No, WordPress doesn’t offer newsletters – not really: Dissociated Press

Switching away from Substack is a hot topic right now, for reasons I won’t belabor here (hint: it’s because of the Nazis) – which means that people are searching for alternatives. One that’s getting tossed around is WordPress. As much as I’d love that to be true, the WordPress Newsletter functionality is not what most folks think of when you think “newsletter.”

I subscribe to 10-15 various technology and other newsletters, which vary in format quite a bit – but generally show some editorial discretion from the newsletter editor or publisher. That is to say, if you follow a organization’s blog and its newsletter, you expect to see some additional / different content and curation to go into its newsletter.

WordPress… doesn’t have that. Or if it does it’s nowhere to be found in the Newsletter Settings or Jetpack Settings for Newsletters via WordPress.com. It’s frustrating because I see this suggestion being thrown around on Mastodon and elsewhere, and have checked it out only to find some features around “let people subscribe via email to your posts.” That’s… not a newsletter. Let me create an actual newsletter, and link to my blog content with additional material, and then we’re in good shape.

Which is disappointing, really. I’ve been thinking about launching my own newsletter in 2024, and the only real value offered by WordPress in this department is delivering things via email instead of RSS / visiting the blog directly.

It’s a pity, because WordPress / Automattic are ceding a huge market to others instead of offering real value to people subscribing to their WP.com plans. A proper newsletter offering in addition to the WordPress hosting and other features you get with their various paid plans would be a major draw. Why they haven’t upped their game here, even before Substack’s Nazi problem came to light, mystifies me.

Substack has posed a “threat” to the WordPress publishing model for quite a while. What Automattic offers right now might check a box somewhere that says “newsletter” but it’s hardly a real offering. While you can find some stats for emails, it’s basically just opens and clicks. Not over time, segregated by month or week or anything like that … just a list of opens and clicks. My last post apparently got 22 opens and 5 clicks. That’s all I know.

I’d love to recommend WordPress for this use case, I really would. I think that Automattic is a good company and it’s much nicer to be able to satisfy the need for a site, blog, and newsletter in one product. Sadly, it’s not ready to fill that use case just yet.