Jetpack Safe Mode is a feature that will minimize Jetpack Identity Crises and will begin shipping in version 4.4.
What is an Identity Crisis?
When you connect your Jetpack site, WordPress.com notes the URL. If that URL changes on your Jetpack-enabled site but the URL we have on WordPress.com doesn’t get updated, then your site is now in what we call Identity Crisis.
Why is this a problem?
Jetpack saves a blog ID and a token (think username and password) in your site’s database when you first connect that is unique to your specific URL. We use this blog ID to keep track of a lot of things, including your site’s stats information and your subscribers. When there’s an Identity Crisis occurring, having conflicting information can result in problems like the apparent loss of your stats or subscribers, wrong shortlinks, and others. Safe mode helps prevent these problems before they start.
How does Safe Mode Help?
There are several cases where your Jetpack-enabled site’s URL could change:
- You bought a new domain name and updated your site to use that domain.
- You clone your site from production to staging.
- You allow two URLs to point to the same WordPress installation.
- Any other scenario where the URL of your site might change.
In most cases, we can safely update the URL and not cause an Identity Crisis. But, there are a handful of cases where we’re not able to automatically determine whether we should update the URL on the shadow site.
In these cases, Jetpack takes some extra steps to make sure that we’re not causing an Identity Crisis:
- We don’t allow syncing any more information from the Jetpack-enabled site to the WordPress.com shadow site.
- We begin displaying the Jetpack Safe Mode notice.
- We continue showing that notice until an admin of your site resolves the potential Identity Crisis.
What does the Safe Mode notice look like?
When the notice is first displayed, you’ll see something like this:
Clicking the “Confirm Safe Mode” button will hide the notice and leave your site in Safe Mode. Clicking the “Fix Jetpack’s Connection” button will present you with something like this:
What does each button mean?
Looking at the two above screenshots, there are four actions you can take. Below is an explanation of why you would click each button.
Confirm Safe Mode
If you have cloned your site for testing purposes, then you’ll want to click the “Confirm Safe Mode” button.This will leave your site in Safe Mode and hide the notice. An example of this would be if I were to copy jetpack.com to staging.jetpack.com. Many hosts will refer to this as a “staging” environment.
After clicking the “Confirm Safe Mode” button, you will see a “Jetpack Safe Mode” button popup in the admin bar. Clicking this will display the Safe Mode notice again in case you need to fix your connection using on of the other methods.
Fix Jetpack’s Connection
If your site is not setup for testing purposes, and you’re seeing the Safe Mode notice, then you’ll want to click the “Fix Jetpack’s Connection” button. This will then give you two options to choose from for fixing your site’s connection.
Migrate Stats & Subscribers
You would click the “Migrate Stats & Subscribers” button if you the new site URL is replacing your old site’s URL. The most common case of this is when a developer is taking a site from a development environment to a production environment.
For example: Going from newsite.mydevelopmentwebsites.com to newsite.com.
After clicking this button, WordPress.com will migrate all of your stats and subscribers from the old site to the new site and then we will place the old site in staging mode.
Note: After clicking the “Migrate Stats & Subscribers” button, the Safe Mode notice should disappear immediately on your new site but it could take a few minutes for stats and subscribers to migrate.
Start Fresh & Create New Connection
You would click the “Start Fresh & Create New Connection” button when you’re creating a new and separate site. The most common use case for this action would be if you’re creating a copy of site A to be used as a starting point for site B.
After clicking the “Start Fresh & Create New Connection” button, you will be redirected to WordPress.com to authorize the connection. After clicking the “Approve” button there, your new Jetpack-enabled site will have its own connection and the Safe Mode notice should disappear.
Still have questions?
We’re here to help! Just contact us and we’ll be happy to clarify things if you’re not sure what to do or if you’re having trouble.
