You might have heard of the great, free, powerful WordPress plugin Jetpack, by Automattic. If you are skeptical about using it, don’t be. If you have read somewhere that after installing it, your blog will load very slowly, Jetpack has nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, when you add any plugin, the page loading speed is increased. It doesn’t really matter whether you are using Jetpack or any other plugin for that matter. By the way, Jetpack requires a WordPress.com account. Yes, it is mandatory and if you are again skeptical about it, then I could say only one thing, it helps in many ways. I received only more visitors from a WordPress account and never ever have faced any issues. There are many advantages of Jetpack WordPress plugin, however, I will include only the ones which specifically benefited my blogs:
1) Developed by Automattic: These are the people who have developed WordPress. If you trust WordPress, then you would have to give at-least one chance to them by installing their plugin. That’s how I started using Jetpack and never looked back.
2) Publicize: This a great tool as you can connect your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and Patch account with WordPress. When you post an article, a link is automatically posted to these social networking sites. This tool is simply amazing because it saves my time. I don’t have to manually publish any links in social networking sites.
3) Social sharing buttons: Social sharing buttons are very classy and they look awesome. You can check this out in this blog at the end of the posts. It also includes “Print” and “Email” buttons which your users can use for printing and sending your posts as emails to their friends. Another advantage of these buttons is that they load very fast. You also have the option to select from 4 different button styles.
4) Jetpack comments: Comment system in Jetpack is very powerful. From the day I have installed I am not receiving any spam comments. And yes, I don’t even use Akismet. Visitors of your site can post comments directly using WordPress account, Twitter account, Google+ account, Facebook account or by typing in “Email”, “Name” and “Website”.
5) Subscriptions: Visitors of your blog can subscribe directly to your posts and comments. They will receive an email whenever a new post or a comment is published.
6) Spelling and grammar: This is another tool in Jetpack which I love. By using this tool you can proof read your posts for spelling and grammatical suggestions by clicking on a button in post edit section. I don’t have to use any Grammar checker or MS Word because of this tool.
7) Contact form: You can create and add a custom contact form by using Jetpack. You don’t have to add any other plugin for that.
8) Widget visibility: This is again a helpful feature. You can control the visibility of the widgets to display them for particular categories, authors, tags, date and page conditions. To set it up, go to: Appearance –> Widgets. Click on “Visibility” for the particular widget and set up the specific conditions to control visibility for that widget.
There are various other tools in JetPack but the above given tools are the ones which I use for my blogs. I highly recommend Jetpack as it saves my time considerably. Also, you can be rest assured that there will be continuous updates, new functionality will be added and bug fixes in future. Instead of installing plugins one by one, my vote goes to Jetpack. It’s like one plugin to rule them all 😉