The invitation email
The email that carries the link. It is the only thing most invited people will ever read about your site before they join it, so it is worth five minutes.
Subject and message
The subject starts as You are invited to join followed by your site name. The message is edited in the full WordPress editor, with Visual and Text modes, formatting and the Add Media button, so you can put your logo or a photograph in it exactly as you would in a post.
The default message reads:
Hello,
You have been invited to create an account on {site_name}.
{registration_button}
Or copy and paste this link into your browser:
{registration_url}This invitation expires on {expiration_date}.
Rewrite all of it. The only thing the email genuinely needs is one of the two link tokens.
The six tokens
Each one is swapped for real content at the moment the email is sent. Click a chip below the editor to insert it at the cursor rather than typing it.
| Token | Becomes |
|---|---|
{registration_button} | A styled button linking to their invitation, using the colours and label set below. |
{registration_url} | The same link written out in full as a plain underlined link. {registration_link} does the same thing. |
{expiration_date} | The date the invitation stops working, in your site's date format. |
{invite_code} | The raw 20-character code. Rarely needed, since both link tokens already contain it. |
{site_name} | Your site title, as set under Settings > General. |
{role} | The name of the role this invitation grants, for example Subscriber. |
Keep both link tokens in. The button is what almost everyone clicks, and the plain link is what saves the ones whose email client strips buttons, blocks styling or shows the message as plain text. Two lines of insurance for no cost.
The button
Four controls, all of which apply to {registration_button} wherever it appears:
| Setting | Notes |
|---|---|
| Button label | Blank gives Complete Your Registration. |
| Corner radius | 0 to 60 pixels. 6 by default. |
| Button colour | The background. Also used for the Log in button in the welcome email. |
| Button text | The label colour. Keep the contrast high; some email clients ignore background colours entirely and you do not want white on white when they do. |
These are the email's button colours, and they are set separately from the registration form's button on the Settings tab. That is deliberate: an email is read on a white background in somebody else's software, and a form sits on your own page.
Who it comes from
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| From name | The name in the recipient's inbox. Your business name usually beats a person's name here, because the recipient is expecting the business. |
| From email | The address it appears to come from. Leave blank to use the WordPress default. |
| Reply-to | Where a reply actually goes. Set this if the From address is a no-reply mailbox nobody reads. |
From name and From email are used together or not at all: both must be filled in, and the email address must be valid, before either is applied. That prevents a half-filled pair producing a malformed sender.
Use a From address on your own domain. Putting a Gmail or Outlook address in From, while the mail is actually sent by your web server, is the single most reliable way to have invitations filed as spam. Receiving servers check whether the sending server is allowed to send for that domain, and a free mailbox provider never authorises your host to do so.
The same From name and From email are used for the welcome email, so setting them here sets them for both.
How the message is rendered
The email is sent as HTML, in a plain 640px-wide container with no template wrapped around it, so what you write is what arrives. If you write in the Text tab without any HTML at all, your line breaks are converted for you. If you write in the Visual tab, the paragraphs it produces are left exactly as they are, so nothing double-spaces.
Next
The welcome email is the second, different email, sent after somebody has registered.
Still stuck?
Write to me and it is me who answers, not a ticket queue. Tell me what you expected and what happened instead.
