Why the WordPress.com connection is important for Jetpack

The Jetpack connection gives your site access to the WordPress.com cloud and unlocks the collective power of thousands of globally distributed servers to provide security, performance and functionality at scale.

With the Jetpack plugin, you can use many features developed on WordPress.com on your self-hosted website. By connecting your self-hosted website to a WordPress.com account via the Jetpack plugin, you can access many features originally developed for WordPress.com sites.

Benefits of connecting your Jetpack site with your WordPress.com account

By connecting your site to Jetpack with your WordPress.com account, you unlock a range of benefits tailored to enhance your experience:

• Automatic actions performed on your behalf: you can enable some features to automatically take actions, so you don’t need to think about that. For example, Jetpack Social can automatically share your site’s posts on multiple social media networks when you publish new content; you can also get instant notifications on your phone when you get new likes and comments.
• Access to special tools: some tools and features rely on the data stored in our servers, so you can access it via a WordPress.com account connection. Some examples are the Activity Log, a comprehensive list of events on your site, or the Advanced Stats, where you’ll find even more details about visitors, including Views By Country, Unique Views, and many more insights about your site.
• Use the Jetpack API: you can leverage the API connection to enhance your site’s capabilities while keeping it secure. You can securely connect Jetpack products and services to your site, unlocking new functionality powered by the WordPress.com cloud. For example, you can use the Backup feature to create full site backups and securely store them in the cloud. Another feature that requires such a connection is Search, which indexes all your content in the cloud and runs search queries without using any resources on your site.

Jetpack features that don’t need a WordPress.com account connection

While we still recommend connecting your WordPress.com account with Jetpack, some features can work without this. By clicking the “Set up Jetpack” button and establishing a site-only connection, you can access and use the following features:

• Carousel — can turn your standard WordPress galleries on posts or pages into a gorgeous full-screen photo browsing experience with comments and EXIF metadata.
• Comment Likes — facilitate your viewers’ interaction by allowing like comments. You can also control how Comment Likes appear on your site.
• Firewall — block/allow a specific request IP, or ensure any rules delivered to the site remain functional after the paid subscription with a Scan feature lapses or is removed.
• Comments — replace your default comment form with this comment system, which integrates social media login options.
• Contact Form — add and customize contact forms on your site.
• Copy Post — start new posts based on existing posts.
• Custom Content Types — add content that doesn’t necessarily fit into a post but isn’t right for a static page either.
• Custom CSS (deprecated) — customize the appearance of your theme without creating a child theme or worrying about theme updates overwriting your customizations.
• Extra Sidebar Widgets (Except the Instagram widget) — add extra widgets to your blog, including RSS Links to X Timelines and Facebook Like Boxes.
• Gravatar Hovercards — make your profile visible to others on the web. You can help people find your blog or access your identity on other services like X, Facebook, or Linkedin.
• Infinite Scroll — create a constant flow of posts and content by pulling the next posts automatically into view when approaching the bottom of the page.
• Latex — write complex mathematical equations, formulas, and more with this powerful markup language.
• Likes — have your viewers easily show appreciation for your posts with this Like button.
• Markdown — compose posts and comments with links, lists, and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks.
• Related Posts — display contextual posts your visitors might be interested in reading after they read the current post.
• SEO Tools — optimize your site for search engines with custom title formats, front-page meta descriptions, and social previews.
• Site Accelerator — you can make the pages load faster by allowing Jetpack to optimize your images and serve your images and static files (like CSS and JavaScript) from our global network of servers.
• Sitemaps — generate sitemaps that list each post and page that should be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing.
• Sharing — add sharing buttons to your blog posts so your readers can share your content on their networks.
• Shortcodes — embed videos from YouTube and other media across the web directly into your site.
• Shortlinks — get short and simple links to your posts and pages using the wp.me domain.
• Stats — check your site’s statistics data to see how many visits your site gets and what posts and pages are the most popular.
• Stories — combine photos and videos to create engaging, tappable, full-screen slideshows on your site’s posts and pages.
• Tiled Gallery — display your image galleries as a thumbnail grid, tiled mosaic, square tiles, circles, tiled columns or slideshow.
• Verification Tools — verify your site ownership with Google, Bing, Pinterest, and Yandex services.
• Widget Visibility — configure widgets to appear only on certain pages (or be hidden on certain pages) by using the Visibility panel.

Jetpack features that must need a WordPress.com account connection

You will need to connect Jetpack using your WordPress.com account if you want to use the specific features listed below. These features, in fact, need data synchronization from the WordPress.com cloud as well as your account authentication for security and privacy matters.

Please note that you will need a paid plan, as well as a working connection via your WordPress.com account, to activate some of these features (some are included in the free plan):

• Activity Log — build a comprehensive list of all the events that happen on your site.
• AI Assistant — add AI-powered text generation into your block editor.
• Backup — get automatic full backups of your site (stored in the WordPress.com cloud) and restore them in one click.
• Brute Force Attack Protection— protect your site and account against traditional brute force attacks and distributed brute force attacks that use many servers to target your site.
• Donations – add a payment button to any post or page for donations, tips, and other contributions, using Stripe as the payment gateway.
• Firewall — add another layer of protection to your site with the firewall feature, which examines incoming traffic and decides to allow or block it based on various rules.
• Google Analytics (deprecated).
• Instagram Widget — display an Instagram Box with the latest photos from your account within a widgetized area of your theme.
• JSON API — access to WordPress.com’s OAuth2 authentication system and WordPress.com REST API to authorize applications and services to securely connect to your site, offering additional functionality.
• Mailchimp — facilitate your visitors’ signup to your Mailchimp list.
• Monitor — get an automated email (with steps to take action) to our WordPress.com account’s email address every time our servers find something off in your site.
• Notifications — get notifications in your WordPress.com admin bar, in your browser, and on your mobile device about new comments and Likes.
• Pay with PayPal — add a payment button to any post or page and immediately start accepting PayPal payments for physical products, digital goods, or donations.
• Post by Email — publish blog posts via email.
• Recurring payments — add a payment button to any post or page. You can accept credit or debit cards using Stripe as the payment gateway.
• Scan — get automated scanning for security threats and use the one-click fixes to address them.
• Search — leverage the WordPress.com cloud to index all your content and run search queries without using any resources on your site.
• Jetpack Social — distribute your new content across your preferred social media networks.
• SSO — sign in to your self-hosted sites quickly and securely using the same log-in credentials you use for WordPress.com.
• Subscriptions — have your visitors sign up for email notifications of your latest posts and comments. Subscriptions are managed via the WordPress.com cloud.
• VideoPress — speed up your site by serving your video content via the WordPress.com cloud.
• VideoPress Block — upload videos from your computer to be hosted on WordPress.com, rather than on your host’s servers.
• WordAds — generate income from your WordPress site via advertisements.
• WordAds block — insert an Ad unit anywhere within the content of any post or page. All other blocks already work with a site-only connection.

Connect Jetpack with my WordPress.com account

To establish a Jetpack connection by using your WordPress.com account, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Jetpack menu in your WP Admin dashboard.
2. Scroll down to find the Connection area.
3. Click the Connect button and the following Connect your user account to authorize the connection.

You can also read more about reconnecting Jetpack on this page or read this documentation page if you need to (re)install Jetpack from scratch.

Have trouble connecting Jetpack to WordPress.com? If so, here are some steps to help you solve the problem.