We use and love Jetpack around here. It’s a WordPress plugin that brings a whole suite of functionality to your site ranging from security to marketing! Here’s our favorite features around here.
Powerful Search
Jetpack’s Search feature gives your site an incredibly powerful search feature with the flip of a switch. You get a very fast, truly intelligent search for your entire site that is easily sortable and filterable for literally zero work on your part. You can’t rely on default WordPress search — this is a must-have. Bonus: it’s all handled off-site so there is minimal burden on your site.
Backups & Activity
We sleep easy knowing CSS-Tricks is entirely backed up in real-time. Everything is backed up from the site’s content, comments, settings, theme files, media, even WordPress itself.
An activity log shows off everything that happens on the site, and I use that same log to restore the site to any point in that log.
Performant Media
There are at least four things you have to do with images on websites to make sure you’re serving them in a performance responsible way: 1) use the responsive images syntax to serve an appropriately sized version 2) optimize the image 3) lazy load the image 4) serve the image from a CDN. Fortunately, WordPress itself helps with #1, which can be tricky. Jetpack helps with the other 3 with the flip of a switch.
And don’t forget about video! VideoPress does even more for your hosted videos. No ads, beautiful feature-rich player, CDN-hosted optimized video, poster graphics for mobile, and you do absolutely nothing different with your workflow: just drag and drop videos into posts.
Markdown
Writing content in Markdown can be awful handy. Especially on a developer-focused site, it makes sense to offer it to users in the comment section.
With Jetpack Markdown, you also get a Markdown block to use in the block editor so you can write in chunks of Markdown wherever needed.
Related Posts
CSS-Tricks has thousands of pages of content! It’s a challenge for us to surface all the best stuff, particularly on a per-topic basis and without having to hand-pick everything. Showing related posts is tricky to pull off and we love that Jetpack does a great job with it, all without burdening our servers the way other related content solutions can.
Social Connections
We like to tell the world as best as we can when we publish new content. Rather than having to do that manually, we can share the post to Twitter and Facebook the second we hit that “Publish” button.
These are just a few of the literally dozens of super useful features of Jetpack! We bet your site and needs are a bit different than ours, so make sure to explore the whole feature set to find more things that are perfect for you.
