10 SEO Features You Should Use with Jetpack Plugin

Jetpack is one of the most popular free plugins for WordPress with more than 5 million active installations. To use this plugin, you need to create an account with WordPress.com and link your WordPress.org site. Earlier days Jetpack was part of the default WordPress installation which was widely criticized by the WordPress community users. Now, it does not come as part of WordPress installation and you need to install the plugin manually like any other plugin. If you are using Jetpack, here are top 10 SEO features you should enable to make use of the different modules available in plugin’s settings.

Jetpack SEO Features

There was a big debate on internet regarding whether Jetpack will slow down your site or not. We have used the plugin on many of sites and frankly do not find any specific problem related to performance. So, if you are using Jetpack, you can continue to use and here are the features related to SEO that you should activate in plugin settings.

1. Install Jetpack Boost Plugin

Do not get confused with Jetpack and Jetpack Boost plugins. They are two different plugins and the Jetpack Boost offers exclusive SEO features to optimize your site for search engines. This is a must use plugin along with Jetpack, especially if other optimization plugins are not working on your site for generating your critical CSS. This plugin allows you to generate critical CSS, defer JavaScript and allow lazy loading to speed up your Core Web Vital score.

Note that Jetpack plugin also offers SEO tools to optimize title and meta description formats under “Traffic > Search engine optimization” section. However, this option will be disabled if you are using other SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math.

2. Enable Related Posts

There are many free dedicated related posts plugin available for WordPress. However, these plugins need to index your entire site’s content and hence slow down by querying the database for each page loading. Jetpack solves this problem by serving related posts from WordPress.com infrastructure. You can enable this feature from Jetpack settings page under “Traffic” section. It will automatically show related posts below the content or you can use the block in Gutenberg editor to insert related posts wherever you want inside the post.

Make sure you have a featured image for all the posts and the plugin will crop and serve thumbnail images for your related from Jetpack image CDN service. As everything is done at WordPress.com servers, you do not need to worry about the speed.

3. Uptime Monitoring

Most bloggers start with cheap shared hosting companies like Bluehost or HostGator. Though this works well for starting, you may have lot of downtime when the server resources are exceeded. Similarly, your site may also go down when someone targeting with bot traffic or trying to hack. Therefore, monitoring uptime of the site is one of the mandatory tasks for every blogger to take immediate action in case of need. Jetpack make this easier and all what you need is to simply enable “Downtime monitoring” feature under “Security” section of your Jetpack settings page.

This will continuously monitor your site and send you an email whenever you sites goes down. You will also receive another email when the site is up and reachable again mentioning the total duration of the downtime.

4. Email Subscription Widget

Most of the email subscription plugins only allow you to collect the emails and you need to manually send the post or newsletter to the subscribers. Jetpack make things easier by automatically sending all your new posts to the subscribers. You can anytime download the subscriber emails from WordPress.com site and migrate to any other service providers like Mailchimp. First, go to “Writing” section in Jetpack settings page and enable “Make extra widgets available for use on your site including subscription forma and Twitter streams” option under “Widgets” section. This will enable additional widgets and now you can add email subscription widget using the block in your content area or in sidebar/footer.

5. Comment Subscription

You can also enable site subscription and comment subscription options below the comment form. This option is available under “Discussion > Subscriptions” section in the plugins settings page. This will help to increase the user interaction and subscription rate when you have attractive content.

6. Use Lazy Loading

Lazy loading will delay loading the images until the user interaction to improve the page loading speed. You can enable this feature under “Performance & speed” section in “Performance” tab.

7. Content Acceleration

If you do not use any other CDN setup, then the best option is to make use of content acceleration options available with Jetpack plugin. You can improve the loading time of images and other static files like CSS and JavaScript from Jetpack CDN. You can turn on “Enable site accelerator” and then the separately for images and static files under the performance section. This will also help you to serve WebP images to supported browsers thus fixing “Serve images in next-gen formats” warning in Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

Remember, there are some limitations like you can’t purge the cached images when serving images from Jetpack CDN. You can check the complete details on official Jetpack support page before you enable this option.

8. XML Sitemap

XML Sitemap helps search engines to easily crawl your site’s content and understand the updated status of pages. You can easily enable XML Sitemap under “Traffic” section. This will add general Sitemap for your site as well as news Sitemap containing the posts published on your site during past 48 hours.

9. Site Stats

Integrating Google Analytics is a premium feature in Jetpack. However, you can use the site statistic to track your traffic with Jetpack. This feature is enabled by default in Jetpack and you can view the traffic status in “Jetpack > Dashboard” section. This is useful for smaller sites and if you do not want to use Google Analytics for privacy reasons.

10. Webmaster Tools Verification

Similarly, you can add verification codes from Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Pinterest, Facebook, and Yandex under “Traffic > Site verification” section.

Final Words

The above mentioned SEO features in Jetpack plugin can help to increase traffic to your site, user interaction and speed. The big advantage with Jetpack is that you can individually activate or deactivate the modules. Therefore, make sure to disable the features that you do not want to use. For example, if you use another plugin for lazy loading images, you should disable the feature in Jetpack to avoid the conflict.