How to Add a Newsletter Signup Form to Your Website

A newsletter signup form lets visitors give you their email address so you can send them updates, offers, or news. It's one of the simplest ways to build a list of interested customers instead of relying only on people remembering to come back to your site. You can add one in a few different ways depending on how your website is built.

What You Need First

Before adding a form to your website, you need somewhere to send and store the email addresses you collect:

• An account with an email marketing service (for example, a newsletter platform like Mailchimp, Brevo, or a similar provider). Most offer a free plan for small lists.
• Access to edit your website, either through your website builder, your WordPress admin area, or your site's HTML files.

Collecting email addresses means you're handling personal data. Always let visitors know how their email will be used, and avoid adding people to a mailing list without their consent. If your site doesn't already explain this, see our article on adding a privacy policy and cookie consent notice.

Option 1: Use Your Email Marketing Provider's Embed Code

This is the easiest method and works on almost any website, including ones built with a website builder.

1. Log in to your email marketing provider's dashboard.
2. Create a new signup form (providers usually call this something like Create Form or Signup Form).
3. Customize the fields you want to collect (at minimum, an email address field; optionally a name field).
4. Look for an option to get the form's Embed Code or HTML Code, and copy it.
5. Open the page on your website where you want the form to appear, switch to the HTML or code editing view, and paste the code in.
6. Save and publish the page, then submit a test email address yourself to confirm it arrives in your provider's list.

Option 2: Add the Form on a WordPress Website

If your site runs on WordPress, you have two straightforward routes:

1. Most email marketing providers offer an official WordPress plugin. Go to Plugins, then Add New, search for your provider's name, and install and activate the plugin.
2. Follow the plugin's setup wizard to connect it to your email marketing account using an API key (your provider's dashboard will show you where to find this).
3. Once connected, add the form to a page using the plugin's block or shortcode, usually by searching for the plugin's name in the WordPress block editor.

Alternatively, you can skip a dedicated plugin and use the embed code method from Option 1 by pasting the code into a Custom HTML block on the page where you want the form.

Option 3: Build a Simple Custom HTML Form

If you'd rather not depend on a third-party plugin and your site is built with custom code, you can add a basic form directly:

<form action="https://your-provider-form-url" method="post">
  <input type="email" name="email" placeholder="Your email address" required>
  <button type="submit">Subscribe</button>
</form>

The action attribute needs to point to the submission URL your email marketing provider gives you for its forms, since a plain HTML form on its own has nowhere to send the data. Check your provider's documentation for the exact form action URL and field names to use, as these vary between providers.

A Few Tips

• Keep the form short. Asking only for an email address (and maybe a first name) gets more signups than a long form.
• Add a brief line near the form explaining what subscribers will receive and how often, so expectations are clear.
• Test the form on both desktop and mobile after adding it, since forms that look fine on a large screen sometimes overlap or break on a phone.