What to do if your subscribers disappear in Jetpack

I recently had a client that moved web servers. I referred to this situation in April as I described a website that was loading slowly and only a server change made a difference. Well, a couple of weeks in to that change and my client notices that her nearly 300 blog subscribers were missing. We had been using the Jetpack plugin to manage her blog subscriptions.

This perplexed me since the subscribers amass in WordPress.com and she had not changed her account at all. What could have happened?

I first reached out to WordPress.com. The first response I received was entirely off message and dealing with people that had WordPress.com sites that they migrated to WordPress.org self hosted sites. After doing a few google searches, I found a thread on Jetpack support that said the following:

With Jetpack, your stats and subscriber information is connected to a unique blog ID. Sometimes, if a site owner was using a development site or a different address when they set up Jetpack, disconnecting may create a new blog ID. When this happens, it may appear that your stats were lost.

After finding this, I opened the database in phpMyAdmin in wp_options -> looked at the record for jetpack_options and found the blog id. I copied it to a text doc.  I then looked at stats_options and the blog id was different. I also copied this to a text doc.

I then sent this information to support and they had indeed created two records. It had happened on the staging URL for the website during our server move.  Support merged the subscribers back into my client’s WordPress.com account.

After this experience and the general bogging down of my client’s website with the Jetpack plugin, we are in search of a new blog subscription tool to replace Jetpack.  Does anyone have any suggestions?  I would love for you to share them with all of us in the cafe!

RESOURCES: WP Superstars – Is The WordPress Jetpack Plugin Worth The Convenience?