How to Manage Jetpack User Capabilities
Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins in WordPress with over 5 million users. The plugin is a swiss-army knife that offers users a ton of helpful features including security, spam-blocking, backups, traffic statistics, and more.
Several PublishPress customers have asked us how to control access to the Jetpack settings. For example, one user wanted to allow their Editors to see the traffic statistics.
In this post, I'll explain several ways that you can control access to the Jetpack dashboard.
Who Can Access Jetpack?
By default, only users in the Administrator role can see and use the Jetpack dashboard inside your site.
Access to Jetpack is controlled by the manage_options capability in WordPress. If you want to give a user access to the Jetpack menus, you can do this:
- Install the PublishPress Capabilities plugin.
- Go to “Capabilities” in your WordPress admin menu.
- Choose the user role in the top-left corner.
- Check the box for “manage options”.
One thing to note: The manage_options permission allows you to access all of the links under “Settings” in the WordPress admin. So be careful with who you give this capability to.
- Once that's done, your users will be able to see the “Dashboard” and “Settings” menu links. The users will also be able to see menu link links for features such as Akismet or Jetpack Backup, if you have those plugins installed.
How to Control Access to Jetpack Site Stats
One feature in Jetpack does have its own access controls, separate from the other features. The “Site Stats” feature has access settings inside the main Jetpack plugin.
- Go to “Jetpack”, then “Settings”, and then “Traffic”.
- Scroll down and find the “Site stats” tab.
- Click the down arrow in the “Site stabs” tab.
- In this area, you can decide which user roles can view Jetpack stats:
How to Control Access to Jetpack Menus
If you want to give users specific access to Jetpack admin menus, then PublishPress Capabilities can help here. The Pro version of PublishPress Capabilities allows you to block access to menu links.
- Install the PublishPress Capabilities Pro plugin.
- Follow the steps above to give the “manage options” capability to a user role.
- Go to “Capabilities” then “Admin Menus” in your WordPress admin.
- Choose the user role.
- Block access to any menu link you don't want that user role to access. For example, in this image below, I'm blocking access to the “Akismet Anti-Spam” menu.
