Installation time: 20 minutes.
THE FUTURE IS HERE. Well, not everyone likes Push notifications but still. I prefer this instead of newsletters beacause you don’t need an email to get the latest news from a blog or a website. It works in the same way as Facebooks notifications on your desktop or smartphone.
If you are not into setting up forms and letting your visitors signup to a newsletter you should try Push notifications which have increased in web development the last couple of months. Push notifications or Web Push will enable you to retain visitors with breaking news and new published content on your website, e.g a new blog post. Usually you need knowledge in service workers and Google Cloud Messaging and SSL with HTTPS, but when working in WordPress you can use free plugins for this. No technical skillz!
Push notifications – OneSignal
With a plugin from OneSignal and “Free Web Push Notifications” you can in just 15 minutes setup push notifications and make your visitors to subscribe and get your news as notifications on your computer or smartphone. This will work on Chrome (desktop & Android), Safari (Mac OS X), and Firefox (Desktop) on both HTTP and HTTPS sites. I recommend using SSL protocol on your website to get even better rankings on search engines, but if you don’t have it you can still use this plugin with HTTP.
Also included in the plugin:
- Automatic notifications
- Target different segments
- Opt-In Customization
- Real Time Analytics
- A/B Testing
- Schedule you notifications
The push notification button is also shown with the same icon and on the same place on desktop. If you subscribe from a smartphone you won’t get notifications to your desktop so if you want both you need to subscribe twice. You can change button color, texts, size and background in back-end and choose your own logo as well. Your visitor don’t need to register or signup by email, they are just allowing your website to send notification to the client they are using. It’s also easy for a visitor to unsubscribe for your notifications.
Download and activate the plugin. Follow the setup guide provided by OneSignal. After the installation you can login to OneSignal and easily make A/B tests, create segments and watch your analytics. You can also send custom messages to your subscribers if you want to, go easy with this function. Your subscribers only wants to get notifications when you publish a new blog post or other content they signup for.
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