We use and love Jetpack around here. It’s a WordPress plugin that brings a whole suite of functionality to your site ranging from security to marketing! Here’s our favorite features around here.
Powerful Search
Jetpack’s Instant Search feature gives your site an incredibly powerful search feature with the flip of a switch. It’s powered by a super-fast Elasticsearch API your site communicates with directly and the results algorithm is based on intelligent stuff like popularity and recency.
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Backups & Activity
We sleep easy at night knowing CSS-Tricks is entirely backed up in real-time. That’s all the files of course, like WordPress itself, my theme, and plugins, but also the entire database and all the media files. The activity log lets us know who did what and when.
![](https://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20210928030215im_/https://i2.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Screen-Shot-2020-04-16-at-11.47.03-AM.png?fit=944%2C1024&ssl=1)
Image Handling
There are at least four things you have to do with images on websites to make sure you’re serving them in a performance responsible way: 1) use the responsive images syntax to serve an appropriately sized version 2) optimize the image 3) lazy load the image 4) serve the image from a CDN.
Fortunately, WordPress itself helps with #1, which can be tricky. Jetpack helps with the other 3 with the flip of a switch.
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Related Posts
CSS-Tricks has thousands of pages of content! It’s a challenge for us to surface all the best stuff, particularly on a per-topic basis and without having to hand-pick everything. Showing related posts is tricky to pull off and we love that Jetpack does a great job with it, all without burdening our servers the way other related content solutions can.
![](https://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20210928030215im_/https://i1.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Screen-Shot-2020-04-16-at-8.49.22-AM.png?fit=1024%2C299&ssl=1)
Markdown
Writing content in Markdown is the way to go. Not only is it quick and convenient, it helps make content last by keeping it super clean and free of presentational markup.
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Social Connections
We like to tell the world as best as we can when we publish new content. Rather than having to do that manually, we can share the post to Twitter and Facebook the second we hit that “Publish” button.
![](https://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20210928030215im_/https://i2.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Screen-Shot-2020-04-16-at-10.47.05-AM.png?resize=262%2C389&ssl=1)
These are just a few of the literally dozens of super useful features of Jetpack! We bet your site and needs are a bit different than ours, so make sure to explore the whole feature set to find more things that are perfect for you.