Jetpack has always been one of my most favorite WordPress plugins simply because it provides so many functions under one roof. Jetpack can take care a lot of work for you and you don’t have to install individual plugins. I have been using Jetpack for a long time now, but some of it’s other features came to light when I was developing a client’s website of mine recently.
Jetpack Features
Social Sharing
Most bloggers use Digg Digg or Post as their social sharing plugin but Jetpack has an equally good social sharing options and it also has some additional options. You can have either the official icons or just a simple icon with text.
Like other plugins, you can also choose where to show the sharing buttons. The only thing it doesn’t have is the floating option. Most people prefer the floating option, however it uses heavy jQuery and javascript functions which takes a lot of time to load, even asynchronously. The Jetpack sharing buttons will be shown just below your post.
Social Media Widgets
Jetpack makes adding social media widget to your sidebar a breeze. Some of the widgets that are available with Jetpack are Facebook Like Box and Twitter Timeline. Adding the widget is as easy as adding your social profile url. You can also control the width and height of widget.
Popular Posts Widget
There are lots of popular posts widget plugins available. I have tested almost all of them. Though I don’t use the Jetpack one, because this theme comes with one. But Jetpack one actually provides a lot of functions.
You can show the popular posts very easily by just dragging it to the sidebar in the widget area.
Blog Subscription
Blog subscription is actually a great way to increase your followers and subscribers. The subscription option allows one follow a blog or follow a comment thread. Both of them are represented below the comment form. If your content is great, you can get many followers via this method.
Blog Statistics
Jetpack also comes with a great statistics feature which lets you see the no. of visits that you get. It breaks down the visits with different sources including search engines and social media. It also tracks which links were clicked on your site.
It shows no. of visits for each individual pages. Overall, it’s a great tracker of visits.
Publicize
Publicize is actually a great option to share your new content on social media. It actually takes a lot of effort to go third part websites like dlvr.it, Twitterfeed and RSS Graffiti and configure your blog feed.
With publicize you can connect most of your social media accounts right here from WordPress.
Once you have the connected the account, you will get a publicize option on your WordPress editor. You can select all of them or some of them which is totally upto you. The link that is shared is created by WordPress shortlinks which will look something like this – http://wp.me/p3l9wW-IM
Photon – A CDN to load your images faster
Photon is actually is a great feature to load the images quickly on your blog. What it basically does is, it caches your images onto the powerful WordPress.com content delivery network which ultimately reduces the load on your server.
One point to note here is that the url of your images will change with a wp.com in front of your original image.
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The URL will look something like this – http://i1.wp.com/www.lionblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jetpack9.jpg
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When you deactivate it ( which you can anytime ), the URL will return back to normal.
So, if you haven’t been using Jetpack plugin, start using now because I highly recommend it.
