How the Jetpack Activity Log Helps You Manage a WordPress Site

A successful website requires consistent management and upkeep, especially if you have multiple users and contributors. But if you’re as busy as most entrepreneurs, you may not have the time to keep track of every action on your site.

What happens if something goes wrong? How can you find out what caused the issue and how to fix it?

Learn the benefits of website management, why it’s so important for your business, and how to efficiently track website activity with Jetpack Activity.

The benefits of monitoring your website

The last thing you want is for a visitor to land on your site only to immediately leave in frustration. If your website loads slowly, has a broken layout or missing images, or doesn’t work at all, that’s exactly what will happen.

There are two big ways that tracking website activity helps you keep your site healthy and functional:

1. Preventing website downtime

When something goes wrong, it’s easy to blame bots, hackers, and spammers. But there are also internal factors that can slow down or break your website. The most common include:

• Using an unreliable ad network
• Uploading images that are too large
• Adding too many plugins
• Choosing low-quality plugins and themes
• Overloading your site with videos

When you’re aware of what’s happening on your site, it’s easier to diagnose problems and prevent them from happening again. Jetpack shows you a detailed list of everything that happens on your site, so you know exactly what changes have been made and who made them.

2. Diagnosing update issues

It’s critical to regularly update WordPress along with your themes and plugins. Not only do updates provide new features, they also keep your site secure and working properly. Automatic updates streamline the process, so there’s no reason not to be up to date. 

Updates can also cause your site to break, particularly plugin updates. Why? The developers of the vast number of available themes and plugins each have their own coding style, so you might encounter a plugin that’s incompatible with your theme or other plugins. Sometimes an update may even introduce new problems.

Knowing which plugin is responsible for the issue can require quite a bit of troubleshooting, especially if you have lots of plugins. Traditionally, you would need to deactivate all of them, then reactivate them one by one until you identify the problem. If your site was completely down and you couldn’t access your dashboard, you’d have to use FTP for this.

But if you’re tracking website activity using Jetpack, you can easily identify the last updated plugin, deactivate it, and revert your site back to its functional state pre-update.

Website management with Jetpack Activity

Jetpack Activity is a great solution for people who want to spend less time debugging their website and more time selling products and services. 

Instead of tracking every single change manually, visit the activity log for up to date details on what’s happening behind the scenes of your site.  You can use that information to troubleshoot issues and debug problems. Search and filter by date or activity type and know exactly who made each change and when. Jetpack Activity pairs detailed info with complete transparency within your organization.

What if there is a problem? If you also have real-time backups enabled, you can use the activity log to restore your website to a specific moment in time. If you know that a change you made to your page took down your website, you can restore your site to exactly how it was before you made that change. And since Jetpack saves your backups separately from your site files, you can usually restore your site even while it’s completely down and inaccessible. 

Learn more about Jetpack Backup options or upgrade your Jetpack plan to get what you need.

Accessing Jetpack Activity

To find the activity log for your website, log into WordPress.com and click My Sites. If you have multiple websites, you can switch between them to see your activity in the same account. 

Click Activity to see recent events, along with the time that they occurred and who made the changes. 

With a free Jetpack account, you’ll see your 20 most recent site events. If a lot happens on your site, you may want to upgrade — paid plans allow you to see events from the last 30 days or even the last year. 

Upgrading also allows you to search and filter entries in the activity log and restore backups. See a full list of Jetpack plan features.

What activities are included?

Jetpack Activity displays actions like comments made, attachments uploaded, posts updated, pages published, and users logged in. This helps you keep track of what each of your team members is doing and when (or reminds you of what you did!).

It also displays automated activities that your website performs, like emptying comment spam, updating plugins, and completing backups. 

View the full list of activities monitored.

Searching and filtering

If you have a paid Jetpack plan, you can search and filter the activity log. 

If you have a content marketing team managing your blog posts, you can filter the activity log by Posts and Pages, then select a date range. This will show you exactly what posts were published or modified within a certain period of time, and allows you to track what’s being published. If you want to make sure that images are uploaded in the correct size, filter by Media and check the file size of each picture. Or if you just want to make sure that backups are running successfully, filter by Backups and Restores.

Filtering lets you check in on specific issues without wasting time digging through every aspect of your website.

Monitor your site on the go

Whether you’re traveling or just rushing from one meeting to another, it can be easy to overlook website management. But with Jetpack, you can use the WordPress app to view your activity.

1. Download the WordPress app.
2. Log into your website.
3. Choose Activity. 
4. Scroll down to view your activity log. 

If you’re checking in on a regular basis, you’ll be able to prevent the majority of potential site issues simply by catching them before they become a problem.

Stay up to date on your website activity

Website management doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. Jetpack Activity makes it simple to manage and monitor your site and users. If something does go wrong, every second of downtime could equal lost revenue. Jetpack helps you quickly get your site, and your business, back up and running. 

Get started with Jetpack Activity.

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