Subscription Management Page
The subscription management page lets your visitors view and control which email lists they’re subscribed to.
Table of Contents
Creating the Page
- Go to SSE Emails > Settings > General
- Under “Subscription Management Page”, click Create Page
- The plugin creates a published WordPress page titled “Manage Email Preferences” containing the
Please log in to manage your email preferences.
If you have an account, log in here. Otherwise, you can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of any email we send you.
- A link to the page appears in Settings after creation
You can rename the page, change its slug, or move it to any location in your page hierarchy — the shortcode does all the work.
How Visitors Are Identified
The page adapts to three scenarios:
1. Logged-In WordPress User
The subscriber is looked up by their WordPress user ID or email. They see a list of all active lists with checkboxes and can save changes immediately.
If the visitor previously subscribed through a form without being logged in, they have an sse_subscriber_id cookie. The page uses this to find their subscriber record and shows the same checkbox interface.
3. Unknown Visitor
If neither logged in nor cookied, the page does not ask for an email address. Identity must come from a credential the visitor possesses — being logged in, their sse_subscriber_id cookie, or the tokenised link in one of their emails (every newsletter/support email links here with their token). This is deliberate: a free-text email box would let anyone read or change another person’s preferences by typing their address.
To manage preferences, an unknown visitor should click the “manage preferences / unsubscribe” link in any email we’ve sent them, or log in.
What Visitors See
The page shows everything a subscriber can control in one place:
- Lists — a checkbox for each active list (archived lists are hidden); checked = subscribed. Each list shows its name and description.
- Newsletter categories — if you’ve enabled the article newsletter, a checkbox for each enabled post category, so subscribers can pick exactly which topics they want rather than all-or-nothing.
- Newsletter frequency — a choice between instant (an email for each new post as it’s published) and digest (a periodic summary on your schedule).
- A Save Preferences button and a success/error message.
Changes are saved via AJAX — the page doesn’t reload.
The category checkboxes and the frequency choice are the front-end controls for the article newsletter described in Newsletter. A couple of behaviours worth knowing:
- A subscriber with no explicit category choices is treated as subscribed to every enabled category by default — so a new subscriber receives everything until they narrow it down here.
- Unticking a category here is the same as using the per-category unsubscribe link in an email: it records that preference so that category stops sending to them, while leaving the others on.
- The frequency choice is per-subscriber. Switching from instant to digest takes effect from the next post/digest onward.
This is the “manage instead of unsubscribe” destination — pointing your unsubscribe footers and confirmation pages here keeps more subscribers engaged than a single opt-out link. See Unsubscribes & the Preference Centre.
Linking to the Page
You can link to the management page from anywhere — footer menus, email footers, confirmation messages, etc. Common placements:
- Site footer navigation
- Email template footer (for future email sending)
- WooCommerce My Account (see WooCommerce Integration)
- Custom links in form success messages
Customisation
The management page uses minimal, clean CSS (class prefix sse-manage). You can style it via your theme:
/* Container */
.sse-manage { }
/* Individual list item */
.sse-manage__item { }
/* List description text */
.sse-manage__desc { }
/* Save button */
.sse-manage__btn { }
/* Success / error messages */
.sse-manage__message--success { }
.sse-manage__message--error { }