Follow.it, an alternative to Feedburner

Follow.it, alternative to FeedBurner email suscription

Google has let FeedBurner die slowly for 10 years, the longest it has gone without an update. Once the most popular RSS feed subscription service for blogs and podcasts in the early 2000s, FeedBurner has now entered a final stage of agony.

All of us who have used it will remember its crazy tiny subscriber counter that every day showed a different number or an alarming zero so-called readers.

On your page have planted the obituary announcing the date of its death and burial as an email subscription service, its most used utility. It will be July 2021. They call it "going into maintenance mode".

While you may think that receiving feeds by mail or reading pages using feed readers is a thing of the past, you'd be surprised how many people use this way to read or receive their regular reading.

Alternatives

Since FeedBurner started to smell like a corpse, many users have been looking for alternatives to mail delivery, and there are some, although not all of them are completely free, cheap or completely to the average blogopath's liking in terms of customisation options.

Many opted to use the wordPress native subscriptionThe problem is that in order to add it, you had to eat its mega-jack of a plugin "Jetpack " which has a bunch of different excess utilities that add more processes to the load.

There is also a free plugin that allows you to configure the submissions to your liking and manage everything on your own I've been testing this and although it did its job very well and I liked the approach, I had to do without it for the usual reasons. The performance.

The plugin made an abusive use of admin-ajax which slowed down the loading time by up to 10 seconds. It even crashed the blog with intermittent and frequent 500 errors due to requests overload.

Besides, you know the golden rule of WP, install only the right and really necessary plugins.

The other options are to use external services like Mailchimp or similar in their basic free versions if you have few subscribers.

Follow.it

Three days ago they wrote me from Follow.it to invite me to try their tool and for that they offered me one of their payment plans. I found it interesting and also I was again without email subscription option. I started by trying their free basic version, which can be used for up to 5 feeds with unlimited subscribers. As a courtesy I thought it only fair to write this review.

The free basic version has some limitations in terms of email personalisation and other settings, but compared to the rest of the alternatives it is a very good option if you don't want to complicate your life too much.

The two paid plans they offer are quite reasonably priced and unless you have tens of thousands of followers their rates are not too steep. You can calculate an estimate based on the number of subscribers at their calculator.

As an alternative to FeedBurner advertise as an alternative to FeedBurner, on their blog they explain how to do the transfer exporting e importing your subscribers. But if you want to start from scratch, it is as simple as placing the url of your blog or feed in a box like this one from your homepage, register and configure the sending options.

Subscription form

Then just add a link to subscribe and / or configure the form and place it on your site. For this they offer you a tool for the basic design with three clicks, but always use your own forms in case you want to format it differently or use the plugin to add subscription buttons.

Although I've opted to make a subscription form with Elementor which is shown as a pop-up window to visitors (only once per visit because I hate pop-ups) when they leave the blog, Follow.it (which has many more moves in its portfolio) offers another free tool for its users, MyPopups. With it you can set up a form both in popup and banner format.

First impressions of the user experience

At first, the website can be a bit confusing and it feels like some of the options are scattered around and it takes longer than usual to find them.

Also missing is a privacy policy checkbox for the GDPR-compliant form for users from Europe in your form configurator. I have already proposed this in our email exchange and they assure us that they will take it into account for future updates. A native follower counter option wouldn't be a bad thing either.

Although its basic version is fully functional and very useful, it is perhaps a little short in terms of layout possibilities for the emails that readers receive.

One of the options that I find most interesting is the filters and channels area and also that they promise to add more ways and channels to serve the feed.

Even in the free basic version you can have the email list of subscribers. Unregistered subscribers who only use their reader are also counted but are shown as"invisible" readers.

After doing several test subscriptions I have verified that the notifications arrive almost instantly and the whole subscription process can be completed in seconds. New articles are served quickly for the single post option (one post per post).

The result has been much better than expected. In just 24 hours there were already 41 subscribers (thank you and welcome). Approximately 19% of them signed up from the form in the exit pop-up window.

PROS

-Free basic version with unlimited subscribers and for 5 feeds.
-Different filters and channels for sending.
-Complete subscriber registration.
-Fast setup and attentive support.
-Promise improvements and more options.
-Reasonable prices.

CONTRAS

-Missing privacy policy checkbox to comply with GDPR for users in Europe.
-No followers counter to display on the blog.
-Mail too simple in its basic version (correct in its paid versions).