Use the subscriber importer to quickly import your email subscribers from another platform. This guide will show you how to import a CSV file of your subscribers so that they’ll be notified each time you publish a post on WordPress.com.
In this guide
Please ensure that you have permission to email your subscribers. If we receive complaints from your subscribers about spam, or if your emails have a high bounce rate, we may take action against your account. Read our Best Practices for Email Delivery to ensure your subscribers receive your emails.
To import subscribers, follow these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Users → Subscribers (or Hosting → Subscribers if using WP-Admin).
- Click the “+ Add subscribers” button.
- If you have just a few email addresses to add, you can type them in the boxes provided. Alternatively, click the “upload a CSV file” link to select a file from your computer.
- Click the “Add subscribers” button after you have made your selection.
You can either manually type in email addresses or upload a CSV file that you downloaded from another email platform. When uploading a CSV file, you can import more. All email addresses in your CSV file will be imported.
You can also import subscribers during the process of creating your newsletter site. After completing the initial site setup, you will be taken to the Add Subscribers screen.
You can view your imported subscribers from your dashboard by navigating to Users → Subscribers (or Hosting → Subscribers if using WP-Admin):
Here, you can view, add, and remove subscribers. Visit our Subscribers guide to learn more.
If you’d like to migrate subscribers from an existing WordPress.com site to a self-hosted site, you can do that via the Jetpack plugin.
If you face any errors importing a CSV file, here are a few things to verify first:
- Go through your subscriber email list and make sure that all of them are valid email addresses. If we detect any invalid email addresses, the import will not work.
- Ensure you have collected all your subscriber email addresses by yourself and have not purchased any subscriber list. We take spam very seriously, and your email list will be blocked if we detect known spam addresses.
- If you have lots of email addresses, try importing them in smaller batches of 500 each.
Here is a list of common errors, and what you can do about them:
| Error Message | Explanation | Suggested Action |
|---|---|---|
| Can’t start subscriber import while another one is running. | Another import is running | Make sure you haven’t started imports in another tab. Otherwise, contact Support. |
| No subscribers have been submitted. | An empty file was submitted | Examine your CSV file and double-check if it’s not empty. |
| The CSV file does not contain information. | The CSV file is empty | Examine your CSV file and double-check if it’s not empty. |
| You cannot add more subscribers on the free plan. | You have reached the limit of subscribers (100 for now) | There is a limit of 100 subscribers on the free plan. Please upgrade to a paid plan. |
| You are not allowed to manage subscribers for the specified site. | The user account does not have permission to manage users on the site (likely because the account has a different role) | Try performing the action from an administrator account. |
| Any other error | – | Contact Support |
If you receive an email saying that not all of your subscribers have been imported, here’s why:
- Some email domains are known spammers or abusers, so we block such domains from receiving email.
- The email address you tried to add is associated with a WordPress.com user account that has chosen not to receive email (that user can re-enable emails in their notification settings).
- The email address has too many pending invites for subscriptions.
