WordPress Jetpack Troubleshooting

Jetpack for WordPress is a great set of plugins to help publish and share your blog posts. Unfortunately, this functionality comes at the cost of it not always being the easiest to setup and/or install. In our experience we have found a pretty wide array of issues that cause it not to function properly, ranging from incompatible theme issues to other plugins.

Below are some tips to hopefully solving your issues and getting JetPack running.

First step is to check out JetPack’s known issues page (Here). Disable/remove any plugins that are listed there and try re-installing Jetpack again. W3TC is our staple plugin, but unfortunately it REALLY does not play nice for Jetpack.

One thing to note is that they tell you to disable CloudFlare completely. We do not agree with that, as Cloudflare is an incredibly important tool for keeping your WordPress blogs safe. Just find another “Like” button if you need to!

If Jetpack is still having issue, the other avenue to try is checking out your theme. On a test platform that has a copy of your wordpress install, try switching the theme to one of the stock ones from WordPress and install Jetpack. If it works there, then your theme is causing a conflict and/or actively disabled Jetpack for some reason.

In one instance, we were using the them “Karma” and ran into a bizarre instance where if you had the plugin installed and THEN installed Jetpack, the theme would disable the sharing/publicize instances of Jetpack without warning the end user. We were told that you would only get the warning when the theme was enabled on an already existing instance of Jetpack. It is our strong opinion that ANY plugin/widget etc should ALWAYS warn the user if it is actively disabling another module/plugin that was outside of its scope. (For Karma users, go to the “functions.php” file in the wp-content/themes/Karma folder. Go to line 136 and comment out the $arr and “update_option” lines).

Hopefully this will help others resolve their JetPack plugin install issues. Once its installed, its a very helpful set of tools.