jetpack

If you have, say, 20 posts/pages on your WordPress site, the search functionality that is baked right into your self-hosted WordPress site will probably do a great job. Search is a pretty cool feature to ship with WordPress, truth be told. But as a site grows, you'll find limits. How it works behind the scenes is a touch over my head, but as I understand it, it does a MySQL LIKE query on your post titles and post content. It tries its best to order by relevance (like if it finds an exact sentence match), then largely orders by date.

If search is super important to your site (here on CSS-Tricks, on-site search gets used a ton) you'll probably look for other options.

TLDR: Jetpack Search is quite good out of the box, customizable, and requires very little effort.

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We've been working with Jetpack around here as a sponsor. It's a great match because as someone with a bunch of self-hosted WordPress sites, Jetpack is one of those no-brainer plugins for me. Jetpack can do a ton of good things for any site in a variety of very different ways. Here's one way to think about it: it brings the power of WordPress' own massive servers to you.

For now, let's just focus on one angle of what Jetpack can do for you: image performance. Jetpack does a ton for you in this regard, solving some non-trivial performance upgrades. Let's take a look at what I see as the four big boosts you get from Jetpack on your images.

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Jetpack is an official WordPress plugin directly from Automattic. It's an interesting plugin in that it doesn't just do *one thing* — it does a whole slew of things that enhance what your WordPress site can do. *Any* WordPress site, that is, and often with extremely little effort. Those easy win features Jesse Friedman calls light switch features, meaning you literally flip a switch in Jetpack's settings and start benefitting. I love that.

There are dozens of features in Jetpack, and I personally make use of most of them and see the benefit in all of them. Allow me to share with you five of my favorites and how they are actively used right here on this site. It's actually a bit hard to pick, so perhaps I'll do this again sometime!

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