To turn off WordPress.com achievements notifications, open the Achievements page in the Reader, click the settings icon next to your activity streak, and switch them off. That one toggle covers the whole account. People get tripped up because the notifications were on by default and the settings only exist in a browser, so most of them meet the feature as noise long before they find the page.
The feature landed with a cheerful announcement on the WordPress.com blog in May. The tone is confetti, which is fair, since it’s meant to be fun. But the comment thread under that post has details that matter if you maintain sites for other people, and none of them made the headline.
What shipped
The Achievements page lives in your Reader profile and shows unlocked badges, locked ones you can work toward, progress bars, and an activity streak. The streak counts the small stuff: publish a post, leave a comment, like something, follow a site. Seven consecutive days earns a streak freeze, and that freeze quietly absorbs the first day you miss. That’s decent design for a feature that costs nothing to ignore.
Two facts from that thread are worth keeping. Achievements are not new; WordPress.com has had a small set of them as site-level notifications for years, and this release added over fifty more. And most of them are not retroactive, so someone with a decade of history sees locked badges for things they already did, like mapping a custom domain or being featured on Freshly Pressed. Confused users ask about that first, and the answer is that the backfill was skipped on purpose. Recomputing history for every account was judged too risky for a lighthearted feature. I think that’s defensible, even if it reads as unkind.
Where the WordPress.com achievements settings live
There are two switches, and neither one mentions the other. I’d check both.
- Open the Reader with the reading glasses icon in the admin bar, go to your Reader profile, then to Achievements. The direct address is wordpress.com/reader/users/me/achievements.
- Click the settings icon beside the streak and turn off achievement notifications. You still earn badges and the streak keeps counting, but the alerts stop. The same menu holds the visibility setting, which stays private by default and can be opened to other logged-in WordPress.com users.
- Then open your notification settings at wordpress.com/me/notifications. The Extras section has its own Achievements entry, which the support docs describe as the switch for receiving notifications when you unlock something. If someone is still getting pinged after step two, this is usually why.
The official support guide covers the same ground with screenshots, including a troubleshooting note for a missing streak day.
The mobile app and the defaults
The support questions come from the mobile app. The notifications shipped on by default while the page stayed private, so people were pinged about something they hadn’t opted into and couldn’t easily see. And the settings only exist in the browser, which doesn’t share a login session with the Jetpack mobile app. One commenter reported tapping the “see all of your achievements” link from the app and landing on an Error Loading Post screen. Nothing is broken; it’s a session mismatch, and the fix is to open the page in a browser, which isn’t an obvious instruction to hand a client.
The defaults are what I’d argue with. Private by default for the page is the right call. Notifications on by default is not, especially for people who run several sites and collected a badge from each in the same week. A global off switch exists now, which helps, but every account still starts in the on state.
Self-hosted WordPress gets none of this. It’s a Reader feature tied to the WordPress.com account rather than the site. I’m not sure how far the pings reach into Jetpack-connected self-hosted accounts, but they follow the login instead of the domain.
What I’d do this week
If you look after WordPress.com or Jetpack-connected sites for clients and want these defaults tidied across all their accounts, that’s the kind of quiet cleanup work I do. Send me the list of logins and I’ll walk the settings once and note down what changed.
This week, on any site where the editors work from the app, I’d open the Achievements page in a browser, switch notifications off at the account level, and check the Extras entry for good measure. Then add one line to the handover notes: the page is private by default and nothing is broken.
