Fuck Jetpack

When I was new to WordPress, there was this handy plugin called Jetpack. Made by a company called Automattic, it added a ton of useful features, all for free. These included things like extra widgets, an easy contact form you could add to your website, a vastly detailed stat system and an easy way to post blog posts to other websites. Sure, Jetpack constantly tried to sell you its premium version, after all, that’s what most free plugins do to try and make money, but the features it offered were great, and the price for the premium stuff wasn’t too bad.

I quickly used a lot of these features when I took over hosting the Daily SPUF. The biggest feature I used was the Social sub-plugin. This allowed me to automatically post links to other social media. The Daily SPUF used to post to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr all the time, although I could never get the Reddit auto-poster to work, and support for it didn’t last for very long. Still, these features were great, and the Daily SPUF’s Tumblr page had 2000 posts on it. That goes to show how long we used these features for, over five years.

There were also other handy features. I still use the contact form to this day, and, thankfully, it hasn’t changed in the slightest. Not that I get much email these days, most of the emails I get are just spam emails asking me if I want to build an app for iOS or want to pay a small fortune for SEO optimization. Weirdly, a lot of these emails come from Outlook accounts. Like, if you don’t even have your own domain name, how the fuck can I trust you with SEO?

But over the last couple of years, a lot of these features have been reduced or stripped away. The biggest one being the Social sub-plugin. This feature used to be free, but was reduced to 30 posts per month, with a post in this case being a post to an individual social media site. So, with our daily articles, we’d get 10 days of social media posts before being nagged and pestered to upgrade to premium to pay for more. For about a month, I got around this by rolling Jetpack back to an older version, but then they just removed the feature overall from older versions and added a nag to make you upgrade. A lot of features, I’ve noticed, have been turned off and need to be re-enabled. I used to have image acceleration turned on, but a recent update turned that off and moved the setting, so I was completely unaware what had changed. Sure, maybe I should have read the change notes before upgrading the plugin, but moving the setting to where it is now makes no sense. Why is it not with all the other site settings?

The features have all been shuffled around as well. The speed-boosting and site protection parts of Jetpack have now been taken out and put into their own plugins, and they also have a premium version that they nag you to buy.

Granted, a lot of features do still exist. The additional Testimonials and Portfolios custom post types still exist, so does the infinite scroll feature (which rarely worked), as does a very limited version of the old CDN that would use lazy image loading and serve some CSS files from faster servers. But this is all locked away behind the settings. And at the same time, the settings also constantly nag you and tell you to upgrade to premium. And more and more of it is also locked away behind a WordPress.com account, which makes things awkward for people using WordPress.org’s standalone version.

Sure, you might think I’m complaining when Jetpack does a lot of things for free. But that’s not what I’m complaining about. Formerly free features have been taken away or heavily limited, then repackaged and sold back to us. At a premium. That’s what annoys me. And this stuff isn’t cheap either. If I just want the Social sub-plugin to post to social media again, it’d cost me $10 a month if I pay yearly, $14 if I pay monthly. The whole Jetpack package costs $45 a month, or $19 for just the security stuff alone.

At least we still have Akismet Anti-spam that’s still free. That plugin does a lot of hard work. I think taking that away would cause an uproar.