Step 1: Finalize your WordPress project
Progressier is a tool that lets you add extra features, like PWA installation and push notifications to your WordPress web app. When your app is ready to launch and accessible at a custom domain, you can incorporate Progressier into your project to enhance its capabilities.
Step 2: Set up your Progressier account
Progressier is an all-in-one no-code toolkit for web apps. It usually takes 8 minutes or less to integrate Progressier with WordPress.
If you haven’t done so already, create your Progressier account. It comes with a free trial (no credit card required!) so you can test all features free of charge for 14 days without risk.
Step 3: Create your PWA
After signing up, you'll be prompted to enter a few details about your app, e.g. how it was built (choose WordPress), the name of your app, and its domain.
Step 4: Wrap up your WordPress PWA setup
After logging in, you'll be prompted with a series of tasks to complete to finish your onboarding. Tasks are easy and include uploading your logo, setting up your WordPress project correctly, installing your app, and sending a test push notification
Step 5: Navigate to your app
Head back to your app's domain. You should be prompted to allow notifications. If not, click on the Floating Action Button at the bottom-right corner of your app. There are also other widgets you can use to ask users to allow notifications.
Step 6: Learn to send push notifications
Our Push Composer allows you to compose a notification, select a specific group of users of your WordPress app to send it to, and even schedule its actual delivery from 15 minutes to 14 days in the future.
Step 7: Sync push subscriptions with user profiles (optional)
Sending the same notification to every user for marketing purposes is one thing. Sending notifications programmatically to a user to react to events in your WordPress app is another. Luckily, Progressier comes with a solution for both use cases. Simply connect your user data (e.g. a user ID or user email), then call our Push API in your server-side code to send a push notification to a specific user. You don't have to manage push subscriptions on your end.
Pros of adding push notifications to your WordPress app
Push notifications can improve user engagement with your WordPress PWA, increase retention, decrease churn, and provide a better overall user experience by delivering timely and relevant updates and information to users in a convenient manner.
Push notifications can serve as a reminder for users to open your WordPress app, which can help increase traffic. For instance, a news app could send push notifications about breaking stories or updates to encourage app usage.
WordPress push notifications: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Users may opt out of receiving push notifications if they find them to be too frequent or irrelevant. Also Google sometimes auto-blocks push notifications for users that frequently block them.
What are the best push services for WordPress apps?
There are many different push notification service providers to choose from for your WordPress app, and the best one for you will depend on your specific needs and requirements. Some of the most popular push notification service providers include:
- OneSignal: Probably the most popular option for push notifications. OneSignal works well across platforms and provides more options than FCM but can be quite costly, especially at scale.
- Progressier: probably the best option if you develop web apps as it also comes with additional functionality designed to enhance web apps specifically, e.g. targeted push notifications.
- Airship: Another tool designed to help developers and marketers engage with their users through personalized and timely messages delivered to their mobile devices. Not exclusively web-based.
- TruePush: Another popular option for developers to integrate push notifications into their WordPress app.
Developing your own push notification solution
If you're using WordPress, it's likely you value simplicity and getting things done quickly. Building your own push service requires code (a ton of it!) and is a non-trivial engineering effort. While sending a notification to one user is easy, sending it to many simultaneously is pretty hard and requires capabilities that can't be replicated in no-code or low-code platforms.
What devices and browsers are compatible with push notifications?
The Web Push API is compatible with Windows (via Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera), macOS (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari), Android (Samsung Internet, Chrome, Firefox) and iOS (Safari).
