As you are wondering the world wide interwebs, you may have noticed a new thing, websites are asking if you want push notifications when the site update. In this post I’m going to talk about WordPress web push notifications and do you need them.

What Is WordPress Web Push Notifications

When you visit a site with a supported browser such as Google Chrome a popup will appear on your screen asking if you want to get notifications.

Already I’m annoyed yet another popup! I’ve gone for a simple red icon bottom right of the screen.

You don’t need to enter any details, just click on the popup and it is saved.  This is saved in your browser settings.  A unique ID from your browser is sent to your push notification supplier, in my case OneSignal.com.  That’s the sign-up process.

There is a console on OneSignal where I can send out a WordPress web push notification to my subscribers.  The push appears bottom right of my browser and looks like this.

Setting Up WordPress Web Push Notifications

I’m not going to recreate the wheel, here is a great tutorial to make your site use push notifications.

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-web-push-notification-to-your-wordpress-site/

My Opinion

This is just my opinion, and my feeling, but I don’t want all the sites I follow jumping onto my browser screen shrieking that there is a new blog post, I prefer to coral all my blog posts into my feed reader or get them in my inbox for later reading.

Do we need another notification?  Think about your mobile phone, it beeps at me too many times, and I’ve deactivate a lot of mobile push notifications.

Browser notifications are intrusive, they popup and demand your attention when you are working at your desktop, flow is broken no matter how focused you are.

I’ve effectively used web push for my helpdesk software notification and live chat software which is client related.  I need that alert, but do I want an alert jumping onto my desktop when Johnny posts about his new pet cat?  No I don’t.

Experiment

I’m adding push notification onto WP Dude until Thanksgiving 2017.  This will allow you, the reader, to see push in action if you have not seen it, and get an update about my blog posts to see if you like it.  I might even try to sell you some services, how annoying.

I’ll be monitoring sign ups to see how effective this technology is for marketing.  I’ll look at sign up rate and click through from my push notifications.

I don’t like the technology so as I sit writing I don’t think I’ll keep it, but I may be surprised by how effective it is. I’m open to this experiment.

Can I ask you to sign-up to test the system? Click on the red icon bottom right.

I’ll write a follow up post at the end of the experiment.

Wrap Up – WordPress Web Push Notifications

As you can no doubt tell I’m not a fan of this technology.  It is far too intrusive in my humble opinion.  I’m prepared to have my opinion changed if it is effective, but there’s no lead magnet delivery in exchange for sign-up.

Photo Credit: lenswrangler Flickr via Compfight cc