I’m excited to share a brand-new feature in Toocheke Premium that helps you stay connected with your readers without relying on them to remember to check your site, scroll their social feed, or catch your latest post before it gets buried: email notifications.
Note: This feature is available in Toocheke Premium only and is not included in the free version of Toocheke.
Readers can now subscribe right on your site and get an email the moment you publish a new comic, manga chapter, or blog post — no algorithm, no social feed to scroll past, just a notification straight in their inbox.
💌 What’s New in Toocheke Premium
The latest version introduces Email Notifications, which let you:
- Let readers subscribe with just their email address — no account required
- Notify them automatically when you publish a new Comic, Manga Chapter, Post, or, if you’d like, a new Series, Manga Series, or Manga Volume
- Offer series-specific subscriptions, so a reader can follow just one story instead of everything on your site
- Protect your signup form from spam with built-in Cloudflare Turnstile support
- Send a clean, branded email featuring your own logo and signature
- Give readers full control with confirm, manage, and unsubscribe links on every email — no dead ends
- View, manage, and export your subscriber list anytime, right from your WordPress dashboard
Best of all, once it’s set up, it just runs in the background. Publish your comic like you always do, and Toocheke takes care of the rest.
⚡ Why This Matters for Independent Creators
Not every reader lives on social media. Some of your most loyal readers just want a simple heads-up in their inbox when something new is out — no account to check, no algorithm deciding whether they even see your post.
This feature helps you:
- Reach readers who don’t use social media at all
- Bring readers back consistently, since a notification email tends to get seen far more reliably than a post that might get buried in a feed
- Offer series-specific subscriptions, so a reader who only cares about one story doesn’t get emailed about everything else on your site
- Stay in control, since you decide exactly which post types trigger an email, and readers can always leave whenever they want, no questions asked
🛠️ How to Set It Up
This one has a few more setup steps than some of our other features, since you’re building out your own subscriber experience — but each step is takes just a few minutes, and you’ll only do this once.
- Create three simple pages on your site — a Confirmation page, an Unsubscribe page, and a Manage Subscription page — and add one shortcode to each:
[toocheke_notify_confirmed][toocheke_notify_unsubscribed][toocheke_notify_manage]
- In your WordPress admin area, go to Toocheke → Options → Notifications.
- Under Pages & Shortcodes, select the three pages you just created from the dropdowns, so links in your emails go to the right place.
- Under Notify Subscribers On, choose which post types should trigger an email. Post, Comic, and Manga Chapter are turned on by default; Series-level content is off by default, since most readers only want to hear about new pages, not new series listings.
- (Strongly recommended) Install WP Mail SMTP and connect it to a free-tier email service like Brevo or SendGrid. WordPress’s default mail function alone isn’t reliable once you have real subscribers — here is a great tutorial that gives you a full step-by-step walkthrough.
- (Optional but recommended) Turn on Cloudflare Turnstile to keep bots from spamming your signup form with fake email addresses. It’s free — add a widget at the Cloudflare Turnstile dashboard, paste your Site Key and Secret Key into the two fields here, and use the Test Connection button to confirm it’s working before you save.
- Under Email Design, upload a logo and write a short signature — this is what your readers will actually see at the top and bottom of every email you send.
- Click Save Changes.
- Finally, place the signup form wherever you’d like readers to subscribe — a page, a sidebar widget, any place that makes sense on your website:
[toocheke_notify_signup]- Want a signup form scoped to just one series or manga series? Use
[toocheke_notify_signup series="123"]or[toocheke_notify_signup manga_series="456"]with that series’ post ID.
That’s it — you’re live! 🎉
📬 What Your Readers Actually See
Once someone fills out your signup form, they’ll get a confirmation email with a Confirm Now button. After confirming, they’re all set — the next time you publish something that matches what they’re subscribed to, they’ll get a clean, branded email with your logo, the new content, and a button to read more.
Readers are never stuck once they’ve subscribed:
- The Manage Subscription page lets them switch between “notify me about everything” and following specific series or manga series
- A Unsubscribe link sits in the footer of every single email, no exceptions, no hoops to jump through
🗂️ Managing Your Subscribers
Curious who’s actually subscribed? Head to Toocheke → Email Subscriptions to see your full list, filter by status (Confirmed, Pending, or Unsubscribed), and remove anyone if you need to.
Want to use your list somewhere else — like importing it into Mailchimp or another email platform? Click Export CSV at the top of that page to download your whole subscriber list in one click.
🙋♂️ Why I Added This Feature
A lot of you have been asking for an email notification feature that allows your readers to have a direct means of receiving notifications of updates. This feature is meant to be genuinely reader-friendly, not just creator-friendly — that’s why so much of it, from the confirmation step to the series-specific subscriptions to the always-visible unsubscribe link, is built around giving your readers control over what lands in their inbox.
💬 Feedback Welcome
If you give Email Notifications a try, I’d love to hear how it works for your comic site. Your feedback always helps me get a better sense of what features you’d love to see in Toocheke next.
Thanks again for supporting Toocheke and being part of the community! 🖤
Happy Tooning!