In today’s interview, we welcome Jetpack. For those of you who still have questions about Jetpack (and if you do you should totally visit them at their #WCEU booth) – it’s a single plugin that boosts your site with the most powerful WordPress.com features. It enables you to hook your self-hosted WordPress site to WordPress.com’s infrastructure so that you can take advantage of robust stats, easy social sharing, and a whole lot more.
WordPress without its community would be like Paris without its croissants
WordCamp Europe: You have sponsored WordCamps all over. What is your main motivation for sponsoring them?
Jetpack: WordPress without its community would be like Paris without its croissants! We sponsor WordCamps around the world because it’s one of the most effective ways of supporting the hard-working organisers and volunteers and giving something back to the community that made us. WordCamps are also a fantastic place to have rich conversations with WordPress experts and newcomers from all walks of life — the people that we aim to serve with our products and services.
We’re definitely looking to sample as many croissants as possible. And ideally do so while having amazing conversations with all the attendees. Talking to 3,000 attendees (and eating as many croissants) is probably a little unrealistic but we’ll give it our best shot. We’re particularly looking forward to discussing the recent improvements to Jetpack’s UI, our new affiliate program, and how Jetpack is helping hosting companies improve the WordPress experience for everyone.
WordCamp Europe offers a fantastic atmosphere and energy
Europe – with so many different languages and cultural differences – how important is WordCamp Europe for community growth?
Attending WordCamp Europe is like fuelling up for the year ahead. The excitement, ideas, and connections that are made are things we take back home to help drive our, and the community’s, growth when we’re back at our desks. In Vienna last year we re-connected with some familiar places and made new acquaintances that we’ve solidified in the following months. This is only possible because of the fantastic atmosphere and energy which means we take home not just business cards, but fantastic memories.
In what way do you think you can best contribute to the future of WordPress?
Supporting and being an active part of the WordPress community is a key factor as I mentioned. Beyond that, Jetpack’s mission is to provide all WordPress sites and users with a launch pad that makes the process of building, securing, and maintaining sites even easier than with just core WordPress. In the long run, we believe that this is the best way of ensuring WordPress’ continued growth and adoption in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
With Jetpack – designing, growing, and securing a WordPress site becomes significantly easier
Jetpack is a plugin that can best be described as a jack of all trades. It has a ton of features. Are you planning on introducing more, or working on the ones you have?
We like to think of Jetpack as the new baseline — or platform — from which designing, growing, and securing a WordPress site becomes significantly easier. So rather than “jack of all trades” most newcomers to WordPress see Jetpack as a “starting point”. Some of our services — like stats, backups, CDN, related posts, and brute force attack protection — are valuable throughout a site’s lifecycle and some others — like contact forms and email subscriptions — are things which eventually some sites will turn to other plugins for more features.
Over the past 12 months we’ve focused a lot on improving our user interface and user experience and the robustness of our security systems and development processes. In the coming year, you can definitely expect some big announcements but I can’t share any details as yet. 🙂
What is your most popular feature, and why would you recommend it to your users?
Support. Our users consistently give us rave reviews about the support they receive from our team (30 Happiness Engineers at last count) and we’ve had a steady rate of 85% high satisfaction from everyone who contacts us. We’re constantly trying to improve our response times — and they’re now much faster for priority support customers — because we think timely and personalised support underpins any feature or service we offer.
Thank you Jetpack for sponsoring WordCamp Europe 2017 (and don’t forget to stop by their booth)
Say hello to #WCEU sponsors
Sponsors are one of the most important parts of WordCamp Europe. With their help we keep the ticket price low, and the conference open to everyone. While in Paris, visit their booths, say hello to them, and talk with them about their products and services. Wondering who these companies are? Visit the sponsors page.
Thank you to our sponsors for being an important part of WordCamp Europe <3