Service Workers and Delivery
Web push depends on a service worker — a small background component the browser registers for your site, able to receive a message when no page is open.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Background Messaging:
- Push Notifications — subscriptions and their endpoints
Architect Panel → Configuration:
- Site Settings — the site address the registration is bound to
Why one is needed
Something has to receive the notification when the user is not on your site. A page cannot, because it does not exist at that moment. The service worker persists after the page has gone, which is the whole mechanism.
HTTPS is required
Service workers only register over a secure connection. That is not a platform choice — browsers enforce it — so push is unavailable on any site not served securely.
It is tied to your address
The registration and every subscription belong to the exact origin. Change your domain and every existing subscription is worthless — users must subscribe again, and there is no way to migrate them.
Worth knowing before a rebrand or a domain change, because the loss is silent: notifications simply stop arriving and nobody reports it.
Clearing site data removes it
A user who clears their browsing data unsubscribes without knowing. Their expectation is unchanged and notifications stop — which surfaces as "I stopped getting alerts" some weeks later.
Where notifications matter, having a visible indication of whether they are currently enabled saves that conversation.
Test what an arriving notification does
The click behaviour is the part most often left wrong. A notification that opens the home page when it was about a specific record wastes the moment you worked to earn.
Make it open the thing it is about, and check it when the application is closed, when it is open in the background, and when the user is already on the relevant page.
Check the appearance
Title, body and icon are what the user sees, often on a lock screen alongside a dozen others. A notification saying "Update" from an unrecognisable icon is deleted without being read.
Say what happened, specifically, and make the icon recognisably yours.
Do not notify too much
The fastest way to lose the channel. People turn notifications off at the operating system level, permanently, and you will never know they did.
Notify about things the person asked to hear about and things genuinely requiring action. Not every change.
Worked example
An installation checks notification behaviour on real devices after each release: clicking opens the relevant record rather than the home page, the icon is the organisation's, and the body names the case. Notifications are limited to assignment and outcome, which are the two things people said they wanted to know about.
Recommendations
- Serve the site over HTTPS — push requires it.
- Expect to lose subscriptions on a domain change.
- Make clicking open the right thing, and test all three states.
- Notify sparingly — over-notifying loses the channel permanently.