In this tutorial we’ll see how to add push notifications to your WordPress blog. Notifications are real push notifications, meaning that they are delivered even when the user is not on your website. This way you can re-engage users when you publish new contents.

We are going to use the official Pushpad plugin.

Install the plugin

In your WordPress admin dashboard go to Plugins → Add new and find “Pushpad“.

Create an account on Pushpad

After sign up (it’s free) you need to create a new sender and a new project where you enter some details about your website (name, URL, icon, etc.).

When you create the sender you can choose between Pushpad Pro (which uses your own domain but requires HTTPS) and Pushpad Express (which is fully managed by us on a Pushpad subdomain of your choice).

After the project is created, go to project settings and find the Project ID. Save it somewhere since we need in the following step.

Go to Account → Access tokens → Add access token and create a new token. Now you have everything you need to configure the plugin.

Configure the plugin

In your WordPress dashboard go to Pushpad → Settings.

Select Pushpad Express or Pushpad Pro and enter the Project ID and access token that you have obtained previously.

Add the widget to sidebar

Go to Appearance → Widgets and drag the Pushpad widget in the sidebar.

This adds a button that allows user to subscribe to your push notifications.

Alternatively, if you use Pushpad Express and you don’t want to use the widget, you can manually add the project link to your website: you can find the link to your project in the Pushpad dashboard.

Send push notifications

Finally you can send push notifications to your subscribers.

You can do it directly from WordPress:

If you prefer you can also send push notifications from Pushpad dashboard.