4 Best Plugins to Send WordPress Post Notifications (All Are Free)

Searching for a way to send WordPress post notifications via email?

You might want to send email notifications to your blog’s subscribers when you publish a new post. Or, if you have multiple authors and you want to simplify your admin processes, you might want to send yourself post notification emails when someone publishes a post on your site.

Either way, we’ve got you covered because we’re going to cover everything you need to know about the best plugins and tools to send WordPress post notifications.

In this article, we’re going to cover plugins that help you send two different types of notifications:

1. Automatic email notifications to your blog’s subscribers when you publish a new post.
2. Admin notification emails to yourself (or your site’s editors, or really any registered users on your site).

You can click the links above to jump straight to the section for the type of plugin that you’re interested in. Or, just keep reading to learn about all of your options.

Ready to get started? Let’s dig in!

Two plugins to send WordPress post notifications to blog subscribers

If you want to send email post notifications to your subscribers, you’ll need a tool that can do two things:

1. Create an opt-in form that visitors can use to subscribe to your post notifications, along with a way to manage those subscribers.
2. Automatically send notifications when you publish a new post.

We’re going to showcase two tools that can help you do that:

1. MailPoet
2. Jetpack, via its Subscriptions feature

Both tools are easy-to-use and non-technical, but they have a pretty different approach – MailPoet offers the most flexibility and customizability, while Jetpack offers a really simple option for basic notifications.

Let’s go through them…

1. MailPoet

MailPoet is a full-service WordPress email plugin. It can help you:

• Send automatic post notification emails on a custom schedule. E.g. instant notifications for each post, a daily digest of all the posts that day, a weekly digest, and so on.
• Completely customize the email template for your post notifications using a drag-and-drop editor (or any other email templates that you use).
• Design custom email subscribe forms using the WordPress block editor.
• Manage subscribers via your dashboard, including separating them into different segments if needed.
• Send one-off emails in addition to your automatic post notifications.

That’s the main advantage of MailPoet – it’s a full email solution that also includes a built-in feature for automatic post notifications.

It’s the best option if you want the most flexibility for controlling the schedule of your notifications, customizing their design, and managing your subscribers (like sending different types of notifications to different segments of subscribers).

How MailPoet works

To help you collect subscribers, MailPoet lets you design email opt-in forms using pre-built templates and the WordPress block editor.

You’ll be able to manage all of your subscribers from your dashboard, including dividing them into different segments.

To set up post notifications, MailPoet includes a built-in feature to send automatic emails for your posts. You can send an email right away for every single post. Or, you can also set up daily, weekly, or monthly digests that include some or all of the posts that you’ve published in those timeframes:

Then, to control the actual content of your emails, you can use MailPoet’s drag-and-drop builder and pre-built templates, including inserting merge tags for dynamic information (such as the name of the subscriber). 

The builder also includes dedicated widgets to dynamically insert content from your posts. You can choose how much content to include. For example, you could only display the post title or you could include the excerpt or full text.

Finally, MailPoet also includes its own built-in email sending service, which means that you can be confident your emails will make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.

For a detailed look at how to use MailPoet for post notifications, check out our full guide on how to send automatic WordPress post notification emails with MailPoet.

2. Jetpack Subscriptions

Compared to MailPoet, Jetpack’s Subscriptions feature is much less customizable. However, in some situations that might be exactly what you want!

Here are the limitations of Jetpack’s post notifications feature. You…

1. Can’t customize the design of the notification emails. You can choose whether to send an excerpt or the full text of a post, but that’s pretty much it.
2. Don’t get advanced tools to manage your subscriber lists. For example, you can’t create list segments.
3. Can’t send your own custom one-off emails. It only works for automatic post notifications.

But if you’re ok with those limitations, there are some definite positives to Jetpack post notifications:

1. It’s 100% free. Whether you have 100 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers, you won’t pay anything to send them post notifications.
2. It’s super simple. You pretty much just activate the feature, choose where to add your subscribe forms, and you never need to think about it again.
3. It works for comments, too. You can give subscribers the option to also get notified for new comments on posts that they’re following.

How Jetpack Subscriptions works

To set up Jetpack post notifications, you’ll need to install the Jetpack plugin and enable the Subscriptions feature. From there, there’s not much to configure.

Really the only thing that you must do is choose how to collect subscribers. You can create dedicated forms and/or you can add checkboxes to your comment forms that let readers subscribe to notifications when they leave a comment on your blog.

If you want to limit which types of content trigger notifications, you can use code filters to include/exclude certain categories of posts. There’s also a code filter that enables an option to enable/disable notification emails on a post-by-post basis.

To learn how it works, check out our full guide on using Jetpack Subscriptions for email post notifications.

Which tool should you use?

Again, both tools are easy to use, so your decision should really just come down to this:

• If you want the flexibility to customize the design for your post notifications, customize their schedule, and send other types of emails to your subscribers, use MailPoet.
• If you just want a really lightweight solution exclusively for post notifications and you don’t need to control the design of the email, you can use Jetpack Subscriptions.

For most people, we think that MailPoet is probably a better option because it offers more flexibility while still keeping things beginner-friendly.

However, if you’re fine with the limitations of Jetpack Subscriptions, it’s also a great solution for what it does.

Two plugins to send email post notifications to admins, editors, or other registered users

Above, we showed you some useful plugins to send WordPress post notifications to your readers. But as we mentioned in the introduction, there’s another type of post notification that can also be useful – sending notifications to yourself or your editorial team when there’s a new post.

If you have a multi-author blog or if you just generally publish a lot of content, setting up post notifications can help you stay on top of what’s going on with your site’s content.

These plugins can also help you send post notifications to your users. However, there’s a very key difference between these plugins and MailPoet/Jetpack – both of these plugins only let you send notification emails to people who are registered on your site.

As with the previous section, we’ll share two solutions that you can use here…

1. Better Notifications for WP

Better Notifications for WP is the most popular plugin at WordPress.org for setting up custom WordPress alert emails.

It lets you set up email alerts for a variety of different actions, but we’re going to focus on the post notifications.

When you set up your notification, you can choose from different actions related to your posts. For example, you can send a notification email when a post is…

• Published
• Updated
• Submitted as pending review
• Scheduled
• Moved to trash
• Made private

To control who receives the notification emails, you can either select entire user roles or choose specific usernames.

Then, to control the content of your emails, you can either use the WYSIWYG Classic editor or format the email as plain text.  You’ll also be able to use lots of merge tags to insert dynamic information related to the post, such as the title, URL, author, and so on.

With the premium version, you’ll get more advanced conditional controls. For example, you could only send alerts for posts with certain…

• Categories
• Tags
• Authors
• Post formats
• Terms

By default, the plugin sends its alerts using the regular WordPress mail function. However, to improve reliability, you could pair it with MailPoet by enabling MailPoet’s built-in feature to send transactional emails.

Or, it also works with SMTP plugins and services, including SendGrid and Mailgun.

The free version of the plugin works for basic post notifications. For more advanced features, bundles start at $129.

2. Notification

Notification is another popular option that lets you set up your own custom post notification emails (along with notifications for other types of activity on your site).

When you set up the notification, you can choose from a variety of different actions for your posts. You can send a notification when a post is…

• Published
• Updated
• Saved as a draft
• Set for review
• Scheduled
• Trashed

When you choose who should receive the notification email, you can choose from different user roles, choose specific usernames, or enter any email address.

You can also fully customize the text of the email using the WYSIWYG Classic editor, including using merge tags to insert dynamic information, such as the name of the post and its URL:

With the premium version, you’ll also be able to add conditional logic, such as only sending a notification for posts with a specific category, tag, author, and so on.

You can send basic post notifications with the free version of the plugin at WordPress.org. To unlock the conditional rules and other advanced features, the premium version starts at $99.

Which Tool Should You Use?

For basic WordPress post notifications, both tools are pretty equal so you should be fine with either.

If you need more advanced features, such as only sending notifications for posts in certain categories, the Notification plugin is a bit cheaper for that specific feature (though there are other feature differences between the premium plugins that might push you in one direction or another).

Get started with WordPress post notifications today

Whether you want to send WordPress post notifications to your readers or to your site management team, you can find some great plugins that make it easy to set up.

If you want to send automatic post notifications to your readers, we showcased two great options that work in different ways:

• MailPoet – this is the best option if you want the ability to customize when to send your emails, the content/design of your emails, which segments of users should receive notifications, and so on. You’ll also be able to send other emails beyond post notifications. Check out the full MailPoet guide.
• Jetpack Subscriptions – this can be a good option if you just want a very simple way to send notifications and only notifications. It does have some notable limitations that we discussed above, but if you’re fine with those limitations, it’s a very easy way to implement post notifications (and it’s 100% free). Check out the full Jetpack Subscriptions guide.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a way to send post notifications to yourself, your editors, or other types of registered users on your site, then you might be better off with the other two plugins that we featured – Better Notifications for WP or Notification. 

You can also pair the two types of plugins. For example, you could use MailPoet to send notifications to your readers and Better Notifications for WP to send notifications to your editorial staff.

The cool thing about this combination is that you can still use MailPoet’s built-in sending service to deliver the notification emails that Better Notifications for WP sends – just make sure to enable MailPoet’s transactional email feature.

Do you still have any questions about sending post notifications on WordPress? Let us know in the comments!