How to Use Jetpack on WordPress and Keep Your Local Admin Toolbar

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If you’re a WordPress user, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Jetpack. It’s a popular plugin that provides users with a wide range of features, including social media integration, security enhancements, and performance optimizations. However, if you’re not happy with the admin toolbar that comes with Jetpack, don’t worry – there is a way to keep your local admin toolbar while using Jetpack. In this article, we will show you how to do just that.

Jetpack WordPress Toolbar
Featureless toolbar with Jetpack connection

When searching for solutions to this issue, I spotted some forum posts that said this could be achieved by simply changing a setting in the Jetpack plugin’s configuration but apparently this is no longer available, so this fix no longer applies.

Normal "local" admin toolbar with buttons and info panels.
Normal “local” admin toolbar with buttons and info panels.

One solution to use the local admin toolbar is that you use separate accounts. One account that you connect with WordPress.com and the Jetpack service, and for your day-to-day operations you use a different admin account that is not connected to WordPress.com.

If you however want to restore the normal WordPress toolbar there is another way how you can do that. After a conversation with the Automattic support team, one of their happiness engineers provided the following guide as the only possible way how to achieve this. While I thought that it was not a sophisticated solution, it was still a solution.

Local Toolbar Fix WordPress Admin
Image: Screenshot by Christopher Isak
  • First, you need to install the Code Snippets plugin for WordPress, which is also available for free. You will not require premium features to make this fix work.
  • Then you activate the plugin and navigate to its setup page. Ignore all of the sample snippets.
  • Add a new PHP function now and paste the following code snippet:
function disable_wpcomtoolbar ( $modules ) {
if ( isset( $modules['masterbar'] ) ) {
unset( $modules['masterbar'] );
}
return $modules;
} 
add_filter( 'jetpack_get_available_modules', 'disable_wpcomtoolbar' );
  • Set it to “Run snippet everywhere” if you need it on the front and back end or choose another value that fits your needs.
  • Activate it now and it should directly reflect in your current session.

Why does anybody want to use the “normal” toolbar? There could be many reasons for that. For instance, many plugins and themes insert very useful buttons into the toolbar, while the Jetpack or WordPress.com toolbar is really good for nothing at all. Maybe mine was buggy but it didn’t even have a button to create a new post, and this is certainly a core function in my books.

So you basically had to install yet another plugin to your WordPress instance, but once you did this it should work. Hopefully, there will be a more sophisticated way if Automattic lets you select either toolbar in the normal settings, but for now, this should work.

Photo credit: The feature image is symbolic and has been done by Racorn. The screenshots were taken by Christopher Isak for TechAcute.

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Christopher Isak
Christopher Isakhttps://techacute.com
Hi there and thanks for reading my article! I'm Chris the founder of TechAcute. I write about technology news and share experiences from my life in the enterprise world. Drop by on Twitter and say 'hi' sometime. ;)
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