contact Jetpack support manually. On the other hand, most other CDN systems, such as Kinsta CDN, allow you to clear your CDN cache directly from their dashboards.

When compared to competing alternatives, Jetpack’s static file optimization is likewise lacking. There’s no reason why a WordPress CDN in 2022 should only deliver files from WordPress Core, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.

We recommend utilizing an optimization plugin like Autoptimize to minify assets before serving them over a full-featured CDN like Kinsta CDN instead of activating static file optimization in Jetpack. Jetpack also allows you to load photos slowly. Enable this option if you’re using Jetpack on your site to speed up pages with a lot of photos.

Hosting of video (Paid Plan Only)
Finally, Jetpack offers a premium video hosting service that allows you to upload video files to Jetpack’s servers and embed them on your WordPress site. When compared to streaming video files directly from your host, this form of service has a few advantages.

For starters, videos use up a lot of bandwidth, and most WordPress hosting have some sort of bandwidth cap or acceptable usage policy.

Second, a dedicated video service with scattered data centers will be able to transmit content more consistently around the world. If you want to self-host a lot of videos on your WordPress site, we recommend checking out Jetpack’s solution.

Writing Options in Jetpack
Markdown support, full-screen image carousels, LaTeX support, and other features are available in Jetpack for bloggers and content creators. Let’s have a look at them now.

Slideshows with a Full-Screen Carousel
You undoubtedly include a lot of photographs on your WordPress site if you’re a photographer or travel writer. Adding full-screen carousel functionality to your image galleries will help your site’s users have a better experience. Without writing any code, Jetpack allows you to add full-screen carousel slideshow capabilities to your normal WordPress galleries.

Simply enable “Display Images in a Full-Screen Carousel Gallery” to use Jetpack’s full-screen carousel slideshows. For the carousel slideshow, there are additional options to display EXIF metadata (camera model, shutter speed, aperture, etc.) and comments.

Finally, you have the option of choosing a light or dark theme for your carousel.

Enable the full-screen carousel for image galleries in Jetpack.
When you enable the full-screen carousel, clicking on a normal gallery will open a beautiful slideshow like the one below.

The carousel is entirely responsive, so it works nicely on tablets and smartphones.

The full-screen image carousel slideshow in Jetpack.
Composing Jetpack contains a few features that help you write better and manage your content better in WordPress.

Jetpack has writing and content management features.
Copy Posts & Pages – if your workflow entails making additional posts and pages from a single template, this capability will come in handy.
Support for Markdown — Markdown is a syntactic format for producing text for the web. Despite the fact that millions of people use it around the world, WordPress has never provided first-class support for it until the Gutenberg editor. There’s no need to enable this feature for Markdown support if you’re using Gutenberg. Enabling this option will allow you to write in Markdown if you’re still using the traditional editor.
Support for LaTeX – LaTeX is a markup language used to create equations and other mathematical documents. This is a really handy tool for folks who frequently write in LaTeX.
Compose Using Shortcodes — With this option set, you can use shortcodes to incorporate material from services like Flickr, Hulu, Scribd, Instagram, and more. There’s no need to enable this feature if you’re using the Gutenberg editor because embeds are already supported.

Types of Custom Content
Testimonials and tutorials are two types of custom content that Jetpack allows you to add to your WordPress site. This functionality may or may not be useful depending on your theme and needs.

You can add testimonials and portfolio items in Jetpack settings or the “Portfolio” and “Testimonials” tabs in the sidebar if this feature is enabled.

Custom content kinds in Jetpack

If your theme doesn’t support Jetpack custom content types, you can still display material using their shortcodes ([portfolio] and [testimonials]).

Enhancements to the theme
Infinite scroll and an upgraded CSS customization panel are two theme additions available with Jetpack. Infinite scroll replaces the pagination on your WordPress site with an AJAX-based loader that downloads new posts without requiring you to load the next page.

Do you want to discover how we grew our traffic by over 1000%?
Join the 20,000+ people who receive our weekly email with WordPress insider secrets!

Now is the time to subscribe.
Jetpack’s infinite scroll feature comes with three settings.

Use the default theme behavior to load more posts.
Using a button, add more posts to the page.
As the reader scrolls down, load more posts.
Jetpack may be an excellent alternative if you’re searching for a simple solution to add infinite scrolling to your site. Keep in mind that if you choose the third option, visitors may find it difficult to click on links or information in the footer of your site — this is a regular problem we see on WordPress sites that use infinite scrolling.

Enabling the “Enhance CSS Customization Panel” option in Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS adds a few extra options to the CSS editor in WordPress.

The CSS editor in Jetpack has been improved.
Media Width – if the width of your theme’s primary content area has been modified in CSS, specify the width here as well to guarantee that the default size for image embeds is right.
Start Over – this option entirely removes your theme’s default CSS styling. If you want to rebuild CSS from scratch without having to overwrite existing styles, this capability comes in handy. It can also aid in the reduction of CSS bloat.
LESS and Sass are supported by the improved CSS editor (SCSS Syntax). This functionality is handy for users who want to develop CSS styles in LESS or Sass and use a preprocessor to convert CSS.
Widgets There are two options for customizing widgets on your site in Jetpack’s “Widgets” settings.

Settings for the Jetpack widget.
Additional widgets, such as social icons, Flickr, top posts and pages, Twitter timeline, and more, will be supported. Refer to Jetpack’s official documentation for a complete list of included widgets.
Customize the visibility of widgets on a post or page-by-post or page-by-page basis.
These two capabilities may be beneficial for widget customization depending on how your WordPress site is configured. If your blog covers both technology and photography, for example, you can make a Flickr widget appear exclusively on your photography-related entries.

Email a message
This Jetpack feature allows you to send new posts to your subscribers through email. Jetpack will provide you with a unique email address to send posts to after you enable the feature.

In Jetpack, you can send a message by email.
When you use this way of posting, the title of your article will be determined by the subject line of your email. There are also a number of shortcodes for setting post metadata, such as [category x,y,z] and [slug some-url-name].

While email posting may be convenient for some on-the-go bloggers, we don’t think it’s a great experience in general. You must constantly remember to get the formatting precisely correct while using email publishing.

You must also ensure that shortcodes are formatted correctly. If you don’t have access to an email client, you can probably publish material in the WordPress dashboard using a web browser instead.

We advocate utilizing the WordPress app instead of email publishing for WordPress users who like to publish on their mobile devices.

Toolbar for WordPress.com
Jetpack allows you to replace your WordPress toolbar with one that looks like it belongs on WordPress.com. The WordPress.com toolbar has links to all of your Jetpack-connected sites, notifications, and your WordPress.com profile, among other things.

WordPress.com’s Jetpack toolbar.
When you click “Write” in the WordPress.com toolbar to create a new post, the official WordPress.com editor will open instead of the default editor.

This editor is a more advanced version of the Gutenberg editor for WordPress. It includes a number of pre-made blocks to assist you in customizing your posts and pages.

Refer to the official documentation for further information about the WordPress.com editor.

The post editor on WordPress.com.
Sharing Jetpack is jam-packed with social-related features that make connecting with your audience a breeze. Let’s have a peek, shall we?

Make Connections Known
You may link your WordPress site to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr using Jetpack’s “Publicize Connections” feature. Newly published posts will be automatically shared on connected social sites once this feature is activated.

Are you fed up with a sluggish host? Kinsta is designed for speed and efficiency. Take a look at our plans.

Jetpack allows you to connect your WordPress site to social media.

Buttons for sharing and like
The feature “Sharing Buttons” is self-explanatory. It allows you to personalize your posts and pages by adding social sharing buttons.

You can also choose the content types you want the sharing buttons to appear on, in addition to customizing the button’s appearance.

Customize the social sharing buttons in Jetpack.
Enabling Jetpack’s “Like Buttons” function will add a “Like” button to the end of your WordPress posts, similar to the sharing buttons discussed above.

Jetpack allows you to add “Like” buttons to your posts.
Discussion
The “Discussion” feature of Jetpack allows you to enhance the functionality of WordPress’ built-in commenting system.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

Comments
You can add other comment authentication methods (WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, and Google) in the “Comments” area. You can also customize the form’s “comment form introduction” and color scheme.

This section also contains a few extra options, such as pop-up business cards, Markdown support, and comment likes.

Jetpack allows you to customize your WordPress comments.
In terms of login methods and engagement capabilities, WordPress’ default commenting system is relatively limited. If your blog receives a lot of comments, utilizing Jetpack’s comment-related features can help your readers have a better experience.

Check out this article for more information about WordPress commenting plugins, which includes ten different options.

Subscriptions
Jetpack’s “Subscriptions” function makes adding site and comment subscriptions to your WordPress site simple.

Jetpack allows you to add site and comment subscriptions.
When comment subscriptions are enabled, two more checkboxes appear below the comment form, allowing users to subscribe to your site or new comments via email.

Subscriptions to the Jetpack site and comments.
Traffic
The “Traffic” page in Jetpack allows you to customize a range of parameters, such as sitemaps, advertisements, related posts, shortlinks, and more.

Advertisements (Paid Plan Only)
You can enable display advertisements on your site if you have a Jetpack premium membership. Jetpack’s advertisements functionality is powered by WordAds, a WordPress-specific ad network that connects your site to over 50 advertisers like as Google Adsense, AppNexus, Amazon A9, and others.

Advertisers bid significantly for placements on WordAds sites, according to WordAds, because display advertising on WordAds sites reach over 1 billion visitors per month.

WordAds powers the advertisements feature in Jetpack.
Enabling WordAds in Jetpack may be a smart alternative if you’re a Jetpack premium plan user who wishes to include display adverts on a WordPress site.

We encourage that you try it out and compare the RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) to other ad networks such as Google Adsense, Mediavine, and AdThrive.

Related Articles
You can add a related posts widget to the bottom of each article using Jetpack’s “Related Posts” functionality. You can add a related content header and thumbnail images for individual posts using a few modification options.

Jetpack’s related posts.
In the Customize > Related Posts section, you’ll also find a few more options. You may toggle between list and grid layouts in this menu, as well as whether or not to display a post’s category/tag and date.

Customize the look of linked posts.
If you’re seeking for a quick way to display related material, Jetpack’s built-in related posts feature will suffice. It doesn’t have as many customization options as something like YARPP, but that can be a benefit in some circumstances.

Search Engine Optimization (Only Paid Plans) Paid Jetpack customers have built-in SEO help. You’ll be able to update SEO titles, meta descriptions, and more in the WordPress editor once it’s enabled.

Even if you have a paid Jetpack plan, we recommend that you use a third-party SEO plugin. Following our testing of a number of SEO plugins, we discovered that Yoast SEO and The SEO Framework are the finest plugins for improving your WordPress SEO.

Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to track (Paid Plan Only)
You can use Jetpack to add a Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress site if you’re a paying Jetpack member. Although using Jetpack to install a GA tracking code is convenient, we prefer using Site Kit by Google instead because it combines Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Adsense into an one plugin.

Shortlinks on WP.me
Long URLs can be shared via shortlinks. You can access a https://wp.me shortlink by clicking the green lightning icon in the top right corner of the post editor if Jetpack’s “WP.me Shortlinks” functionality is activated.

Jetpack allows you to add shortlink support to your posts.
Sitemaps
Jetpack can produce XML sitemaps for your WordPress site automatically. You can enable this option in Jetpack if you’re not utilizing a third-party SEO plugin to generate sitemaps.

Because WordPress 5.5 includes built-in XML sitemap support, you should disable all sitemap plugins after upgrading to 5.5.

Verification of the Website
Jetpack’s “Site Verification” function allows you to use leading search engines like Google, Bing, Pinterest, and Yandex to verify ownership of your WordPress site. There’s no need to enable this option in Jetpack if your site has previously been verified.

If your site hasn’t been confirmed yet, you can use Jetpack to paste the verification HTML meta tag for each service.

With Jetpack, you can verify your site with search engines.
Is it more easy and all-encompassing to be bloated and unnecessary? Here are the benefits and drawbacks of using Jetpack on your #WordPress site.
TO TWEET, CLICK HERE
Jetpack is an all-in-one plugin that comes with a slew of useful features. Jetpack can perform a lot of things, but it falls short when compared to purpose-built plugins.

Jetpack’s CDN, for example, isn’t as feature-rich as a specialized CDN like Kinsta CDN. Jetpack’s CSS and JavaScript optimization is also inferior to that of Autoptimize or WP Rocket. Having said that, Jetpack does have a couple of useful features. For certain types of content providers, Jetpack’s full-screen image carousels and Markdown/LaTeX support are quite beneficial.

Whether or not to use Jetpack depends on your site’s individual requirements. If you do decide to use Jetpack, we recommend that you only use the capabilities described in this article.

Do you have Jetpack installed? Let us know in the comments what your favorite Jetpack features are!