Today post is for the site owners who wants to create a following of supporters that continually return to read their content, socialise with the community, and buy products.

There’s many ways of supporting visitors to come back to your site. Ways you can support is creating an email campaign, managing a presence on social media, or to running competitions and promotions.

But still, there’s been a surge in push notification plugins to connect with audiences. In this WordPress Wednesday, we’ve taking a look at what exactly push notifications are and whether we can use them to increase the number of returning visitors a website. Also, I’m sharing four free push notification plugins.

What are push notification plugins for WordPress?

Push notification are automatic message that gets sent to previous visitors to your site or who have opted in. Usually, you’ll see a pop-up that will ask if they want to receive notifications. So if the visitor accept then your site can “push” notifications. These push notifications can be for site updates, new articles, products, or special offers etc.

There are also visible pros to use push notifications, but there are some significant cons, too, if not used correctly.

Let’s start with the pros:

• Push notifications drive traffic directly to your site by encouraging visitors to return.
• For people who have opted into receiving, it will let you know that they already have an interest in your website or niche.
• This can, in turn, can help your site get converted against its goals, whether they are to build a community or generate sales.

Now here’s the cons with push notifications:

• People will have to choose to accept the notifications to get them.
• And the number of push notifications you send out can make a vast difference between increasing returning visitors and losing followers as having too many notifications can cause you to risk annoying your audience and having too few. They may forget about your and your website.

So when choosing a WordPress plugin to add push notifications to your site, you should consider supported devices, opt-in form and notification customisations, the number of push notifications you can send, control over messages sent and if analytics will be provided.

So let’s take a look at some free push notification plugins for WordPress.

1. OneSignal

OneSignal is a free WordPress plugin that can provide unlimited desktop push notifications. This plugin currently supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari browsers. This feature-rich plugin opt-in form customisation options as well as timing and display location settings.

It also allows you to A/B test your messages to see which ones have a better conversion rate and along with automatic push notifications that are sent every time you publish a new post, you can send reminders out to people that haven’t visited your site in a while.

Messages can be scheduled to be delivered in the future, based on previous times, readers visited your site or their time zone.

Price: Free

2. Beamer

Beamer is a newsfeed and push notification free WordPress plugin that you can use to manage your site announcements all from one place.

With Beamer, you can coordinate scheduled posts and notifications, enable automatic announcements for new posts, add segmentation based on behaviour, location or demographics and even create a Beamer Newsfeed for your site complete with custom colour, location and notice types. One of the best reason for this plugin is it only takes 5 minutes to get Beamer setup on your site.

Price: Free

3. WonderPush

Another excellent option for push notifications is this WonderPush web push notifications. Once the plugin been installed and subscribers who have opted in will know as soon a post been published.

The plugin is compatible with Chrome, Edge, Opera and Firefox you should not have any problem reaching the majority of your audience.

This plugin standout is the awesome built-in features. If you want to reach out to a specific demographic, then this plugin has the option to restrict a push-based on language, tags or events. You can also utilise WonderPush to recover abandoned carts or to send out a push to remind subscribers that they left something remarkable in their carts.

And with WonderPush’s dashboard, you can manage all of your campaigns, segments, staff with access and real-time analytics for your notifications.

It’s important to note that WonderPush WordPress plugin is free but to have the push notifications is a premium service that starts at €1 / month + €1 for every additional 1000 subscribers per month), and they’re GDPR compliant as well.

Price: Free

4. PushAssist

PushAssist is a free plugin that is a great way to add PushAssist notifications to your website. To use this plugin, you will need to signup for a free account (up-to subscribers limit of 3000), but after that the setup simple.

PushAssist also includes options for HTTP/S, GCM keys, scheduled campaigns, automatic post notifications and the ability to add your own logo, title, message and link to your notifications and you can even add UTM parameters to track your push notification results in Google Analytics!

Price: Free