Setting Up the Jetpack Plugin

Last updated: August 7, 2018 at 1:17 am

In the last tutorial, I walked you through installing and activating the Jetpack Plugin. Now, when I log in to my website’s Dashboard, I’m prompted to “Set Up Jetpack.” And in this tutorial, I’ll let you follow me as I set up Jetpack.

So I’ll go ahead and click on the button, “Set up Jetpack.”

And this is what loads.

As you can see from the picture above, it turns out that we need a WordPress.com account in order to complete our setup of Jetpack.

So let’s go ahead and click the “continue” button. And this is what loads:

It’s an error message telling me to log in using my wordpress.com username instead of my email which was put there by the browser detecting it from cookies.

But I don’t have a wordpress log in. So what do I do. Towards the top right hand of this same page is a Sign Up button. So let’s click it and continue the Sign Up process.

Now a new page loads.

As you can see, it says, “create an account to set up Jetpack.”

So I’ll go ahead and fill up all the necessary boxes.

As you can see, my email has already been filled in through the use of cookies in my browser, but I’m asked to choose a username and a password and click “create your account.”

Of course, I’m not going to tell you what username and password I chose! So I’ll fill those in and click the Create Your Account button, and here goes.

This page loads for me to set up Jetpack.

And guess what? They’re asking me to select a “plan” and each one costs money!

Wow! And we thought that Jetpack was a free plugin!

But wait, scroll down a little and there is a free option!

And that’s what we want! We want to start with free!
So let’s click that button, shall we?

And that’s it! It loads a new page that says “your jetpack site is ready to go!”

We did it. But there’s another button there that says “Activate Recommended Features!” So let’s click that button! Shall we?

Yes! I do!

And here is what loads.

Great, so it looks like the features have been activated and one of those is “site stats” which basically means that my Dashboard will now show me how many visitors came to my website for the day, where they came from, what keyword they typed in etc.

That’s great.

The next thing to do is to play around with the Settings of Jetpack.

So great! Let’s go ahead and do that! But first, let’s take a look at what this page is telling us about Jetpack – before we navigate away.

In the screenshot above, it’s showing us that it has a Security Scanning Feature as well as a backup Feature. But it also says that to use those features requires an upgrade. In others word: pay money. And we don’t want to pay any money for anything right now, especially when there are free ways to doing the same thing.

Scroll a little lower and it’s telling us about the Spam Protection feature which also requires an upgrade. To the right side of that is the “Plugin Updates” feature which is active, and which checks to make sure all plugins on the site are up to date. Currently it detects that all plugins are updated and that’s good.

Scroll down a little more, and, as you can see in the above picture, it’s telling about two more features:

  1. Protect: Jetpack is working to block malicious login attempts -which trust me, you will a lot. However, if you have created a hard to guess username and a really strong password, and you have also activated the Logiziner Plugin, then by now you have a quadruple strength protection against hacker. Combine this with all the protection offered by our amazing web hosting service “LeaseHost,” and you’re website is almost impossible to hack.
  2. Jetpack is monitoring your website to see if it goes down for some reason. Most web hosts guarantee 99.9 % uptime. Lease Host is the only web host which guarantees 100% uptime and actually delivers that. Yes! With Lease Host web hosting, your website will almost never go down.

Great! So there are a few features highlighted on that same page, but we’ll talk about that later. For now, let’s go ahead and tweak our Jetpack settings a little bit, if necessary.

To do that, we need to scroll back up to the page where it says “settings.”

So I’ll now click the “Settings” button and see what loads.

So that’s basically a sneak of what the settings page looks like. It has five headings to navigate and look under:

  1. Writing
  2. Sharing
  3. Discussion
  4. Traffic
  5. Security

And, I’m going to run through them all right now, and see if there is anything to change at the moment. If not I’m going to just truncate this lesson right here.

OK, so I don’t see anything I want to change right now. But what I do know is that I will have to make some changes in the future, and when I do, I’ll create tutorial for you to follow.

One thing for sure is that I have to turn off the Jetpack commenting feature, because I’ve encountered problems with it in the past, and I know use WP Discus for comments.

But we’ll deal with that later. For now, let’s end this lesson right here. I think you’ve learned a lot about setting up jetpack and you can learn a lot more by fiddling around a little bit – but carefully.

So, now that we have Jetpack installed, our Facebook Page Integration Widget should be there. So we will put then in the left column in our next lesson. So see you in the next lesson, “Integrating a Facebook Page into Your WordPress Website.”

Oh and by the way, I did receive an email from Jetpack telling me that I’m all set!

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