Jettisoned Jetpack

I have been using WordPress probably since around 2009 and incorporated it into one of my courses around 2010. In general, I am quite pleased with WordPress, and how it allows me and millions of others to keep solid Web sites.

One of the offshoots of WordPress is Jetpack. It arrived in early 2011 and consolidated separate plugins into a single plugin. Initially, it included a small number of plugin functions but over time, its available modules grew significantly.

I have been using Jetpack for over 12 years, possibly from its inception. My earliest support post was 11 years and 6 months ago! Among its growing number of functions and modules, I have used mainly site stats, tiled galleries, and on a few posts, image compare modules. With occasional hiccups, bug reports, and waiting for fixes, it has functioned as it originally claimed.

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(Even before Jetpack, while using WordPress Stats I ran into problems back in 2011. WordPress was using a third-party spying software embedded in their Stats plugin without the users’ knowledge. I wrote about it then.)

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Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.

Jetpack Is Free, They Said

Early on, and even in relatively recent years, WordPress which owns Jetpack claimed that Jetpack is free and will remain free. The statement I captured from an early Jetpack site said “Jetpack itself is, and always will be free,” as you can see in the image. It added that some new features may require payment. Fair enough! And we have come a long way.

Free No More

However, in recent years, Jetpack sidestepped some reasonable requests for changes and improvements and recently decided to charge for what has always been a part of free Jetpack, the site stats. It has been an integral part of the original Jetpack that was supposed to be always free.

The way they implemented the payment wall was a mystery. Commercial sites were required to buy the paid version of the stats module. And, somehow their system decided that this was a commercial site. I wrote a trouble ticket and asked the same in a follow-up post, and that was four days ago. I inquired why my site was marked as a commercial site, and whether there was an appeal process. I still have not received an answer.

How To Eject Jetpack?

I have used the Jetpack tiled gallery block in quite a few posts. However, I was determined to cut my ties with this plugin, so I started by converting all the tiled gallery blocks to regular WordPress galleries. The conversion is simple, click on the block icon on the left corner of the block toolbar and select Gallery from the list. The conversion is instant. I will advise changing the number of columns up or down and bringing it back if you like what you see. Otherwise, the number of columns may not correspond to what you see in the edit window.

The next item on the line was image compare blocks where a slider in the middle allows displaying two versions of an image, before and after. I searched for a plugin for that and installed it. After I installed that plugin, I disabled the image compare module in Jetpack so that it would display an error and offer block recovery. Since the feature was disabled, it would fail and give me the option to keep the HTML. I copied the image names from that block when I inserted a new image compare block and quickly converted them to the new plugin. After each replacement was completed, I deleted the HTML block remnant.

The third and the main thing I was using with Jetpack was the stats feature. I am still in the process of trying a few WordPress statistics plugins and will decide on one. The other active modules were not offering anything significant or even noticeable to me and when I disabled and deleted Jetpack I felt good! Enough of this dragging the users into paid versions of what you promised to be free forever.

It was a little time-consuming but I have done it. One user leaving the folds of Jetpack is nothing significant. But this user would like them to know that their arbitrary methods of classifying sites as commercial to coerce the site owners to buy a paid version will cause more dissatisfied users. You can easily tell by looking at their support forum as well as on other public forums where users say goodbye to Jetpack. I am not the first one, nor will I be the last. That’s too bad!

For the record, I would like to share a few screen captures from the early days of the Jetpack site I dug up in the folds of the Internet Archive—first, a few links to the archives. The dates are archive dates. Note that the domain name was Jetpack.me. Also note that these links may open slowly as they load from the Internet Archive site, not live views of an existing site.

Jetpack announced by Matt Mullenweg

Jetpack site on July 4, 2012

Jetpack site on December 31, 2012

7/17/2024: For the record, I posted on a thread on the Jetpack support forum and it got deleted. I wrote it once more and repeating it here for the record.

Well, this is interesting! I wrote a follow up on this thread and it was deleted. I essentially said that I stumbled onto this thread after I wrote an article on the same topic on my site and provided a link to the article. Has Jetpack and WordPress become so thin skinned that they cannot take any criticism? Here is the link again, and I will add this comment to my article in case it gets deleted again.

Jettisoned Jetpack

7/18/2024: Jetpack removed the above reply on that thread. And, I received a reply from another developer and I wrote a thank you reply and now my reply is waiting for moderation. For a long time, my questions or replies did not need moderator approval. I guess WordPress does not want to hear disagreements with its policies.