You can allow site visitors to sign up for your latest post and comment notifications using the Subscription module in the Jetpack plugin.

Activate Subscriptions

Once you’ve activated the Jetpack plugin you activate the subscriptions module as follows:

1.  Go to Jetpack > Settings

Jetpack Settings page

2. Click on the Discussion tab.

Click on Subscriptions

3.  Scroll down to Subscriptions module and toggle on the switch next to “Let visitors subscribe to new posts and comments via email“.

Enable subscriptions

Visitors automatically see an option to subscribe at the bottom of your comment form if you enable “Enable the “subscribe to site” option on your comment form” and/or “Enable the “subscribe to comments” option on your comment form”.

Subscription options on comment form

A subscriber is sent an email to confirm their subscription and post/comment emails won’t be sent until the subscription is confirmed.

Blog Subscription (Jetpack)

You can also add a Blog Subscription (Jetpack) widget to your sidebar.

Here is an example of what the Blog Subscription (Jetpack) widget looks like:

Blog Subscription Widget

Once you add the widget to your sidebar in Appearance > Widgets, you’ll see the widget settings look like this:

  • Widget title: Allows you to add your own custom title.
  • Optional text: Can use the default form text, customized or removed entirely so the form only shows the title and the button.
  • Subscribe Button: Used to customize the text on the subscribe button.
  • Success Message Text: Can use the default form text or customized.
  • Show total number of subscribers: Select if you want to display your number of email subscribers in the widget.

Monitoring Email subscribers

The emails are sent by the WordPress.com servers and your email list is stored on their servers.

To view your email list you need to click on the View Your Email Subscribers on the Subscriptions module in Jetpack > Settings.

You can also select to be notified when someone subscribes to your site using the Email Me – Whenever Someone follows my blog in Settings > Discussion.

Subscription notification.