WordPress parent company Automattic announced that Jetpack, used by over 5 million users, is now available as six individual plugins.
This allows users to choose which features they want without the burden of installing the entire suite of products.
Jetpack By Automattic
Automattic is the for-profit side of WordPress. Although they are for-profit the majority of its projects are available under the General Public License.
Jetpack is an all-in-one WordPress utility that works together seamlessly to bring security, backup, performance improvements and other functionalities to a WordPress site.
The advantage of Jetpack is that a publisher can have multiple must-have functionalities without having to worry that six different plugins may or may not work well together. Anyone who’s used a performance boosting caching plugin knows how touchy plugin conflicts can become.
Yet Jetpack’s strength has also been seen as its weakness because not everyone needs an all-in-one plugin.
Jetpack Social Admin Dashboard
Jetpack Available As Six Plugins
Automattic announced that Jetpack is now available in six different plugins for those who want to pick and choose features.
Automattic acknowledged the shortcoming of the all-in-one approach in its announcement:
“Many developers and site owners asked for the flexibility to use specific components of Jetpack as part of their own, custom-built “tech stack” of plugins. We listened.
‘The WordPress community is passionate about being able to control exactly what is installed on their sites,’ says Jetpack CEO James Grierson. ‘The new Jetpack plugins will provide that flexibility, as well as enhance the overall WordPress experience.””
Plugin Details
Some of the plugins are brand new while a couple others have between one to two years of availability.
- Four of the new plugins are free: Jetpack Protect, Boost, Social, and CRM are completely free.
- Two of the plugins require payment: Jetpack Backup and Jetpack Search require a paid plan.
The six WordPress plugins are:
Jetpack Backup
This plugin reached the version 1.0 milestone in October 2021. Not really a completely new plugin. It’s a website backup plugin that backs up themes, plugins and database, including WooCommerce customer data. The plugin offers users the ability to restore the site to any previous state, even if the website is offline.
Jetpack Protect
Provides website security by scanning plugins and themes on a daily basis to identify and provide a warning if any have vulnerabilities. The plugin uses the WPScan vulnerability library which contains an up to the minute listing of WordPress vulnerabilities.
Jetpack Boost
This plugin reached the version 1.0 milestone on April 2021, so it’s not really brand new. This plugin improves website performance by generating critical CSS (loads just the CSS that is needed), defers non-essential JavaScript, lazy loading module that only loads images that users can see.
Jetpack Social
Social sharing management and scheduling hub that allows managing all social channels from one location.
Jetpack Search
Provides advanced features like autopredict, autocorrect spelling, instant results, real-time indexing and other advanced features.
Jetpack CRM
This plugin was announced as being spun off the main Jetpack but it’s been offered since 2020. It helps manage clients with a management portal, invoicing, billing system and more
Jetpack Original All-in-One
The original version of Jetpack will remain the same for now. The announcement said that eventually at some point in the future some of the functions spun off into individual plugins will be removed from the Jetpack but assured that adding them back in will be trouble-free.
