Email WordPress Users When a New Post Is Published

You write great content and want to build up an audience of people who read your blog regularly. In this situation, there’s no better way to keep your audience up-to-date than by email.

Here’s how you automatically notify users whenever you write a new post. We’re going to use the free features of the PublishPress plugin.

Video guide to emailing your users


Step #1. Install the PublishPress plugin

  • In your dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
  • Search for “PublishPress“. Install and activate the plugin.
publishpress plugin for WordPress

Step #2. Configure the Notifications

  • Find “PublishPress” in the left menu and click “Notifications”.
  • Click “New”.
notifications from the publishpress plugin for WordPress
  • Give your notification a title. I choose “Send new posts to users”.
  • Choose “When the content is moved to a new status”.
  • Select “Published” in “New status”.
published status
  • Choose the content status before it is published. I’d recommend choosing all statuses except “Published”.
pending
  • Choose the types of content that will trigger the notifications. I choose “Post”.
  • Choose which users will get the notifications.
Choose which users will get notifications

Next, you can customize the email subject and body. Here’s a guide to the syntax you can use.

email body for your publishpress notifications
  • Click “Publish” and your notifications will go live.

Some final advice

With this plugin, you’re emailing everyone immediately when new content is added. So if you make a mistake and accidentally publish, users will get an email about it. Therefore, be sure to carefully create and publish your content. Double or triple check your work to be sure.

If you want to explore some of the more advanced features of PublishPress notifications, check out this guide to including Yoast SEO data in your notifications.

Also, it’s worth installing a plugin such as Email Log to keep an eye on your emails. This will help you keep an eye on all the automatic messages coming from your site.

Author

  • Nick Savov

    Nick is the Director of Support at OSTraining and you can find him in almost every area of the site, from answering support requests and account questions to creating tutorials and software.

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Dan Knauss
Dan Knauss
8 years ago

Ever see a good plugin for including arbitrary email addresses in a metabox on a single post to notify them when it’s published?

Dan
Dan
5 years ago
Reply to  Nick Savov

Thanks for your reply, Nick. I’ll keep searching 🙂

Mohamed Harrouch
Mohamed Harrouch
7 years ago

Hi Nick,
Is it possible to avoid sending email notification when a post is commented ?

Thanks

Junayd
Junayd
7 years ago
Reply to  Nick Savov

This happens to me too.

Marcus
Marcus
7 years ago

Is there a way to add several email-adresses to one user? I’m the admin for a small (40-ish users large) community. Adding each person as a user/subscriber seems complicated.

Tim
Tim
7 years ago

I’m looking for a smart way to notify different user groups. Usergroup1 only can see group1 posts, so they should not get a notification whenever a usergroup2-member posts a group2 post. Any thoughts?

Mike F
Mike F
6 years ago

It would have been helpful if these instructions had informed me that in order to get plugins I need a paid subscription to WordPress. Not too cool, since I’ve already invited everyone to our group blog, for a very small nonprofit nonbudget organization. Email notifications are needed, because no one in the group is going to spontaneously check the blog on a daily basis. I either have to inform everyone we can’t do the group WordPress blog, or pay the $48 annual WordPress fee myself.

steve
6 years ago
Reply to  Mike F

Hi Mike. Everything on our site deals with the self-hosted version of WordPress available at WordPress.org.

It sounds like you’re talking about WordPress.com which is a different product (It’s confusing, I know)

Shen Leng
Shen Leng
5 years ago

Is there a way to show a summary of the post, instead of the entire post?

Tony
Tony
5 years ago

Not available anymore?

Tony
Tony
5 years ago
Reply to  Tony

Yesterday I searched for plugin like instruction above showed and it wasn’t in search results. I followed link in article above to wordpress.org and uploaded the “notify-users-e-mail.4.1.2.zip” file manually. My first test, I created a new post and didn’t receive the email (right away, but an hour later) So, I thought something was wrong and deleted the post. Immediately got an error saying “couldn’t communicate with database” and site went down. Luckily I was able to manually delete the plugin via FTP and the site returned. So, did I do something wrong installing it? All I did was upload the

Valerie Cudnik
Valerie Cudnik
5 years ago
Reply to  Tony

The delayed email probably means your wp-cron didn’t run. Or your host held it. Unless you have an SMTP plugin installed there is a good chance your host pulled the plug. Deliverability, because of spam, for emails sent without the benefit of SMTP is always going to be sketchy. My preference is https://wordpress.org/plugins/post-smtp/ great deliverability and it keeps a log.

steve
5 years ago
Reply to  Valerie Cudnik

Thanks Valerie. That’s good advice. If you’re sending a lot of emails from your site, it’s worth keeping a log and also using SMTP.

Valerie Cudnik
Valerie Cudnik
5 years ago

Thanks. Your post came up at the top of Google and was exactly what I needed. Just a simple way to let folks know about new content.

Jacek
Jacek
5 years ago

Can I schedule notfications to be sent for example once a month with short summary or all or last 10 or post topics to group of members ?

steve
5 years ago
Reply to  Jacek

Hi Jacek. You’ll probably need a newsletter-style plugin for that

RobertKza
RobertKza
5 years ago

I am expanding from Joomla to WordPress. I’m looking for a way to select from WordPress blogposts to add when compiling a newsletter and then sending manually. Any ideas ?

Dan
Dan
5 years ago

Hey Nick, great post. What I’m needing to do is for when customers purchase a product via my WooCommerce site is to be notified via email when I update that particular product/post. How can this be automatically done?

Frenchy
Frenchy
5 years ago

How come there’s no unsubscribe/opt out capability?

Marvin Barnes
Marvin Barnes
5 years ago

Thanks for the great tutorial.  I am trying to develop a method to notify all of our club members of new blog postings.  My problem is the members are not logged into the WordPress site.  I do however have a database that is a maintained on the site of the members.  Can PublishPress pull email addresses from another database?
Thanks….
Marvin Barnes

steve
5 years ago
Reply to  Marvin Barnes

Hi Marvin. You’ll proably need another tool for this – PublishPress works on your WordPress user accounts.

Asia Snyder
Asia Snyder
4 years ago

Hey Nick! Thank you so much for this helpful post! I feel like I’ve been trying so many plugin’s and none of them have been working! 
Thanks again!

Carla Scholz
Carla Scholz
4 years ago

I would love to use this plugin, but everytime I activate it, I get this message: 
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$show_posts_publish_time in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/publishpress/modules/calendar/calendar.php on line 245″
And it messes up the formating of my website.  Any suggestions?

steve
4 years ago
Reply to  Carla Scholz

Notices aren’t even really a problem. You can hide those https://www.ostraining.com/blog/wordpress/warnings

Michael Combs
Michael Combs
4 years ago

The problem here is that you don’t have code to pick up the RSS Feed.  We need codes for post thumbnail and post description.

John Theobald
John Theobald
4 years ago

just discovered and installed 🙂

Tom Warburton
Tom Warburton
4 years ago

Hello is there a way of sending an email to just one user because when I change a private page for one user the program sends an email to all users even though their page has not been changed

Jürgen
Jürgen
4 years ago

Great idea. But how do I get users to sign up for notifications?

Nguye Buu
Nguye Buu
3 years ago

I have a dating website, I would like auto send notification to members who are not yet complete their profile (custom post type), mean that their status are private (not published)

If possible, I would like to auto send Weekly Newsletters to all members for new profiles added after 1 week. For example after one week there is about 20 new profiles.

Thanks
Nguyen Buu

email
email
3 years ago

Hi , Just wanted to say thanks for this fantastic article.

johan falk
johan falk
3 years ago

The most important issue is perhaps if “users” has to login to the site from the notification link, and if they can Unsubscribe with a simple click?

Angela De Souza
Angela De Souza
3 years ago

Can I send the whole post by email not just a link to the post?

steve
3 years ago

Hi Angela – Yes, try [psppno_post content]
https://publishpress.com/knowledge-base/customize-email-notifications/

smithbrad
smithbrad
2 years ago

Thank you for sharing the valuable information about the react native push notifications

Anja H
Anja H
2 years ago

How do you mange opt out option? And can I use any sign-up plugin ? I have the notification working for me as admin but don’t want to spam people so I need them to signup in a box somewhere. 

jasenhudson
jasenhudson
2 years ago

BY going through your blog I found both push notification and email notification were going hand in hand with the conversion rate of website visitors. But I have learned many new things from your blog and from videos. Thanks for sharing the information.

doc-snafu
1 year ago

I just installed the plugin and get it working … (I’m a genius)
Anyway, I have a problem because I am using a pretty complex them that doesn’t allow any mistakes or missing fields. So, in the TagDiv Composer I added a line of the homepage then inside this line a “Newsletter” form block. The problem is that as soon as inserted, the block requested from me a ‘code form’ to run. I’ve checked all the pages in your plugin and there is no place where someone is talking about the creation of a form for adding new users. so what ?

Gunter
Belgium

doc-snafu
1 year ago

Afterwards, you must choose the embed form provider. The Newsletter plugin requires an embed code from one of 3 sources:
MailchimpMailer Lite or FeedBurner
You need to have an account created for your preferred newsletter form provider. Copy and insert the embedded form code into the newsletter options.

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