This article explains how readers can subscribe to your site or blog and receive email notifications.
In this guide
On WordPress.com, any reader can follow (subscribe to) your blog to receive an email every time you write a new post. To encourage readers to subscribe to your site, add the Subscribe Block to your homepage, sidebar, footer area, or in any post or page.
You can also make use of Block Patterns to easily add beautiful premade designs to encourage subscribers to sign up, like this:
People with a WordPress.com account can also subscribe to your site by clicking the Follow button in their admin bar. Readers without a WordPress.com account can click the Follow button and input their email address instead. For more information about this, see Following Blogs. This feature is enabled on all WordPress.com sites by default, so there’s no action you need to take to activate it.
When you publish a new post, the notification email is sent automatically by WordPress.com. You can also schedule posts for a future date — the notification email will be sent soon after the post goes live on your site.
By default, your post will be accessible to everybody and emailed to all subscribers. You can control who can view the post using the Newsletter access setting of the post.
You can choose one of the following options:
- Everybody: the post will be visible to everyone.
- All Subscribers: the post will be visible to your subscribers only. This includes free subscribers. Anyone who has not subscribed will see an option to subscribe to view the post.
- Paid Subscribers: the post will be visible to subscribers who have paid through the payment plan.
Your subscribers can decide to receive an email each time you post, or to receive daily or weekly digests of all of your new posts. They can also elect to receive no emails but to read your blog only in the WordPress.com Reader.
WordPress.com will only send out notifications for new public posts. Publishing other content types (like pages or a custom post type) or updating an already published post will not send a notification e-mail. If your site is set to private, your subscribers will not receive any email notifications of your posts.
You can create paid content for paying subscribers only. See Create a Paid Newsletter for more.
You can view a list of your subscribers from your dashboard by clicking on Users and viewing both the Followers and Email followers tabs. To learn more about and manage your followers, visit the My Followers guide.
Sometimes you may not want an email notification to go out for a new post.
You can achieve that by making the whole site private, publishing the post, then making the site public again.
On plugin-enabled sites, you can stop new post notification emails by turning off Jetpack Subscriptions. Turning off Subscriptions also means new subscribers cannot subscribe to your blog. This cannot be turned off on sites with our free, Personal, or Premium plans.
To turn off Subscriptions:
- Go Jetpack → Dashboard → Settings → Discussion
- Scroll down to the Subscriptions section
- Disable the Let visitors subscribe to new posts and comments via email option.
If you want to design and send a custom newsletter where you are in control of the email design and when emails are sent, we integrate with a number of popular services to allow you to collect email addresses on your website. Click the below links to learn more about each option:
If you wish to collect email addresses without using one of the above services, you can use a Form block for your email list.
If you have a plugin-enabled site, you can install one of many plugins to set up an email list and create and send emails to your subscribers. You can install any plugin you like. If you’re not sure which one to choose, we recommend MailPoet!
