How to Add Push Notifications to Your WordPress Website

As a business owner or a marketer, you’re not lacking in tools you can use to reach out to your customers, both prospect and current. Between emails, messaging apps, and ads you can place in high-traffic places such as search engine results pages and social networks, it seems like you’ve got all the regular communication channels covered. So do you really need another method to get in touch with customers?

If the method in question is push notifications, then yes, you might. Push notifications are a wholly different beast than the other communication methods, which makes them suited for a whole other set of purposes. So before we walk through how you can add push notifications to your WordPress website for free, let’s first see what features make them special.

Why Give WordPress Push Notifications a Go?

A case could be made that push notifications deliver more of a qualified message recipient than most other communication methods. How is a push notification different from an email? In lots of ways, including the way people sign up for it. Building a mailing list often relies on incentives. It’s the “enter your email to get our eBook” type of deal that’s often aimed at website visitors.

With WordPress push notifications, the whole process is simplified to the very core. When people navigate to your website using Chrome, Firefox, or any other browser, they see a message asking them whether they’d like to receive notifications from you. If they do, they’ll allow it. If they don’t, they won’t. So you know the people who sign up for your notifications really want them. This might be a reason why push notifications are so popular among e-commerce businesses — they can be used to qualify leads of desktop and mobile alike.

If that isn’t enough for you, or if you’re not interested in qualifying leads, you can enjoy the other benefits of push notifications, including:

Push notifications are cheap and easy. They work incredibly well if you set them up correctly. But that means knowing what to send, when, and to whom. People can opt-out of your web push notifications, and good luck getting them back when that happens. In browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, they can opt out of seeing notifications altogether. So let’s go through the process of setting up push notifications on your WordPress website.

How to Enable Push Notifications on Your WordPress Website

One does not simply send a push notification on a WordPress website. You’ll need some help to do it, and you’ll find that help in the form of a WordPress plugin. There are a couple over on WordPress.org that will do the job, but you’ll soon notice that one plugin — OneSignal — dominates the niche. And in case you were wondering, it has a free plan for the first 30,000 push notification subscribers. If at any point you need more, you’ll have to enrol in a paid plan. You’ll probably have to switch to a new WordPress hosting plan, though, to accomodate all that new traffic.

Because it’s the most popular choice for WordPress web push notification plugins, we’ll use it to show you how you can add push notifications to your website. We’ll start with the installation process.

1. Install the OneSignal Plugin and Create an Account

If you know how to install one WordPress plugin, you know how to install them all. OneSignal is no exception to the rule — you can either download and install it from the “Add Plugins” page in your website’s back end, or you can download it to your computer and upload it to your website once again from the “Add Plugins” page.

When you’ve done that, navigate to the OneSignal item on the menu. After clicking on it, you’ll see the three steps the plugin requires you to do before you’re able to send push notifications from your website.

Right now, you need to take care of step number one and create a OneSignal account or log in to an existing account.

Click on the “OneSignal” hyperlink and you’ll be transferred to OneSignal’s login and signup page. To sign up for the plugin’s services, you’ll need to provide your email, website link, and name of the organization. You’ll receive an email with the confirmation link, and when you click on it you’ll be ready for the second step.

2. Configure the Platform and Create an App in OneSignal

The very next step requires you provide OneSignal with the web address of your website. You’ll also get to pick what kind of service you need — whether you’re adding push notifications to an IOS or Android app, or a website (web push). Choose the last option, and press the “Configure Your Platform” button.

In the next step, you will choose the type of integration you need — WordPress Plugin or Website Builder — and further narrow it down by clicking on the WordPress icon.

You’ll be able to move on to the next step where you add the name of your website, its URL, as well as the default icon you want to use.

It’s very important to determine whether or not your website fully supports HTTPS. If it doesn’t, check the appropriate toggle. The OneSignal plugin runs better on websites that are fully HTTPS. And you might still want to learn how to enable SSL encryption on your website.

In the next window, you’ll be asked to install the plugin on your WordPress website. Since you’ve taken care of this, you can go ahead and copy the APP ID and API Key into the plugin’s configuration page on your website. You’ll notice a place for another ID — the Safari Web ID — which you can get by setting it up as a platform.

After that step, you could simply scroll down to the bottom of the “Configuration” window and click “Save,” and your website would be ready to start delivering notifications. It would be a shame to leave it like that, though, because you should go through at least some of the customization options available.

3. Configure and Customize the Prompts

Before you’re able to send push notifications to your website visitors, you have to ask them whether they’d like to receive the notifications. This initial step is achieved in one of two ways with OneSignal. You can have the regular prompt appear to people who visit your website, and you can also enable the Subscription Bell widget as a backup.

For the regular prompts, you’ll be asked whether to automatically prompt new site visitors with the plugin before the native browser prompt and whether you want to customize the prompt text. OneSignal recommends you enable the former, and as for the latter — it’s up to you. The default copy is decent, but if you want to make it your own, go for it!

As for the Subscription Bell, you first need to enable it before you can access the customization options for it. After doing that, you’ll be able to choose the size, position, and theme of the bell, as well as the copy for the various prompts.

4. Configure and Customize Notifications

The first notification your subscribers will see after they agree to receive notifications from your website is the welcome push notification they get after subscribing. You can choose whether you want your subscribers to get one, of course, and you’ll also be able to customize its contents. So if you want to add some new content to it, you’ll be able.

As for the reason you installed the plugin – web push notifications – you can set whether you want them sent out automatically with every new post you create and whether you want them sent when you publish posts from 3rd party plugins.

If you don’t enable the former, you’ll be able to set it individually for every post thanks to a checkbox the plugin places in the post editor. You should enable the later if you want to create notifications from other plugin-supported post types. Apart from that, you’ll get very few customization options regarding the looks of the notifications — you’ll only get to choose whether to use their featured image for the notification icon.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Because they can be such a useful communication tool, web push notifications are slowly becoming the staple of some niches. But if you’re not a publisher or an e-commerce admin, you might still want to at least give push notifications a go.

You can’t build a community without a means to quickly and efficiently communicate with your fellow community members, right? However, make sure you remember WordPress push notification best practices at all times. Try not to step across any boundaries, and always use reliable WordPress plugins.