Jetpack is a hugely popular plugin developed by Automattic, the major contributor to the whole WordPress platform. It’s a powerful and feature rich plugin. You will find some arguments for and against using Jetpack on your self-hosted WordPress site. But it’s undeniable that the plugin has some great features that are really worth trying.
1. Monitor
Jetpack’s Monitor can keep an eye on your website all the time and it detects if any downtime occurs. Monitor checks your site every five minutes. If it finds the site offline, Jetpack will send a notification to your email address which is associated with the connected WordPress.com account.
2. Stats
Yes, I also know that there is Google Analytics, the mighty service for statistical purpose. But Jetpack’s Stats can still be handy. It provides the most important metrics about your site in a simple and actionable manner. You can easily see the visitor numbers, pageviews, locations, clicks and so on.
3. Photon
For any website on the internet, Content Delivery Network (CDN) can play a major role in making it faster. Some providers offer partial CDN features for free, while images may not be covered by them. Jetpack comes in the game at this point. Photon is a free service offered by Automattic (via Jetpack) which provides CDN service for your site’s images. It’s really a big deal!
4. Subscriptions
If you want to grow your site’s visitor base, email subscription is a must. Jetpack offers a convenient and free solution for this. You can put the subscription shortcode on anywhere of your site to render an email subscription form. There is a widget for that too. Once a user subscribes to your site he/she will get email each time you publish a new post.
5. Protect
Jetpack’s new feature Protect adds some extra value to your site’s security by blocking brute force or malicious login attacks. You may use other services in this purpose too, but it’s not a bad idea to try Jetpack’s Protect. Once the feature is activated, your WP dashboard will show how many suspicious login attempts were blocked by Jetpack.
The above five Jetpack features can be used for free. Jetpack has more than 30 features including the familiar premium backup service VaultPress. You can download Jetpack from this official WordPress plugin repository link.
Do you use Jetpack? Which Jetpack feature you like most?
