How to Add Push Notifications to WordPress Sites (2021)

On the contemporary web, it’s a tough task to capture the attention of the picky and demanding users. The competition is growing with the release of every new website in your industry. Drawing the audience to your online project is difficult. Still, it is not as difficult as keeping them on board for a long time. One of the most proven ways to reach them outside a web resource is to send out push notifications. With WordPress being one of the most popular CMSs powering blogs and websites from different industries, let’s consider the most proven method to add push notifications to WordPress sites.
By means of WordPress push notifications, you can establish a better connection with your audience, while setting up a direct line of communication with the customers. Compared to regular email campaigns, push notifications are more straightforward, growing the chances that your message will be delivered to the target audience.

What is Push Notification?

We are familiar with push notifications from mobile apps. However, quite recently the respective technology has been added to WordPress sites. Push notifications allow you to notify subscribers about new publications appearing on your blog/site. A user shouldn’t necessarily be browsing your site in order to see a notification. As long as one has a browser window running, you may rest assured that your message will be noticed.
Push notification will come in handy whenever you need to inform the audience about:

• a new post being added to your site;
• a new event or announcement about the one that will be taking place in the nearest future;
• a new item/category of products being added to your website;
• special deals and discounts, etc.

Aside from that, push notifications are an impressive tool to boost user engagement. The key point that you need to take into account when deciding on the data that should be displayed is uploading push notifications with important pieces of content only so that people will hardly ignore them.
Push notifications are by no means a replacement of email newsletters. These are just another way of updating the audience on the data that is of the biggest importance.

Why Use Push Notifications

Push notifications will be of use to small business projects, as well as large eCommerce sites. Depending on the topic/niche to which your online project belongs, there are different ways to benefit from push notifications.

• Grow sales. Everyone running eCommerce projects can use push notifications to inform the web community about the new sales and promo campaigns that are launched on the web store.
• Engage with the target audience. To a certain degree, push notifications work similar to a mailing list. The audience has already shown interest in your business niche, so they are eager to keep in touch with you in order to establish a long-lasting relationship with your brand. However, in order to build rapport with subscribers by means of a mailing list, you need to get your email opened. Push notifications, in their turn, are immediately visible on a user’s personal PC or mobile device. So, you do not need to wait until the recipient opens it, which lets you engage with the audience directly.
• Grow traffic. By means of push notifications, you can drive traffic to new posts that appear on your WordPress site. Regular reminders of a blog/site through push notifications ensure that the audience won’t forget about it.

How to Create WordPress Push Notifications

Each time you decide to add or remove features from your WordPress site, make sure that you backup its data and settings. In fact, it’s recommended to do this on a regular basis, no matter if you bring any minor or game-changing modifications to your site.

With the purpose to demonstrate how to add push notifications to your WordPress site, we’ll provide a quick guide on how to install one of the most popular free plugins suited for the purpose – OneSignal plugin. This is one of the most popular solutions available in the WordPress community, which is trusted by more than 175,000 web developers and online marketers. Once setup, it will send notifications to the web users once a new post appears on your blog/site or manage custom notifications.
In order to add push notifications to your site, you need to:

• Install and activate the plugin on your site.
• Once the installation is completed, you will be taken to the plugin setup tab where you will be asked to finish the configuration. The developers of the plugin have shared step-by-step instructions of how to setup push notifications in Chrome and Firefox web browsers.
• Whenever you create a regular or custom post on your WordPress site, the plugin enables you to setup notifications manually while simply ticking a box next to the WordPress area on a post. You can automate this process via OneSignal Push > Configuration in the WordPress dashboard.

• As soon as you are done with the plugin settings, it’s time to configure an opt-in for push notifications. In order for the users to start receiving notifications, they need to agree/opt into the program. To do this, navigate to OneSignal Push > Configuration, and enable the option to “Automatically prompt new site visitors to subscribe to push notifications”.

Additionally, you may feel free to play around with the rest of the plugin settings shown on the image above. For example, you can enable the notification button to reveal post notifications in the lower right corner of the browser window.

5 Top WordPress Plugins to Add Push Notifications to Sites

OneSignal Push is not the only WordPress push notifications plugin that you can install on your site. There are a number of other free extensions that you can install and configure in order to reveal notifications on new pieces of content published on your site.

• • Pushed is an independent push notification service. With it help, you can create your own Developer App to add push notifications to your WordPress blog/website. The plugin will send the notification to iOS and Android devices, we well as desktop PCs. Upon installation, the plugin integrated a WordPress blog with Pushed app, which will take you only 5 minutes to configure.
  • PushCrew is another popular free WordPress plugin, which will send clickable messages directly into the web browsers of your subscribers. Push notifications are intended to be displayed on smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. The notifications can be customized to be displayed in the header or footer of a web page.
  • PushEngage is intended to send notifications to the web browsers of site visitors, thus growing their engagement with your content. The notifications will reach even those users who are not on a site yet. The plugin is intended to run in Chrome and Firefox. The installation and customization are made quick and easy. Simply add your IPI key in the respective area in the dashboard.
  • Pushwoosh will automatically send notifications to the web users whenever you publish or update a post. The plugin also supports the possibility to notify subscribers whenever a scheduled post goes live. In order to use the plugin, you need to have a Developer account with Pushwoosh. The plugin is optimized to send notifications to Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

While sending notifications with Pushnews you grow the chances of your WordPress project to receive a growing number of the web traffic. There is no need to have any special skills in web development in order to manage it. You can also automate push notification messages while setting up a Facebook Page integration.

How to Make Push Notifications Convert

In order to start working with push notifications, you need to have your WordPress blog or site up and running. One of the most cost- and time-effective ways to launch a website is using ready-made designs for the purpose. For example, you can benefit from developer WordPress themes that will be a great fit for building websites of any level of complexity.
Now, as your site is already launched, it’s time to think about the ways to optimize the online marketing strategy and keep the audience engaged with what you are doing. Things get so much easier with the help of push notifications. When done right, a masterfully-built strategy will keep the audience engaged with your site for long.
Here are the 5 proven tips that will help get the best out of push notifications.

• Create stunning content. A push notification is intended to guide the audience to new pieces of content that appear on your site. So, you can keep the audience better engaged by pointing to new cool forms of content that appear on your WordPress blog/site. These may be not blog posts only. You can also notify the web users on videos, audios, new sales, whitepaper downloads, and other data that appears on a site.
• Do not be too pushy with your push notifications. Similar to building an email newsletter strategy, you need to schedule your push notifications the right way. For example, if you send emails to subscribers weekly, notify them about new texts that appear on your site twice a week.
• Expire pushes that are relevant no more. Not all push notification stay relevant over time. Some deals may expire or a blog post highlighting current news won’t remain relevant in 3 days. So, the best way to avoid this is to add the expiration date to push notifications in advance.
• Add custom push sounds. Accompanying push notifications with a sound you can grow open rates to a great degree. A sound is a sure-fire way to get people’s attention, which grows the chances that they will read the message that you deliver and proceed to the post with a click. As the audience keeps coming back to your site over and over again, the sound will become more recognizable, thus growing their interest to open the message.
• Cart abandonment. When doing the online shopping we can add some items to the shopping cart, but for some reason forget to complete an order. In such cases, sending cart abandonment notification to the clients you can grow chances that they will come back to your site and complete the order.

Whatever online strategy you opt for, you can find the one that works better for your site only through running A/B tests. Choose plugins that are the most effective for your own web project, think about the messages that you want your visitors to be notified about, schedule pushes properly, and watch conversions rates boost.