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.).

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 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.

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.