How to Add Push Notifications to Your WordPress Website?

As a business owner or marketer, you don’t lack tools to reach both potential and existing customers. It looks like you’re covering all normal communication channels, from emails, messaging apps, and ads, which you can place in high-traffic places like search engine results pages and social networks. Do you really need another way to communicate with customers?

If the method in question is push notifications, yes, you can. Push notifications are a whole different beast than other communication methods, making them suitable for a number of other purposes. So, before we go over how you can add push notifications to your WordPress website for free, let’s see what features make them special.

Why Launch WordPress Push Notifications?

A situation can be made where push notifications provide more qualified message recipients than most other communication methods. How is a push notification different from an email? In many ways, including the way people sign up. Building a mailing list often relies on incentives. It is a “enter your email to receive our eBook” type of agreement, which is usually targeted at website visitors.

With WordPress push notifications, the whole process is simplified to the core.. When people go to your website using Chrome, Firefox, or another browser, they’ll see a message asking if they’d like to receive notifications from you. If they do, they allow it. If they don’t they won’t. So you know that people who sign up for your notifications really want them. This may be one reason why push notifications are so popular with e-commerce businesses – they can be used to evaluate both desktop and mobile leads.

If that’s not enough for you or you’re not interested in leads, you can enjoy other benefits of push notifications, including:

Push notifications are cheap and easy. They work incredibly well if you set them right. But that means knowing what to send, when and to whom. People can disable your web push notifications and good luck getting them back when that happens. In browsers like Firefox and Chrome, they can choose not to see notifications altogether. So, let’s go over the process of setting up push notifications on your WordPress website.

How to Enable Push Notifications on Your WordPress Website?

Not only a push notification is sent on a WordPress website. To do this you will need some help and you will find it in the form of a WordPress plugin.. WordPress.org has a few that will do the job, but you’ll soon realize there’s a plugin available — OneSignal – niche dominate. 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 must sign up for a paid plan. To accommodate all this new traffic, you will likely need to upgrade to a new WordPress hosting plan.

Since it is the most popular choice for WordPress web push notification plugins, we will use it to show you how you can add push notifications to your website. We will begin the installation process.

1. Install OneSignal Plugin and Create an Account

If you know how to install one WordPress plugin, you also know how to install them all. OneSignal is no exception to this rule — you can download and install it from the “Add Extension” page on your website’s backend, or you can download it to your computer and install it again on your website from “Add Extension”. page.

When you do, go to OneSignal in the menu. After clicking on it, you will see the three steps the plugin asks you to do so that you can send push notifications from your website.

Right now you need to deal with step number one and create a OneSignal account or sign in to an existing account.

Click on the “OneSignal” hyperlink and you will be taken to OneSignal’s login and registration page. To register for the services of the add-on, you must provide your email address, website link and name of the organization. You will receive an email with the confirmation link and click it and you will be ready for step two..

2. Configure Platform and Create an App in OneSignal

The next step requires you to provide your website web address to OneSignal. You can also choose what kind of service you need, whether you’re adding push notifications to an IOS or Android app or a website (web push). Select the last option and hit the “Configure Your Platform” button.

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

You will be able to proceed to the next step where you will add your website name, URL and the default icon you want to use.

It is very important to determine whether your website fully supports HTTPS. If not, check the appropriate transition. The OneSignal plugin works better on websites that are purely HTTPS. You may still want to learn how to enable SSL encryption on your website.

In the next window, you will be asked to install the plugin on your WordPress website. Since you’re interested in this, you can go ahead and copy the APP ID and API Key to the plugin’s configuration page on your website.. You will notice a place for another ID (Safari Web ID) that you can get by setting it as a platform.

After this step, you can scroll down to the bottom of the “Configuration” window and click “Save”; your website will be ready to send notifications. It would be a shame to leave it that way though, because you should review at least some of the customization options available..

3. Configure and Customize Prompts

Before you can send push notifications to your website visitors, you should ask them if they would like to receive notifications. This first step is accomplished with OneSignal in one of two ways. You can make the regular prompt appear to your website visitors and also enable the Subscription Ring widget as a backup..

For normal prompts, you will be asked if you want to automatically request new site visitors with the plugin. before the native browser prompt and whether you want to customize the prompt text. OneSignal recommends enabling the first, and as for the second – it’s up to you. The default copy is fine, but if you want to make your own, go for it!

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

4. Configure and Customize Notifications

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

As for your reason for installing the plugin – web push notifications – you can set whether you want it to be sent automatically with every new post you create and whether you want it to be sent when you publish posts from 3rd party plugins.

If you don’t enable the first one, you can set it up for each post individually thanks to a checkbox the plugin places in the post editor.. If you want to create notifications from other plugin supported post types, you must enable it later. Other than that, you’ll have very little customization options regarding the look of notifications – you can only choose whether to use their featured image for the notification icon or not.

Let’s wrap it up!

Because they can be such a useful communication tool, web push notifications are slowly becoming the foundation of some niches. But if you’re not a publisher or e-commerce manager, you may still want to at least try out push notifications.

You can’t build a community without a way to communicate with your community members quickly and efficiently, right? However, make sure you always remember WordPress push notification best practices. Try not to go beyond the limits and always use reliable WordPress plugins.