This page explains how visitors to your site can sign up to receive notifications about your latest posts using the Subscribe Block (formerly known as the Subscriptions widget).
Many visitors reach your site once and never come back. However, you can convert more of these visitors into regular readers by making it easy to subscribe to your content. Jetpack makes this simple by letting your readers know whenever you’ve published a new post.
Note: If you’re looking for information about Jetpack plan subscriptions, check out our pricing page. For general information about the Subscriptions feature, please see our information page.
Activate
To enable Subscriptions, navigate to Jetpack → Settings → Discussion.
Activate the Let visitors subscribe to new posts and comments via email setting to turn on the Subscriptions feature.
Once the Subscriptions feature is active on your site, visitors can choose to subscribe to new posts and/or new comments on a post they’ve commented on.
- To allow visitors to subscribe to receive notifications of all new posts when leaving a comment, activate the Enable the “subscribe to site” option on your comment form option.
- To allow visitors to be notified of future comments on a post, activate the Enable the “subscribe to comments” option on your comment form option.
You can also choose to be notified any time someone follows your blog. You can find the setting for this in the core WordPress Discussion settings.
- In WP Admin, navigate to Settings → Discussion.
- Scroll to the Email me whenever section.
- Select Someone follows my blog.
Adding the Subscribe Block
The Subscribe Block allows you to insert a subscription form within any post, page, or widget area, enabling your readers to get notifications when you publish new posts. You can find more information about how to add and customize the Subscribe Block here.
Importing Subscribers
We’ve made it possible to manually add subscribers or import a CSV list of existing subscribers from another email platform. For more information, check out this guide.
Exporting Subscribers
You can download a CSV containing your email subscribers by going to WordPress.com > My Sites > Manage > Users > Subscribers. Once there, click the meatball (three dots) icon and select “Download email subscribers as CSV” to export your list of subscribers.
Following via Comments
If you’ve selected the options to Enable the “subscribe to comments” option on your comment form and/or Enable the “subscribe to site” option on your comment form, you’ll see 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:
Site visitors can check Notify me of follow-up comments via email to get an email every time someone else comments on this post.
They can also select Notify me of new posts via email to follow the blog.
After selecting this option, Jetpack will send them the same confirmation email that we send to those who sign up with any other method.
Note: Jetpack will only send out notifications for new posts. Publishing other post types (like pages or a custom post type) or making updates to an already published post will not send a notification e-mail.
Featured images
You can choose whether or not to include your post’s featured image at the top of the post notification email. To access this setting, log in to WordPress.com and navigate to Settings > Reading, then scroll down to Newsletter Settings.
FAQ
What will my visitors see when subscribing?
Visitors will first subscribe by typing in their email address. Afterwards, 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 unsubscribe, so they won’t need to ask you to opt out. Also, if they ignore the confirmation email, they won’t receive anything from your site.
If you wish, you can customize the contents of this confirmation email by going to Settings → Reading in your dashboard.
What does a subscription email look like?
A subscription email will be sent to subscribers each time a new post is added. It will include your author name, author photo, and site logo (if configured). It will look roughly like this:
At the bottom of each email, there is a link back to the full post on your site and also a link for the reader to unsubscribe.
Can I customize the content of the subscription emails?
- In order to only have a short excerpt show in the subscriber emails go to Settings → Reading in your dashboard, and locate the option for “For each article in a feed, show” and make sure that’s set to “Excerpt”:
- With the “Full text” option enabled, your followers will get the full content of your posts.
Note: The steps above will also adjust your site’s RSS feed.
If you prefer, you can split the content of each one of your blog posts into 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 does my username display in the subscription emails?
When you publish a new post, the subscription email includes a “by [author]” section below the post title. This uses the public display name settings from your site, which defaults to your username if you haven’t entered your real name. To change this, go to Users → My Profile and enter a first and last name, then you can change the Display name publicly as setting, to display a variation of your name instead of your username.
Can I disable Subscriptions entirely?
If you don’t want to use Subscriptions, you can follow the instructions here to disable it.
Can I see who my subscribers are?
Sure! Here’s how to find them:
- Go to your Dashboard.
- Click on Jetpack → Settings → Discussion.
- Scroll down to the “Subscriptions” section.
- Click on the link to “View your email followers.”
Why is my subscriber count higher than expected?
If you’ve connected your site to any social networks using Jetpack Social, we add your followers from those into your subscriber count. This is because, when you publish a new post, your social media followers will see an update about the new content, just like your email followers will.
Why can’t I see all my email subscribers?
The Email Subscribers tab currently only shows email subscribers who do not have a WordPress.com account. Your followers should still be receiving your email updates if they are shown in the main Followers list:
How can I transfer my followers from WordPress.com to Jetpack?
If you’ve moved from WordPress.com to your very own Jetpack-powered site and want to transfer your WordPress.com followers and email subscribers, please use our transfer tool.
Is there any limit to the number of subscribers I can have?
No, there is no limit.
Troubleshooting
Are you experiencing any issues with this feature? If so, here are a few key steps that can help you solve the problem.
Emails going to spam.
Some email providers sometimes mark the emails coming from `*wordpress.com` as spam for security reasons. This means that the email might have gone to the junk or spam folder.
Action to take: check the spam/junk folder to see if the emails have landed there. If that doesn’t help, reach out to the email provider and ask them to whitelist emails coming from `*wordpress.com`.
Confirmation link has expired.
Once a user subscribes to a site/blog they receive a confirmation email with a link to click in order to verify their subscription. This link lasts only 24 hours for security reasons.
Action to take: try subscribing to the site again. If you still don’t receive the confirmation email, check your spam/junk folder. If there’s nothing in there, head to https://subscribe.wordpress.com/. Click on ‘Request Details’ and then click on the link in the email that you will receive. This will take you to a page where you can manage your subscriptions. Check in the Pending tab if there’s anything you need to confirm, cancel or approve.
Check your plugins.
It’s possible that there might be another plugin active in your site that’s clashing with Jetpack’s subscription feature.
Action to take: if that’s so, try temporarily deactivating all your plugins, and then try sending another post to see if the subscriptions are sent. If it works, then reactivate each plugin one-by-one to find out which one is causing problems. Once you find it out, you can deactivate that if it’s not very much useful for you. It’s also worth reporting the plugin conflict to the plugin author(s) and to us too. There’s a partial list of plugins that may conflict with Jetpack at this page.
Check your post content.
If your posts have no content, Jetpack will not send new post email notifications to your subscribers.
Action to take: make sure your post content is not empty. If page builders on your site use custom fields rather than the default WordPress post content field, Jetpack will not send emails also.
The subscription feature doesn’t work at all and I can’t figure out what’s broken.
If your posts have no content, Jetpack will not send new post email notifications to your subscribers.
If you can’t pinpoint the root of the issue that’s preventing Subscriptions from working properly and showing as expected, chances are your Jetpack connection isn’t working properly either.
There are steps outlined on this page that you can follow to check and debug your Jetpack connection.
In case the Jetpack debugger is still showing a connection error, you can directly contact our support.
I’ve lost all my followers!
If you suddenly see that all your followers are disappeared into thin air, don’t lose your heart! All your data is stored in our WordPress.com servers, so it’s unlikely that you’ve lost all your followers. Chances are you’re running into an Identity Crisis issue.
We can recover your temporary lost followers for you: just contact us and let us know what happened to you and your followers. We’ll be happy to fix that for you!
Why are my 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 in plain text.
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.
Still need help?
Please contact support directly. We’re happy to lend a hand and answer any other questions that you may have.
Privacy Information
This feature is deactivated by default. It can be activated any time by toggling the Allow users to subscribe to your posts and comments and receive notifications via email setting in the Subscriptions section from Jetpack → Settings → Discussion in your dashboard.
| Data Used | |
|---|---|
| Site Owners / Users
To set up and process subscriptions, we use the subscriber’s email address, as well as the ID of the post or comment (depending on the specific subscription being processed).In the event of a new subscription being initiated, we also collect some basic server data, including all of the subscribing user’s HTTP request headers, the IP address from which the subscribing user is viewing the page, and the URI which was given in order to access the page ( Additionally, for toggle activity tracking (detailed below): IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. |
Site Visitors
To set up and process subscriptions, we use the subscriber’s email address, as well as the ID of the post or comment (depending on the specific subscription being processed).In the event of a new subscription being initiated, we also collect some basic server data, including all of the subscribing user’s HTTP request headers, the IP address from which the subscribing user is viewing the page, and the URI which was given in order to access the page ( |
| Activity Tracked | |
| Site Owners / Users
Functionality cookies are set for a duration of 347 days to remember a visitor’s blog and post subscription choices if, in fact, they have an active subscription.Additionally, we track when, and by which user, the feature is activated and deactivated. We also track when, and which, configuration settings are modified. |
Site Visitors
Functionality cookies are set for a duration of 347 days to remember a visitor’s blog and post subscription choices if, in fact, they have an active subscription. |
| Data Synced (Read More) | |
| Site Owners / Users
We sync options that identify whether or not the feature is activated and how its available settings are configured. |
Site Visitors
None. |
Jetpack 