Every blog or WordPress site require a subscribers widget in order to engage readers with the site. It also helps in increasing viewership of the blog. When it comes to WordPress, plugins is the best way to add a widget to a website. In this post, I will share my experience with subscribers plugins. This will definitely help one in choosing the right subscribers plugin for his/her website.
Theme
Theme plays an important role in placement of subscriber button. Please visit my article “Best WordPress Theme to choose for Website” to find reviews of themes I experimented with.
Jetpack Plugin
I initially tried the ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’ widget and used it with GeneratePress theme I chose for the blog. Remember that this widget will appear only when Jetpack is active on your site. I integrated this widget with the theme by going to Appearance -> Customize -> Widgets -> Right Sidebar.
Click on ‘add a widget’ button and select the ‘Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack)’ widget. The method to add widget may change depending upon the theme. Now the widget will appear on right sidebar. It was nice looking with right set of options to customize it. However, I got the following error while testing it with an email id.
I came to know, while searching on internet, that this widget don’t send the subscription confirmation email to those email ids, whose past subscription to a WordPress website were still not confirmed. This is a major irritant for a reader who likes to be a subscriber of your website and he/she can’t be expected to burn his/her head to resolve this issue.
Email Subscribers & Newsletters Plugin
I then tried the plugin Email Subscribers & Newsletters. After installing & activating the plugin, I got a widget ‘Email Subscribers’ which I added to the right sidebar of the theme. The various options available with this widget is shown below.
After adding the widget, I tested it with an sample email and I got the following message mentioning that an email has been sent to confirm the subscription.
The plugin will add an option/menu in the WordPress Admin Panel as shown below.
The menu provides list the subscribers of the website and provides a number of settings to control the overall functionality of the plugin. I loved working with this plugin. However after a while I realized that this plugin does not send notification when I publish a new page i.e. this plugin is for sending automated notification for new posts on your site. For posts notification, one can configure post categories for which automated email will be send. I will post an another article to provide workaround to send notifications for pages.
Subscriber by BestWebSoft Review
I tried this plugin ‘Subscriber by BestWebSoft‘ when the issue in the plugin ‘Email Subscribers & Newsletters’ was observed. This plugin also did not solve the issue of new page notification. I found it to be also limited functionality wise. One major area of concern was that when I tested the plugin with a new e-mail id, the plugin added the new e-mail id automatically added in the Subscriber list without a second level confirmation by sending an e-mail on it. Also the plugin adds a subscriber as a User on the website with role ‘Mail Subscriber’ – an another major area of concern.
WP Subscribe
I found WP Subscribe to be of different type of subscribe plugin as one has to create an account on email marketing sites. We have choice of either using to open an account. The plugin will maintain the data of subscribers on the opened account.
Email posts to subscribers
Email posts to subscribers is functionality wise similar to Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin. This plugin also send notification for posts only and trick to use pages categories is not working.
Among the above plugins, I have found Email Subscribers & Newsletters to be the best and I recommend it for a website. If you have any question or suggestion, then feel free to comment below.
You can also visit my page “Essential WordPress Plugins List for a Website” to find a complete list of plugins which will enable you to build a secure, SEO friendly and functioning website quickly.
Sancheya. I am using the subscription plugin and solved the issue for notifying when a “page” is published. See the details here:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/subscription-for-new-static-pages/
Hi rocksea, thanks for providing a solution for the page notification. However the solution requires code changes in a plugin file. One has to ensure that change are reapplied when an update of the plugin happens.