Top WordPress Pop-Up Plugins: Boost Engagement & Conversions

After building your website and working hard to attract people to it, how do you take the next step to make the most of it and grow your business further? The answer lies in popups plugins. 

Using the right popup plugin, you can help grow your sales in a simple and effective way. popup plugins can be a fantastic way to engage with your customers, grow your subscriber list, and ultimately, boost your sales. But, as most WordPress users know, there is a huge selection of plugins to choose from – so how do you find the right one?

In this post, we’ll take a look at the ins and outs of WordPress pop-up plugins and give you the top tools to boost your engagement and conversions. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll have some great new tools to try out.

Why Use WordPress Pop-Up Plugins?

If you’re not already using WordPress pop-up plugins, you may be wondering ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ But there are a lot of great reasons to use WordPress popup plugins. 

Directing user attention

Attracting users to your website is one of your main objectives, but how do you keep their attention once they’re there? It’s important to grab your users’ attention quickly when they visit your website, and a popup can be a simple way to achieve this. Placement is especially important when it comes to directing user attention, and strategically placing your popups can help you guide your visitors to specific pages, promotions, or products, ensuring they don’t miss out on key opportunities or information. 

You can use popups to highlight new features, announce sales and special offers, or any other actions you want your users to take. It can be an effective way of driving engagement using one simple action.

Increasing subscriber count

Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective strategies for businesses, so investing some time in growing your subscriber list could have significant benefits. Using popup plugins, you can provide highly visible, on-screen prompts to help encourage people to sign up for your newsletter. These types of popups can highlight special offers and benefits that come with subscribing, providing an attractive offer to encourage your users to subscribe. 

As you grow your subscriber list, you can focus further on boosting your customer engagement to help nurture your leads and, ultimately, increase your conversions.

Promoting time-sensitive offers

One of the areas popup plugins excel the most is promoting time-sensitive offers and promotions, including time-limited sales, flash deals or seasonal discounts. Combining prominent popups with clear, compelling messaging and a simple call to action can help create a sense of urgency that will encourage visitors to take immediate action. This can be an effective way of boosting your conversion rates and driving sales, without having to invest money or execute a complex marketing campaign. 

Gathering user feedback

Pop-up plugins can also be very valuable tools for gathering user feedback and insights. Items such as polls, surveys and feedback forms can easily be turned into popups, helping you to gather information from your customers about their preferences, website user experience and suggestions for improvement. This is a direct form of feedback that can help you get some important insights, while being able to improve overall user experience. You could combine your user feedback popup with an incentive to encourage further responses to your questions.

Not only can popup plugins for WordPress help you attract your users’ attention, they can help you achieve different website goals, ensuring you make the most out of customer engagements with your website.

Key Features to Consider

Now that you’ve got a better understanding of the benefits of using WordPress popup plugins, the next step is choosing the right plugins for your needs. We’ve put together some of the key features for you to consider when choosing a suitable plugin:

Mobile responsiveness

With more than half of all website traffic coming from mobile phones, it’s clear that prioritizing mobile responsiveness is a must when it comes to popup plugins. Pop-up plugins should display seamlessly across different screen sizes and devices, ensuring all visitors to your website can experience the plugin. Choose popup plugins that offer responsive design options, so that they can maintain their effectiveness and visual appeal across different device types.

Ease of design & customization

Pop-up plugins are a highly effective, affordable way of boosting customer engagement and sales, so it’s important that the plugins you choose are also easy to use. A user-friendly interface for designing and customizing popups can help you create engaging on-screen messages that are attractive and contain useful content. Keep an eye out for WordPress popup plugins that contain features such as drag-and-drop editors, pre-designed templates and robust customization options. You should be able to easily modify elements such as text, fonts, colors, images and other design features to help them match your brand identity and align with any of your other marketing materials.

Exit-intent technology

Advances in website technology mean it’s now possible to detect when a user is about to leave your website. However, using an exit-intent plugin can be designed to trigger a message when a user is about to leave your site, and potentially make them think about leaving or complete one last action. From incentives to save money or a call-to-action asking them to stay, these plugins can be very effective at making your users think twice. The most effective plugins of this type will help you fine-tune their features to ensure your popup has maximum impact.

Targeting and segmentation capabilities

If you want to target a specific audience segment, then there are ways to achieve this through popup plugins. These plugins will provide you with advanced targeting options, including geolocation, referral source, user behavior, and even demographics. Segmenting your audience makes it possible to deliver more relevant and personalized popup messages, which could help increase their effectiveness and help build some connections and familiarity with different audience segments.

Analytics and tracking

As with any marketing strategy, it’s important to analyze its effectiveness. The best popup WordPress plugins feature analytics and tracking capabilities to help you monitor your popup campaign performance. These can include various analytic dashboards that can track aspects such as impressions, conversions, click-through rates, and conversion rates. You could also benefit from additional features such as A/B testing to help you explore different types of popup messaging and establish which is the most effective. Having access to these insights will help you adjust your strategy so that you can maximize the impact of your popup campaigns. 

Top 10 WordPress Pop-Up Plugins

To help you find some relevant and effective popup plugins for your website, we’ve put together our pick of the top 10 WordPress pop-up plugins:

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster takes the number one spot for the best WordPress popup plugin. Designed to make lead generation simple, it allows several different types of forms to help you achieve your goals.

One of OptinMonster’s best features is its drag-and-drop builder, which allows you to choose between pre-built templates or design your own from scratch. Using OptinMonster, you can feel confident that your popup will integrate seamlessly with your WordPress site. 

OptinMonster also has the benefit of built-in analytics, helping you to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and alter your strategy as necessary. It also has both free and paid options, and can be integrated easily with email marketing services such as Mailchimp.

2. Sender

Sender is a simple but effective WordPress popup plugin that allows you to create popups and forms that not only look good, but can easily help you grow your subscriber lists and boost engagement,

Packed with useful features, Sender popups can be customized to appear on a scheduled basis, as well as behavior-based triggering, all without the need for code. It also has its own email and SMS marketing capabilities, taking away the need to register with another service. 

With both free basic and subscription-based premium plans, Sender is an affordable solution to help you create impactful popup campaigns for your website. 

3. HubSpot

HubSpot has an extensive range of features, one of which is its free WordPress plugin which comes with many marketing tools designed to help you get the most out of your website. It can help you create popup forms, build newsletters and track campaign performance, and it comes with its own built-in CRM to make it easy for you to manage your marketing communications. 

As a top tool for building and maintaining leads, HubSpot is a trusted and recognizable tool that can help website owners achieve a number of goals.

4. TrustPulse

TrustPulse was developed by the same minds that created OptinMonster, so you can feel confident knowing this is going to be a useful tool for your website. 

One of its top features is its real-time tracking feature, which can help you display your popups during different points of the customer journey, helping you maximize their effectiveness. Its advanced targeting features make it an effective plugin that will help you achieve various goals. 

Like most plugins, it has both free and paid-for options, with the premium plan featuring additional features, including more detailed targeting features, customer support and more.

5. Hello Bar

Hello Bar is a simple but highly effective WordPress pop-up plugin that comes with some amazing features to help you introduce popups to your site with ease. It has a range of templates to choose from, as well as customizable options for you to create your ideal popups without code.

Advanced targeting is one of Hello Bar’s key selling points, allowing website owners to target their messaging according to device, location, visit, page and many other demographics – ideal for maximum effectiveness. Used by a number of high-profile websites, including Eventbrite and Salesforce, it caters for both large and small websites, and claims to be able to convert 83% more of your leads.

To unlock Hello Bar’s best features, you’ll need to pay a subscription charge, although the free version does contain some basic targeting features to help you work out if it’s the right tool for you.

6. Icegram

Icegram is a very popular WP plugin to help you achieve different goals without the need for coding. From growing traffic to boosting your subscribers, Icegram has features that will improve lead generation, and increase your conversion rate too.

It contains four main types of form builders, including CTA messages and ‘toast’ notifications – designed to help you make on-page announcements or display reminders. Its detailed targeting functions make it easy to display your messages at different points of the user journey, and target your desired audience. It even has a built-in headline generator to make it easy for you to create some impactful campaigns.

As with other popup plugins, there are both free and paid-for versions which come with different features, so it’s worth exploring the free version of Icegram to see how it can give your website a boost.

7. Popup Maker

Popup Maker is another popular tool thanks to its easy-to-use interface and ability to create a range of popup content types including popups, slide-ins and more. It can help website owners create campaigns designed to achieve maximum impact, and integrates with email marketing services to make it easy for you to manage your CRM and use your data effectively.

With various targeting features, Popup Maker allows some impressive options for reaching your target goals, including trigger options for different stages of the customer journey.

The free version of Popup Maker includes many features that users will love, but for analytics, you’re going to need to sign up for the premium plan.

8. Elementor’s Popup Builder

Elementor claims to be the number one WordPress pop-up plugin, allowing users to create popup campaigns easily using its no-code drag-and-drop editor. Elementor is incredibly easy to use, integrating with WordPress without the fuss, allowing users to begin using it immediately.

Precise targeting and full conversion tools are some of Elementor’s most attractive features, while the creator itself makes it simple to create some visually appealing communications that will connect with your audience. 

Elementor’s free plugin comes with one year of technical support, which can be a useful addition to those just starting out with WordPress pop-up plugins. There is also a paid-for plan that comes with unlimited support and a range of premium features.

9. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads contains some effective features to help boost your conversions with ease. It is designed to help you plan and execute popup campaigns in a few simple clicks, with a drag-and-drop editor and advanced targeting options making it useful for different objectives. 

The template library includes hundreds of attractive templates that are easy to customize with your own branding, taking the hard work out of popup creation. 

When you sign up for Thrive Leads, you not only get access to its popup plugin, but also other Thrive features, including themes and other plugins designed to make it easy for you to make the most of your website.

10. Popup Domination

Last, but not least on the list is Popup Domination, a fantastic popup plugin for WordPress that combines simple editing with detailed targeting to help you get the most from your campaigns.

Popup Domination has a wide range of built-in templates that can be customized with ease, and is well known for its mobile-friendly features that can allow mobile-only targeting – appealing to your largest user group. Its built-in analytics are also impressive, helping you measure campaign effectiveness, while also offering useful features such as A/B testing.

As with other popular popup plugins, Popup Domination comes with a subscription charge if you want to get the most out of the platform.

Integrating Pop-Ups Without Annoying Users

While popups are incredibly useful for website owners, they can be annoying for those on the receiving end – your users. But fortunately, there are some things you can do to integrate popups successfully without driving users away from your website:

Choose your timing well 

Display popups during moments when they are likely to be the least intrusive. This could be after a user has spent a certain amount of time on your website, or when they scroll to a specific option. Avoid popups when a user first lands on your site to avoid driving them away.

Offer value

Any popups you display on your website should offer some value. This could be a special deal or a discount – something that rewards users for their interaction. This will make a popup more appealing and less intrusive.

Limit their frequency

Avoid having too many popups or having them displayed too frequently during a browning session. This will help keep the user experience positive and avoid popup overload.

Optimize for mobile

Finally, ensure your popups have been designed with mobile-friendliness in mind. They should be easy to see, use and dismiss as necessary by mobile users.

FAQs

Are popups an effective tool for attracting engagement and conversions?

When used correctly, popups can help businesses and website owners achieve a number of goals. For example, if you want to boost your newsletter subscribers or encourage people to make a purchase using a time-limited discount, this is easy to achieve using a popup. With built-in analytics featured in most plugins, you can track and measure your performance easily.

How can I make popups less intrusive?

Make your popups less annoying to users by keeping them simple, and ensuring that timing, frequency and relevance have been taken into account. Make your popup content attractive, and make it easy for users to dismiss them if they’re not interested.

What makes good popup content?

Popups are great content for a variety of actions, including special offers and deals, newsletter subscriptions, event registrations, product recommendations and more. Choose content that aligns with your goals and provides benefits to your users to help maximize your results.

As you can see, using popups as a marketing tool can be an effective way of boosting engagement and conversions for your website. Using WordPress pop-up plugins makes this process fast and simple, with results you can measure easily. Explore suitable WordPress pop-up plugins for your website and enjoy new and exciting ways of reaching your audiences.