I’ve built WordPress websites for I don’t know how long now, but suffice to say I’ve relied on it for a bulk of the work I do as a freelance front-ender. And in that time, I’ve used Jetpack on a good number of them for things like site backups, real-time monitoring, and security scans, among other awesome things.
I love Jetpack, but darn it if it’s time-consuming to manage those services (plus the licenses!) in multiple accounts that I have to keep track of (and get invoices for!).
The Jetpack team took a major step to make it easier to manage its services with a new licensing plan that’s designed specifically for agencies and individuals like myself who manage a portfolio of clients. Instead of littering my 1Password account with a bunch of different logins for different sites to do something like backing up a site, I can now do it all from the convenience of one account: my own.
Sure sure, you say. Plenty of plugins offer developer licenses that can be used on multiple sites. But how many of them allow you to manage those sites all at once? Not many as far as I know. But Jetpack now has this great big, handy dashboard that gives you a nice overview of all the sites you manage in one place.
OK, so the new Jetpack agency dashboard does administrative stuff for licensing and payments. But there’s also the ability to manage all of your Jetpack-driven sites from here as well. Tab over to the site manager and you get to work on all those sites at once. Imagine you have to run a site backup each month for 20 sites. Ugh. It’s really one task, but it’s also sort of like doing the same task 20 times. This way, that can all be done together directly from the dashboard—no hopping accounts and repeating the same task over and again.
Jetpack’s agency licensing is a program you sign up for. Once you’re a member, you not only get the dashboard and a single automated bill each month, but a slew of other perks, including a 25% discount on all Jetpack products and early access to new site management features. This is just the first iteration of the dashboard and site manager, and there’s plenty in the pipeline for more goodness to come. Heck, you can even request a feature if you’d like.
There’s just one requirement: you’ve gotta issue at least five licenses within 90 days. That’s fair considering this is an agency sort of thing and agencies are bound to reach that threshold pretty quickly.
This is definitely the sort of thing that excites me because it saves a lot of time on overhead so more time can be spent, you know, working. So, give it a look and see how it can streamline the way you manage Jetpack on multiple sites.
