I host my own Wordpress blog and am pretty good with the backend work. My question: Is there a good plug-in for adding “subscribe to this blog via email” capabilities?
There are quite a few choices for tying a mailing list or email notifications into your WordPress blog. By “host my own” I assume you mean that you have the software installed on your own server, to differentiate from having a blog on wordpress.com, right?
Good, though it turns out that this feature’s available to wordpress.com blogs too: just look in the configuration area to see how to enable it.
But you’re on your own site, as are my blogs, which means things are a bit more tricky. The first and perhaps hardest task is to determine which of the many choices is going to work best for you. I can’t answer that definitively since I don’t know your business, but I will say that the JetPack plugin from Automattic is what I’ve opted for on my blog, as you’ll see.
To start, go to your plugins area:
You want to look for JetPack. Me? I already have it installed and active:
Notice that as with all WordPress plugins you need to install it and activate it!
Once you do, go to Settings and look for “Subscription”:
Mine’s activated: if yours says “Activate” rather than “Deactivate”, well, click “Activate” to, you guessed it, activate it.
That’s really all you need to do here. Now go to your Appearance > Widgets area:
Now all the Jetpack features that are activated show up as more widgets you can drag into your nav area, right column, etc, as you can see I’m doing here:
As you can see, I’ve placed it between my search box and my social sharing toolkit. We’ll see what that looks like in a second.
First, though, to customize it!
By default, here are the settings:
I don’t really like those, so here’s how I customized it (esp. the button):
Nice, eh? Let’s see how it renders on the Web page:
Done. Now to get people to sign up! 🙂
Oh, you can check it out live too on my film review blog.
This is a good description of the subscribe by email process. I have my self-hosted wordpress blog, and installed Jetpack. I added the subscribe via email widget, and tried it out. All went fine — except — when it notifies the subscriber that their subscription was successful, it also puts them on a page listing ALL OF MY WORDPRESS BLOGS and giving them an option to subscribe to them, too. I don’t want a person subscribing to one of my blogs to see all of the other blogs I have on WordPress. They are totally unrelated. How do I disable this information from appearing? Thanks.
That’s a tricky one, Patrick. I’d say you should email the WordPress support team, but you might need to disassociate them from all being in the same account?