Subscriptions

This page covers the many ways you can use Jetpack’s Subscriptions module to let visitors to your site sign up to receive notifications of your latest posts and comments.

Index:

How does it work?
Where will subscriptions appear?
What will my blog readers see when subscribing?
Can I customize the content of the subscription emails?
Can I see who my subscribers are?
Using filters to customize subscription delivery.
Important notes.

How does it work?

Many visitors land on your site once, never to return. Convert more visitors into regular readers by making it easy to subscribe to your site so new content is pushed directly to them. Jetpack takes care of letting them know whenever you publish a new post.

We can make this part of Jetpack because of WordPress.com: the WordPress.com servers handle the messy work of sending and managing all the email for you. Your blog is still yours, but subscriptions are handled, by us, for free, on your behalf.

How to turn Subscriptions on

Subscriptions requires no special magic to activate. Once you activate Jetpack on your site, Subscriptions will be on by default, however, you will need to set up a few Jetpack features to take full advantage of this great service!

Visitors can choose to subscribe to new posts, or to subscribe to new comments on a post they’ve commented on so they can stay involved in the conversation.

Where will subscriptions appear on my site?

Signup options for Subscriptions can appear in 3 places. One is on by default; the 2 others you have to activate manually.

1. By default, you’ll see two new checkboxes at the bottom of the comment form of every post and page. It’ll look something like this, depending on the theme you’re using and whether or not you’re using Jetpack Comments (screenshot is using Jetpack Comments):

2. You can also add the Jetpack Subscriptions widget to your sidebar, which we strongly recommend. Go to your Dashboard, and head over to Appearance → Widgets. You’ll see a widget called Blog Subscriptions (Jetpack). Click and drag it to the part of your sidebar where you’d like it to appear. Easy!

3. You can also include the Subscriptions form anywhere on your site. To do so, add the following shortcode to any page or post:

[jetpack_subscription_form]

You can customize this shortcode by using the following modifiers:

title – You can change the default “Subscribe to Blog via Email” to your own custom text by using title. Example: [jetpack_subscription_form title="My Custom Title"]
subscribe_text – This will change the default “Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.” text. Example: [jetpack_subscription_form subscribe_text="My custom subscribe text!"]
subscribe_button – This will change the default “Subscribe” button text. Example: [jetpack_subscription_form subscribe_button="Sign Me Up"]
show_subscribers_total You can choose to show your total number of subscribers alongside your form. You can use 0 to hide them (the default) or 1 to show them. Example: [jetpack_subscription_form show_subscribers_total="1"]

Using the examples above, your shortcode of [jetpack_subscription_form title="My Custom Title" subscribe_text="My custom subscribe text!" subscribe_button="Sign Me Up" show_subscribers_total="1"] will look like this!

What will my blog readers see when subscribing?

Visitors subscribe by typing in their email address. In a few minutes they’ll receive a confirmation email that looks like something like this:

Once they click the “Confirm Follow” button, they’ll receive a notification of every future post by email. Each email will have a link at the bottom to Manage Subscriptions, so they can unsubscribe at any time if they choose. Also, if they ignore the confirmation email, they won’t receive anything from your site.

Note: You can customize the contents of this confirmation email by going to Settings → Reading in your dashboard.

Can I customize the content of the subscription emails?

If you go to Settings → Reading in your dashboard, you can change your Feed Settings to “Summary”. Once you save your changes, all subscription emails will only include an excerpt of your post, with a link to continue reading on the site.
If your Feed settings are set to “Full Text”, you can split the content of each one of your blog posts in two parts thanks to the More tag, . Everything that is above the More tag will appear on your home page and in the subscription emails, followed by a link inviting users to click to continue reading; everything that is below that tag will only appear on the post’s page.

Why are the shortcodes not rendering correctly?

Jetpack Subscriptions supports a subset of the most popular shortcodes used in subscription emails.

If you’re using a shortcode that WordPress.com and Jetpack Subscriptions does not support, then the shortcode will display instead of being swapped out with the expected content.

For example: Instead of an image, you might see `[random_image]`.

If you’re using a shortcode that is supported, you may notice that the output is not exactly like what you would see when viewing the post in the browser. This is because we are trying to clean up what is in the email so that the email doesn’t break in different email clients.

For example: For NextGen Galleries, you may notice a link that says “Click here to view gallery in post” instead of the actual gallery.

If you do not like how shortcodes are handled in subscription emails, then you can follow the instructions to customize the content that is sent out.

How to turn Subscriptions off

If you don’t want to use Subscriptions, you can follow the instructions here to turn them off.

Can I see who my subscribers are?

Sure! Here’s how to find them:

Go to your Dashboard
Click on Jetpack → Settings → Engagement
Open the Subscriptions card
Click on the link to “View your email followers”

How to transfer your Followers from one site to another?

So you’ve moved from WordPress.com to your very own Jetpack-powered site? We can help you transfer your WordPress.com Followers and your email subscribers from your old site to the new one. We have details on our Transferring Subscribers support page.

Using filters to customize subscription delivery.

Three filters have been made available since version 3.7 that allows you to customize which posts get emailed to your subscribers. To do so, you would need to add the code to a functionality plugin or directly to your theme’s functions.php file.

jetpack_allow_per_post_subscriptions: Option to toggle email delivery on a per-post basis.

Filter: jetpack_allow_per_post_subscriptions
Will add a checkbox option to every new post of whether or not to email the post to subscribers.
Example usage:

add_filter( 'jetpack_allow_per_post_subscriptions', '__return_true' );

jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_these_categories: Exclude certain categories from ever emailing to subscribers.

Filter: jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_these_categories
Will never send subscriptions emails to whatever categories are in that array
Example usage:

add_filter( 'jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_these_categories', 'exclude_these' );
function exclude_these( $categories ) {
$categories = array( 'category-slug', 'category-slug-2');
return $categories;
}

jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_all_categories_except: Exclude all posts from emailing to subscribers, except ones in these categories.

Filter: jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_all_categories_except
Will never send subscription email for posts, UNLESS the post in in one of these categories.
Example usage:

add_filter( 'jetpack_subscriptions_exclude_all_categories_except', 'exclude_all_except' );
function exclude_all_except( $categories ) {
$categories = array( 'category-slug', 'category-slug-2');
return $categories;
}

A note about these filters:

These filters are not meant to be used together. Only one should be used at a time. They will override each other and it will be awkward.
If either of the category filters are set, then the per-post checkbox will not display no matter what.

Important Notes

Jetpack Subscriptions will only send out notifications for new posts. Publishing other post types (Pages, a Custom Post Type, etc) or updates of already published posts will not send a notification e-mail.

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