Has anyone else noticed that Jetpack Stats is no longer free?
I noticed on Sunday, and a client brought it to my attention on Monday. Basically what happened is that Automattic is now checking to see if you use your site for business, and if so they want you to pay $8 a month for the service (or more).
The change was announced on the Jetpack blog on the previous Wednesday, but like most people I only found out when I visited a client’s Stats page on their site.
The next question you probably have is: Should we pay for Jetpack Stats?
My vote is no.
Jetpack Stats is a nice minimal function traffic stats service. It doesn’t do much, but that was okay when it was free. There are a lot of sites which only need basic traffic stats, and Jetpack Stats filled that need.
EDIT: Another reason not to pay for Jetpack Stats is that you can still get the old-style Jetpack Stats for free. If you go into the Jetpack Settings menu and click on the “Traffic” tab, there is a hidden option for “Enable a new Jetpack Stats experience”, If you de-toggle that option you will get the old stats back. (I tried it and it worked.)
But now that Automattic wants us to pay for Jetpack Stats, it is readily obvious that the service is not worth paying for. There are competing services such as Google Analytics and Statcounter.com which are both free and more comprehensive than Jetpack Stats.
Really, the only thing that Jetpack has going for it now is that it is GDPR-proof. It doesn’t require tracking cookies, which means that it works whether or not the visitor grants permission. Both GA and Statcounter use tracking code, and under the GDPR that code requires permission from visitors.
If I needed traffic stats, I would switch to either GA or Statcounter. In fact, if a client asks me about this, I’ll probably tell them to let me install Google Analytics. It is relatively easy for me to set up GA on a client’s site and then grant them access to the traffic data (it’s not so easy to do this with Statcounter).
One downside of GA is that it collects so much data that it can be hard to understand what you are seeing (this is why I liked the simplicity of Jetpack Stats). But GA is free, which is important given that most of the sites I support can’t justify the expense of paying for traffic stats.
Hi, what would you recomend to an alternative to Jetpack Photon?
I use a paid plugin called WP Rocket.
This toggle is greyed out in the latest version of Jetpack (v13.5), so I’m guessing they got wise to the loophole.. 🙁
It’s still working for me?
I checked a client’s site – they have the greyed out toggle like you said.
The trick now is: downgrade to version 13.4 by downloading from https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/jetpack.13.4.3.zip then installing it via Plugins > Add new > Upload. You can then toggle to the old stats. Then upgrade the plugin again and ignore the messages pushing you to switch to the new experience 🙂
Until the old version is completely removed :/
thanks!
Works , thanks !I used 12.9.3 version from my backup.
Removing Jetpack stats from the free version isn’t just adding up. I’m reading somewhere and they say it’s now available for non-commercial websites. Question is, how do you now judge what is commercial from what is not? Do you verify them individually? Not just adding up for real. Definitely moving over to GA.
BTW, I think they’ve just removed the option to “Enable a new jetpack experience”.
Interestingly, stats seem to be available once again for me. I have a paid Professional Plan, and it had irked me that stats were promised when I signed up for that plan and then taken away. Maybe they have decided to grandfather those of us with a legacy plan. If so, that will save me the hassle of replacing Jetpack with another service when it is time for renewal this fall. I was so annoyed that I was ready to jump ship.