On today’s episode, we are going to talk about Jetpack and why we should have Jetpack on our WordPress website right here on your website engineer podcast episode number 309. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today, we will be talking about Jetpack and why we should use it and why we should be using it on all of our WordPress websites. First, we’ve got just a couple of WordPress announcements that I want to share with you, and then I’ve got a plugin I want to share and then we’ll dive into the main content of the show. The first thing I want to mention is the WordPress survey. I mentioned it last week but if you use WordPress as a hobby or a business or whatever reason you may be using WordPress or – I highly recommend checking out this survey.

It’s at the top of every wordpress.org page and you can find a link to it in the show notes for Episode Number 309 but it’s a short survey. It’ll take about five to eight minutes and it’s got a maximum of 15 questions, depending on how you answer the question. It will serve you the right questions, depending on how you answer them, so it could be a lot less than 15; it could be exactly 15. It’ll take a couple minutes. I highly recommend doing that and checking that out. The other thing in the WordPress news that’s out there is WordPress, a 4.7 beta 1 and yes, we are getting into the – this is another week for another beta. That’s what’s happening as we look at this third release for WordPress this year. We’re going to be releasing or a launching on December 6th is the slated goal.

Just a couple days after Word Camp US. That’s a month away. A little over a month away. If you are interested in checking this out, you can start a brand-new website and then install a plugin. It’s the WordPress beta tester plugin. In that plugin, it has one little setting you need to change. Change it to Bleeding Edge Nightly and that will give you the latest version of WordPress. You can go ahead and then you’ll update to WordPress 4.7. What’s new? What’s coming in 4.7, you may ask? Well, we’ve got a brand-new theme; the 2017 theme is a brand-new theme that brings default – or brings life to your site with great, featured images, video headers, and subtle animations. That’s really cool. This is the first theme that’s been built on a – or built for a business. All the rest of them have been blogging themes.

This is the first one built to showcase a business website. It looks really, really nice. Another thing that’s coming in WordPress 4.7 is video headers. You can have this moving image in the background of a big header image. That’s something to check out to see what your website looks like with that. You can also set up your website in one flow, so you can find and then install a theme right inside the customizer. You can automatically stage themes specific starter content. You can use clickable shortcuts that jump directly to editing menus into the preview pane. It’s going to be really, really nice to be able to customize and get up and running very, very quickly with a brand-new theme within the customizer.

Like I said, in past shows, I think the customizer is where we’re going. The customizer is that very first look that we got to see in some of this cool, JavaScript-y type stuff where we make a change and then we can automatically visualize it right away. Another thing with this automatic visualizing inside the customizer, it is now custom CSS has live preview so if you write a line of CSS code, you’re automatically going to see that preview happen right away. I said it before, we would write CSS and then we have to save it and then we’d have to go to a website and refresh and see if that worked. Now, it just automatically works, which is really, really cool. You can also set the admin language. Just because you site is in one language doesn’t mean that everybody managing your site needs to prefer that language, which is nice.

This is going to be very, very helpful for me on WooCommerce when I’m doing support tickets and whatnot, logging into a site that’s in Danish is a lot more difficult. Even though I’m very familiar with WordPress, just getting the right setting is sometimes hard when native tongues are not set properly. Now, if they create a username for me, I can log in, I can change that to English so I can read it and navigate around much, much smoother. I really, really like that. Pdfs will now have a thumbnail preview inside the media library, which is another nice feature. As always, there’s a lot of exciting developer changes; they’ve got more REST API endpoints; they’ve changed some of the code around for the WP_Hook. There’s custom bulk actions.

We talked about this a few weeks ago, that now when you’re in a post or the page or the products page you can go ahead and you can bulk do things with – you can bulk assign or bulk update the tasks, which are really, really nice. There’s a lot more other things. I’m sure that we’ll dive into this more as the weeks come. I mean we’re only six weeks away from this release cycle so we’ll be seeing WordPress 4.7 come in really, really soon. The other thing that I want to share and I shared in my Easemail newsletter last month was a plugin called Tesla Login Customizer. It’s a free plugin on the WordPress repository and it is the easiest way I’ve found to customize your login, the “forgot your password” page, and it comes with about eight or ten settings already built in like themes and then you can just add your own images and add your logo and change some things around.

It makes it really, really simple. I spent about 13 minutes trying to figure this out and got it all set up last – yesterday, actually, and it just worked really, really well. Now, one of the very cool parts about this is it has some really cool JavaScript things built in so when the login page – when you first go to Wp My Admin and you’re ready to log in, the login page will zoom up from the bottom or come in from the side. Then, when you have the wrong username or password, it will shake and it’ll do some really cool, small little, subtle animation things that just look really, really nice. I think in this day and age, 2016, we should never be logging into a blank WordPress website – a normal WordPress admin page – that has that WordPress logo, especially if we’re running our own businesses. We should be looking at our own logo and our own branding.

This is one of the best ways that I’ve found. There’s tons and tons of these plugins out there, so don’t take this one as this is the best one but I just find that the little things that they’ve done within this plugin just make it look and feel really, really nice. That’s the Tesla Login Customizer. You can find the link in the show notes for Episode Number 309. Today, I was just really grappling with what I should talk about, being the 309th episode. There are a lot of topics that I’ve talked about. There’s a lot of topics that I probably haven’t talked about, yet, and I don’t think I’ve done an episode in the last hundred episodes or so of why we should use Jetpack so I wanted to breeze through some of the reasons and why we should use Jetpack.

This is a little longer of a – not a longer episode but a longer than what I normally say to Word Camp when I’m at a Jetpack booth, is there’s normally a couple of features that I like to point out that are the best or the – why we should be using Jetpack, but we’ll just dive into some of the – or actually, a lot of the features and a lot of the things that are built into Jetpack. Just some of the reasons I like using it and I install it on every single one of my websites. Let’s see. Two main things for using Jetpack is it brings WordPress.com features to self-hosted websites and it also leverages WordPress.com cloud servers. Those are two things like the power of WordPress.com is being used on your website, which is really, really nice. That means that if you are using a shared hosting provider like WordPress, using Jetpack can make your site run faster just by turning it on.

I know there’s a lot of controversy out there and this has been a discussion of several, several years ago about Jetpack is bloated; it takes a while for your site to load, and things like that. Just a bunch of unnecessary code. Well, the developers and the team have a really great job over the last couple of years of paring it down to only the code that needs to be there and if you don’t have a feature enabled, you’re not going to be triggering any of that code. That’s something to think about. Those are two of the things. We’ll talk about those in a little bit more detail. Some of the things we’ll talk about today is how to customize your site; how to write great content and how to grow and engage your audience. The security and stability of your site, performance matters, and maintenance and support. Let’s go ahead and we’ll just dive right in.

The first one is, and this is going to be archaic a little bit when 4.7 comes out, but the first reason I like using Jetpack is you can have custom CSS. If you need to add that customization to your website, custom CSS is a great plugin to do that. Now that that’s going to be built into WordPress 4.7 so we’ll just skim right over that. Another thing that’s built into Jetpack is as contact form. Right out of the box, you could have a contact form and they’re actually working on updating this entire feature. It’s a little bit on the outdated side and they’re doing a really good job of making that more current so you don’t need to install a gravity form or ninja forms or contact forms. You can just use the contact forms built into Jetpack, which is really nice.

One of the other things I just want to mention about Jetpack is it’s got all this functionality and it just makes it nice because you can install this one plugin; you can manage one plugin, and you don’t have to have a bunch of different plugins. Yes, we could’ve had a custom CSS plugin; we could’ve had a contact forms plugin; we can have a lot of these other things but you can all do it with just Jetpack, which is really nice. Another plugin or another feature of Jetpack that’s really nice is it’s called Sidebar Widgets and Visibility. This gives you a little conditional logic so you can say, “I want to show this widget on this page,” if the page is a 404 page or if the category is an all-category page. You can say, “That’s the only pages that I want to display the archive page on,” for example. You can do this with any widget, any plugin or any widget you can add to a widget area.

You can say what page, specifically, to put this on or what page to hide it from, which is really, really nice. Jetpack also has a few modules that make it easy to write great content and create great-looking blog posts. The first one is Markdown. I’ve talked about Markdown before in the past and it is a short-hand way for editing text in bold, italics, adding links, stuff like that, in plain text. Basically, you never have to take your fingers off the keyboard; you can just type and type and type. Then, it will swap it out for HTML. I really like doing this and that’s how I write my show notes. It’s all in Markdown. I just write it, write it, write it and then I put it in this – it’s called Markdown – and then when I it “publish” it will automatically change it into HTML, which makes it really, really nice. Another cool thing that you can do with Jetpack, and this is probably one of the features that gets used the absolute least, and it’s called Beautiful Math.

It’s a technology called latex, which enables the creation of complex math and scientific formulas. You have to learn a little bit of terminology but if you need math equations or all kinds of different math equations, this is the perfect module for you. Like I said, hardly anybody uses this but it’s built right in. Another thing that’s built into Jetpack is spellcheck. If you want to be able to easily check to see if you are spelling things correctly, you can enable the spellcheck plugin. One of my favorite features in this section is the tiled galleries. For some reason, I just really like the way that it works and it just – it seems like it always works and always picks the best images to be the big images.

What I mean by tiled images or tiled galleries is you can upload, say, six, eight pictures of whatever and then Jetpack will automatically organize them into this tiled gallery. It always seems to pick your most important picture; what will be the biggest, and then there will be smaller ones. It makes a big rectangular grid of your images, with some being small and some being big. It just looks really, really cool. Tile galleries. That is another feature that I like. You can also, using Jetpack, grow and engage with your audience. Some of the things that you can do is you can publicize and what publicize is, is you connect your social media accounts – your Facebook, your Twitter, Google+ is people are still using that – and every time you hit the “publish” button or the update button, it will automatically send out a Tweet, send out a Facebook post, with that post already built in.

All you have to do is click the button and it auto sends it out to your list. Pretty nice and pretty – you set it up once and then you forget about it. Every time you publish, it automatically goes out to the right place. You could also enable sharing links at the bottom of every web – of every post or you could put them at the top, depending on where you want it. You can show these buttons on the front page or the archive page or posts or pages and you get to pick which services you want: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg. If you want people to be able to print or email these, you basically enable the services by dragging them into a box. You just drag them and then they’ll show up on the bottom of every post and page. It’s really nice because if someone will share it on Facebook, then it’ll show a little “1” next to the Facebook and then the second time it’ll show a number 2.

That’s just built in. There’s tons of these plugins that are out there but this is just built into Jetpack. You just enable it and it’ll start working you can also do comments. Comments are really nice because then people can log in with their WordPress.com account and then they can go in and just comment on your website if they’re already logged into WordPress.com. They don’t need to create an account on your site or they don’t have to put their name, their website address or email address, all that stuff to make a comment. They can just go ahead and leave a reply, which is really, really nice. They can also, with this commenting system in Jetpack, they can also log in with Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, which is nice as well.

There are likes so very much like Facebook, give your readers and viewers the ability to like a post and then you see either images and they can share it or whatnot. There’s also subscriptions built into Jetpack and this is basically like the easiest way to set up an email mailing list, which is not technically an email mailing list. With Jetpack, they can sign up and then every post that you publish will automatically be sent out to whoever subscribes but the only catch is when you use the Jetpack subscriptions, you can’t send a one-off message out to your list. They will only respond or they’ll only see these brand-new posts, so that’s something you want to think about. Another reason that I like using Jetpack, and we’ll talk a little bit more about some of these features in just a second, but it gives you some stability and some security of your website.

It gives you the ability to do WordPress.com single sign-on so you can log into your website with WordPress.com. This is a nice feature, especially if you have two-factor authentication enabled with WordPress.com. You can bring this to your self-hosted site built right in to Jetpack. Another thing that you can do is you can manage your site within WordPress.com or within Jetpack. If you have Jetpack enabled, now you can use WordPress.com’s interface and you can update all of your plugins, all of your themes. You can manage your entire thing by going to WordPress.com/sites, which is really, really nice. It’s almost like a – there’s a few of the plugins or there’s a few services out there that allow you to manage – I think Manage WP was one of them.

That Infinite WP or there’s another one that I can’t think of right now but those are a couple services that allow you to install a plugin and then you can manage your sites all from one place; especially if you have a lot of client sites or whatnot. Then, this is what you could do, is you could also manage all of your own websites that are connected to the same WordPress.com username. You could also monitor your website for uptime. This is probably one of my favorite features, is I love getting email – oh, I don’t love getting emails but I like getting emails when my website goes down so then I know whether or not – is my host having a problem? I get an email every day. My site’s down for 10 or 15 minutes; then I know it’s probably time to take a look for a new host. Currently, I’m using Flywheel as my host and I’ve gotten two of these messages in the last three years.

I think that they’re doing a pretty good job keeping my website up and running. Also, something you want to think about is performance of your WordPress website. Some of the things built into Jetpack is now you get stats by WordPress.com so this gives you all kinds of data, whether you want to look to see how many people are looking at your website on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. You want to see what your top posts per page is. That’s all built into your dashboard when you have Jetpack enabled. You can see where people are clicking on your website; what some of the search terms are that they’re searching for and finding your website from.

You can find where your top referrers are, which is pretty nice so you can see if they’re coming from search engines or if they are coming from links on Facebook or whatnot. You can see all of your subscribers; you can see how many people have subscribed to your website, which is really nice. Another thing that is built into WordPress is called Photon. This is an image content delivery network, a CDN, and this just allows you to take an image – well, you basically upload your image as normal. You just add it to the media library and then WordPress does its own thing and WordPress will go in and they will take that image and then they’ll upload it to WordPress.com’s servers and so super-fast servers are located all around the world.

Then, wherever somebody is viewing your website, it’s going to serve an image from one of those data centers that WordPress.com has. I have an old screenshot here that I’m looking at but it says, “In WordPress – or in Jetpack 3.1 ten images on 2015 would take almost three seconds to load,” and when you look at newer versions of Jetpack it’s going to take almost just over a second. It knocks almost two full seconds off because it just works so much better. Photon is another one that I always recommend. I recommend turning on Photon and Monitor are the two – just turn them on and that’s all you have to do. There’s no settings; you just turn them on, which is really nice. Another thing that is built in that comes from the power of WordPress.com is related posts with elastic search.

This is just using more features of WordPress.com but it allows you to show related posts at the bottom of every post that you have. It automatically just works, too. You just turn it on and if somebody reads this post, the show notes I have about Jetpack, it’s going to relate other Jetpack-related posts or pages that I have within my website. It’s going to link those and show those at the bottom of this post. Jetpack comes with support as well and you can reach out to any WordPress.com happiness engineer and they’ll be more than welcome to look through your website and try to figure out what’s going on and see where the problem or the issue may lie. Now, one thing that I haven’t talked about because this is fairly new when it comes to Jetpack, is there’s actually two plans that you could buy for Jetpack, as well.

Jetpack, the one that we talked about, all the features that we just talked about, are on the free plan. It’s just Jetpack Free. Then, there is a professional plan or a premium plan and a professional plan. The premium plan runs $99.00 per year and that actually includes a Kismet Plus and it includes VaultPress, so you have those services built in, which that’s about the cost of those anyways. In addition to having Akismet and a VaultPress Plus, it also does a daily malware scanning, which is nice. It also – the premium – also gives you the ability to migrate your site from one place to another so it’s like backup buddy built in. You don’t have to duplicate your site in one place and then unzip it in another place. That’s part of the Jetpack feature, is giving the ability to move and make your website move from one place to another, from one host to another if you want.

Then, the professional plan runs $300.00 per year and that basically just ups the ante when it comes to the WordPress backup system with VaultPress. That will give an enterprise-level Akismet support and then you get real-time backups so anytime that you make a change to your WordPress website, it will automatically change that in the database, your backup archive is unlimited, you can keep your backups forever, and you don’t have any limitations on storage space and the backup is just like you turn it on and it just works. All of these come with brute-force protection and single sign-on, like I said before, and it just makes it harder for people to get into your website. I highly recommend, if you haven’t tried it or haven’t even played with it, spend a little bit of time just putting Jetpack on your site. You will need a free WordPress.com username and password to set that up but then you can manage everything.

You can download the WordPress app. You can use your WordPress app on your phone. That’s another benefit of using Jetpack, is having that ability to use all of the technology that’s built for WordPress.com but you can use it with your self-hosted website. I have this feeling that you are a self-hosted WordPress user because – I don’t know. If you’re listening to a WordPress podcast every week and I’m talking about all the things in the self-hosted world, I just feel like you’re using that but you’re missing out on some of the power of WordPress.com if you don’t have Jetpack installed. Alright, that’s what I want to shar with you this week. Until next week, take care and we’ll talk again, soon. ‘Bye-bye. For more WordPress information, head on over to YourWebsiteEngineer.com.