The practice of double opt-in is highly recommended for all the WordPress webmasters. With it, people need to confirm twice for their subscription of your newsletter, downloading your files, commenting on your blog posts, registration for your membership site, and many more.
In the following, we have written comprehensive guidance for WordPress double opt-in, introducing how it works, why it benefits your site and how to achieve this practice in detail.
General Knowledge of WordPress Double Opt-In
Generally, when people subscribe to your email list or register an account on your website, they are required to fill out all the information needed in the form and click the Subscribe or the Register button to make a confirmation. If this is the end, you simply carry out the single opt-in.
As for the double opt-in, only finishing these steps are not enough. People also need to log into their email to check a new message your site sends them automatically, from which they can find a special link that is required to be clicked for the second time confirmation.
Single Opt-In vs Double Opt-In
In fact, the debate between the single opt-in and the double opt-in has a long history. Personally, we recommend you to adopt the practice of double opt-in for your WordPress sites. To support our views, we have checked the real-world research carried out by MailChimp with about 30,000 users in a random database.
The Working Process of WordPress Double Opt-In
In fact, the process of double opt-in generally requires 4 steps to finish. In the following, we’d like to take the newsletter subscription as an example.
Step 1 – Complete the Subscription Form
People need to enter the required information into the subscription form, including the names and email addresses. Then, click the Subscribe button.
Step 2 – Check the “Thank You” Page
If there is nothing wrong with the first-time confirmation for subscription, your potential subscribers will be redirected to a special “Thank You” page. Here, people can be informed to check their emails to get the confirmation link. Based on the configurations, your email address can be showcased on this page, so that they can find the confirmation message quickly.
Step 3 – Click the Confirmation Link
Now, the subscribers should open their email inbox, check the confirmation message and click the confirmation link or button. If they skip this step, the subscription process cannot succeed.
Besides, if you use MailChimp to manage your newsletters, you can have their IP addresses, dates and times for the confirmation collected and stored.
Step 4 – Subscribe Successfully
Now, the whole double opt-in process is finished. Your subscribers will be led to a welcome page, telling them that they have finished the newsletter subscription already.
How Can Double Opt-In Benefit Your WordPress Sites
In fact, this practice brings a lot of benefits to your site in the aspects of website security, optimization and email list building. Check the details in the following.
- Protect your site away from spammers – Generally, robots and spammers are less likely to pass the double opt-in process, thus cannot complete the registration or subscription for your newsletters. In addition, this practice automatically rejects some bad, non-existent and suspicious email addresses from adding into your list.
- Increase user engagement – Only readers who are really interested in what you share will take their time for passing the double opt-in. In this case, you can be assured that your newsletters are sent to your target visitors who are willing to take some call-to-actions on your emails and websites.
- Reduce the reports for spam – It is possible that your subscribers forget that they have subscribed to your site, thus report your messages as the spam. These reports or complaints may get your domain name banned by ISP. With the double opt-in, however, this situation can be highly reduced as people need to pass several steps to get your newsletters, but not just click a simple button.
How to Enable WordPress Double Opt-In
In fact, to enable this special feature, you can rely on the functional WordPress plugins. Here, as the majority of webmasters use the double opt-in for their email subscription and file downloading, we mainly take these two situations as the examples.
WordPress Double Opt-In for Email Subscription
If you want your readers to pass the double opt-in for email subscription, you can use the Newsletter Manager plugin. After installing it, you can find a new tab named XYZ Newsletter in your WordPress admin. Click it and choose the Settings button in the drop-down menu.
WordPress Double Opt-In for Files Downloading
If you offer something for downloading on your site, you can also enable the double opt-in before people can download them successfully. For this, we highly recommend the plugin named Double Opt-In for Download.
After installing it, you should click the Settings button from the newly-added DOIFD tab, and then, hit the option of Email Settings. Here, you should enter your email address and name that will be showcased in the confirmation message for downloading. Besides, you can modify the subject and body of the verification email based on your needs.
