WordPress Push Notifications: How to Set Them Up
WordPress push notifications have risen in popularity over the years, and chances are you have come across them severally. Most modern websites have them.
Have you ever seen a popup box, asking your permission to send notifications? Those are web push notifications or WordPress push notifications as we will refer to them in this article. Browsers like Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Safari, support them both on mobile and desktop.
The idea behind WordPress push notification is to encourage repeat visits from your visitors. To achieve this, it sends push alerts to subscribers whenever you publish something new on your website. The end goal, of course, is to drive more website traffic.
In this article, we will look into what WordPress push notification is all about. Not only that, we will also walk you through how to set it up on your WordPress website. You don’t have to write any code – WordPress push notification plugins will do the work.
In this article:
- What is WP push notification?
- Benefits of adding push notification to your WordPress website
- Times when you need push notification
- How to add push notification to your website
What is WordPress push notification?
This is how WordPress push notification looks like:
Push notifications are popup prompts that appear whenever a visitor lands on a website. If the visitor clicks Allow, he/she would get an automatic notification any time new content is published on the website. Even if the visitor isn’t currently on the website when new content is published, he/she would still get an alert. However, if the visitor clicks Block, no notification would be sent.
Basically, that’s how push notifications work. They work well both on desktops and mobile devices.
Benefits of Adding Push Notifications to Your WordPress Website
Building loyal, enthusiastic followers to your website is no easy feat. This is because most people visit a website once, never to visit it again. Your biggest challenge is converting this once-in-a-while visitors to repeat visitors.
Thankfully, there are a couple of marketing channels you could use to overcome this challenge. Email marketing, social media marketing, and web push notification are the most common.
Email marketing works, for one thing. No doubt about that. What you may not know is that push notification, if done right, is as effective. Any visitor that permits your notifications has an interest in your website. They will likely come to your site when they receive a notification. That means very little marketing efforts on your part gets you more engagement.
Other benefits of adding push notifications to your website include:
- Very little upfront investment of time and money
- Effective for driving real-time traffic. Let’s say you are offering a product on your website, and visitors have limited time to make a purchase. With push notification, you can drive traffic quickly to your website.
- You can get it up and running quickly, and see results immediately. Email marketing, on the other hand, requires a long-term approach.
Times When You need Push Notification
Here are the best instances when web push notification will be of great help:
- You run an eCommerce store and want to send out coupon deals from time to time.
- When you are about launching a webinar and want to alert your visitors about it.
- You just made a social media update, and wish to get many eyes to it.
It’s important, however, that you use push notification moderately. Otherwise, you risk annoying your visitors.
With that said, let’s see how to set up push notification on your WordPress website.
How to Add Push Notification in WordPress Website
Push notifications are quite easy to set up, and just about anybody – developer or none developer – can set it up.
An efficient push notification plugin solution is all you need, and there are a couple of them out there. The popular ones include:
Most are free, but there is a catch: you get to pay once your subscribers exceed a certain number. PushCrew, for instance, is free, but once your subscribers exceed 2000 you start paying.
Let us walk you through the process of setting up push notification via PushCrew.
How to Setup Push Notification via PushCrew
PushCrew offers a 14-day trial on all its plans, after which you can decide to continue or discontinue. To test the waters, start with their Startup Plan – it’s free.
Step #1: Create a PushCrew Account
First things first, head over to PushCrew website and create a free account. Not to worry, you won’t be asked for your credit card details.
When creating an account, be mindful of the format of your domain – HTTP or HTTPS. Once you have typed in all needed information, click Create Free Account.
Next, fill out the required information in the popup box.
Note: Name of the company can’t be changed once you click the save button. Also, in the Subdomain field, type in your website’s domain. Say your website domain is mytestwebsite.com, type in “mytestwebsite” in the subdomain field.
Step #2: Customize the WordPress push notification popup box
PushCrew lets you add a custom logo and message to the popup box. While still signed in to your PushCrew account, navigate to Setting >> Opt-in.
From here, you can add a custom logo and change the title as well as the subtitle. You can use different messaging for the title on mobile devices if you wish to.
Don’t forget to click the Save button at the top right corner once you are done.
Step #3: Add PushCrew to Your Website
There are two ways to add PushCrew notification to your website: one is adding a snippet of code between the <head></head> tags on every page in your website. Second is using a plugin. Since the latter is a lot simpler, it makes sense to go for it.
While still logged in your PushCrew account, click the Account button at the top bar. Here you will see your account’s id, copy it.
Now log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugin >> Add New. Search for PushCrew, install and activate it.
Once installed and activated, navigate to Settings >> PushCrew. Next, paste your PushCrew ID in the given box and save changes.
Step #4: Send Notifications
If you’ve followed the steps so far, you should have a notification popup on your website that looks like this.
Now you surely have the push notification up and running. It’s about time you send out your first notification.
Head back to your PushCrew account, click the One-Time button in the dashboard panel.
Set the title, message and landing page of your notification. Click Next. On the next page, configure your notification and click Send Now.
That’s it, you are done!
PushCrew is quite easy to implement. You can always upgrade your plans at any time. Check out PushCrew’s pricing page for more.
Other Push Notification WordPress Plugins You Could Try
You are not limited to using PushCrew – there are other plugin solutions that work pretty fine. Let’s see some of them.
Push Engage
Push Engage has a free plan which you will only have to upgrade once your subscribers exceed 2500. Their business plan starts at $29/month and can be used on up to 3 multi sites.
Push Engage supports all major browsers, including Microsoft edge. They offer a 15- day free trial period.
OneSignal
OneSignal really went up and above with their free plan. Their free plan has a bandwidth of 30,000 subscribers on desktop and unlimited on mobile. That’s huge! Excellent solution if you have a large following, but don’t want to make any upfront financial commitment.
In addition, you can use OneSignal to set up an email campaign. That’s the price of two for one!
You can get started right away for free. However, their starter plan starts at $99/month and Pro plan is $600/month.
PushAssist
PushAssist, just like its predecessors, has a free plan which accommodates up to 3,000 subscribers. There is no limit to the number of notification you can send, both on mobile and desktop.
Their Starter Plan has a price tag of $9/month, Business Plan starts at $25/month and Elite plan starts at $299/month. Though seemingly cheaper than the rest, you are restricted to 3500 subscribers in the Starter and Business plans while the Elite plan is 75,000. So, look before taking the leap.
Pushalert
The last on our list is Pushalert. Pretty much similar to other plugin solution – 15-day free trial period, free plan with a bandwidth of 3,000 subscribers.
Conclusion
All the push notification plugin solutions we looked at in this article generally work fine – it just depends on what you are looking for. Some allow you to schedule notification while some others let you run email campaigns from the same dashboard.
Integrating any of these plugins is quite straight forward. We already showed you how to integrate PushCrew to your WordPress website. Other platforms and even custom sites basically follow a similar process.
We hope you found this article helpful. Should you run into hiccups in the process, don’t hesitate to reach out and get WordPress help. If you found this article helpful, kindly share. You might be helping someone.
