Push Notifications

Push notifications let you send a message straight to a visitor's device (for example "today's horoscope is ready"), so people return even when your tab is closed. For a horoscope or astrology site this is the single most effective way to build a repeat audience.

It is free

Web Push is delivered by each browser's own push service (Google for Chrome and Android, Mozilla for Firefox, and so on). There is no third-party account, no API key to buy, and no per-message cost. The only thing your site needs is a signing key pair, which it generates on your own server.

Setting it up

1. Open Push Alerts in the admin and click Generate keys and enable. This creates the VAPID key pair on your server and turns push on.
2. A small "Get alerts" prompt now appears on your site. Every visitor who taps it and allows notifications becomes a subscriber. No account is required, so anonymous visitors can subscribe too.

Sending notifications

• One-off broadcast. On the Push Alerts page, enter a title, an optional body and a link (such as your horoscope page), then send it to every subscriber.
• Automatic daily alert. Turn on the daily option and set the text once. The built-in scheduler then sends it a maximum of once every twenty-four hours, which is ideal for a daily-horoscope habit.
• Rotating messages. In the daily section you can list several messages, one per line in the form Title, Body, link. The daily alert then cycles through them one per day, so subscribers see something different each day (a horoscope one day, a numerology report the next, and so on) instead of the same text.

Who subscribed and what was sent

The Push Alerts page keeps a send history (every notification, the time, whether it was manual or automatic, and how many devices it reached) and a subscribers list. Subscriptions are anonymous by design: no name, email or IP address is stored, only the device or browser type and the date it opted in. This is privacy-friendly and GDPR-safe, so you can see how many people subscribed and on what kind of device, but not who they are.

Good to know

Push requires HTTPS, which your live site already uses. It works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Android. On Apple iPhone and iPad, notifications work only for visitors who first add the site to their home screen, so keep the Progressive Web App feature on. Subscriptions that have expired are removed automatically whenever you send, and visitors can turn alerts off at any time from their browser's site settings.