How to notify clients when their WordPress sites are updated

Sending notifications to clients when their WordPress websites are updated is an excellent way to demonstrate that you are actively maintaining and improving their sites. Additionally, you can encourage clients to help test the latest changes, as they are often the most familiar with their site’s content and functionality. Their feedback can be invaluable, given their extensive experience writing content, engaging with their audience, and understanding their site inside and out.

Your options in sending update notifications

Let’s discover a few ways to handle this below:

1. Notifications via a CRM

Depending on your situation, this approach might make sense, as you likely have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in place to manage your contacts and communication methods.

However, a downside is that you are integrating technical functionality into your CRM, which can complicate its primary purpose and potentially lead to inefficiencies.

2. Notifications via your mail provider

While this isn’t our recommended approach, it is a budget-friendly method to keep clients informed. You could use email templates and contact lists to streamline the process and send e-mails by hand, but this method has its drawbacks. It’s easy to make mistakes, such as emailing the wrong contacts or sending incorrect information and it’s probably not very easy to share with your colleagues.

3. Notifications via CI/CD

Some seasoned developers automate their WordPress updates using CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery). This approach is excellent for automating processes, running tests, and ensuring smooth deployments. You can configure successful deployments to trigger your SMTP server, which will then automatically send out emails to notify relevant parties.

4. Notifications via plugins

Another option is to explore the numerous WordPress plugins that enable email notifications directly from your WordPress site. These plugins can notify you and your clients about specific activities automatically, or you can build custom functionality into your WordPress sites that will allow you to email clients directly.

One such plugin that excels at this and integrates seamlessly with CI/CD is our own Sites Monitor👇.

Notifications via the Sites Monitor plugin

Since our recent 1.6.0 release, premium license holders now have the ability to send notifications to their clients. As we’ve discussed in previous articles, the Sites Monitor plugin is developed based on our own experiences. We maintain hundreds of sites (primarily through automated processes). However, we value the flexibility to send a default message while also being able to customize messages for individual sites when additional background information is needed.

The latest version of Sites Monitor allows you to do just this, you can supply a default message from the settings:

And can update the message on a per site basis when you’ve updated the site:

You can supply multiple client email addresses by adding them as comma-separated list at the client taxonomy.

The full changelog

We’ve improved other things too! You can read the full changelog for the 1.6.0 release here.