Are you looking for an easy way to capture more leads and increase conversion rates on your website? Or maybe you’re just looking for an effective way to boost your email subscribers?
Well, using a WordPress popup plugin is a good way to do this.
But finding the best one for your business can be tricky. You need a popup with advanced detection features, that won’t annoy your customers, and won’t slow down your website.
So we’ll help you by going through 5 of the best WordPress popup plugins. They’ve been chosen based on their quality, ease of use and speed. We’ll give you an honest review of the pros and cons of each of them.
What is a WordPress popup plugin?
Popups are powerful tools that can turn site visitors into subscribers or paying customers.
As we’ve already mentioned, this means you capture more leads and increase your conversation rates.
This is a really easy way to grow your business, and you could say it is an essential marketing tool in the digital world.
It’s also an easy way to highlight specific information, display a call to action, or, just generally, focus the attention of your website viewers.
Some of the things you can use a popup for are:
- Email subscription
- Highlight specific information
- Highlight blog posts or other content
- Log in form
- Subscribe form
- Display call to action
- Offer discounts
- Countdown timers
- Announcements
- Age verification
- Content lock
- Consent forms
- And more
A good WordPress popup plugin also tracks and analyses your website viewers. It can detect when a customer is about to leave your site, for example, and send them a popup with an offer, so you don’t lose a lead (exit intent).
What to consider when picking a popup plugin
The biggest risk to popups is that they can irritate your customers. This can result in a bad customer experience, and risks damaging your brand. So you have to find the perfect balance between subtle and attention-grabbing, which can be hard to do.
You can achieve this by keeping popups minimal (and to a minimum) with only useful information displayed on them, so you don’t overwhelm your visitors.
Your popups also need to be visually appealing. They should look professional and fit in with your brand. You can also use animations or effects like fade in and out, for a more relaxed popup experience.
Other risks to popups are that they can slow down your site’s speed with their tracking features. So you need to make sure you pick a popup that is optimised for performance.
The tracking features also need to be reliable and trustworthy, so you know they are working at the right times. And they should have advanced control features.
But don’t worry, we have considered all of this (and more) when choosing the best WordPress popup plugins for you.
The 5 best WordPress popup plugins
1. Elementor popups
We’re big fans of Elementor at Square Internet. As we’ve previously said, using Elementor to build your WordPress website means fewer plugins are needed. So instead of having loads of plugins clogging up your website, Elementor comes with built-in widgets and tools that have everything you need.
Well, one of the tools that Elementor Pro comes with is Elementor popups, and it’s pretty great.
This is the simplest and fastest WordPress popup plugin, with a wide range of functions and customisation options. And if you already have Elementor Pro, then you don’t need to download anything else.
Instead of being a widget, a separate tool brings up a separate page builder/ template. So you press [control] and [e] to search for it in the Elementor menu, or you can find it under templates in your WordPress dashboard. You then get taken to the popup menu, where you can choose from hundreds of pre-made templates, or start from scratch.
The reason they make their popups separate from the widgets is that your popup becomes a mini page. So then you can completely customise your popup however you would like, and add any widgets to it (such as text, image, call to action, form) in the same way as your would on an Elementor page.
If you’re already familiar with Elementor, then this will be a breeze. And if you’re not, well, it’ll still be super easy to get the hang of. The drag and drop builder and clean interface means that Elementor is incredibly user friendly. And you won’t need any code or development experience to use it at all.
You can create a variety of popups with Elementor, such as email subscriptions, login forms, content locks & upgrades, promotions & sales, countdown timers (for time-sensitive offers), and more.
The popup offers countless customisation options. You can basically do absolutely anything with it, as all of the Elementor tools and widgets are at your disposal. But, don’t get carried away. Remember to keep it minimal, so you don’t overwhelm your customers.
For example, if you want to add email submissions, you can use the form submission widget and add it to your pop-up. There is then a specific submissions section of your Elementor account where you will be able to see them.
Elementor also has conditions, triggers and advanced rules to choose from (such as exit intent). So, your popup will only show based on what you select, giving you full control.
This also isn’t a plugin that will slow your website down at all. As we’ve said before, this comes built into Elementor pro. So you’ll get this, and much more, in the space of just one powerful plugin.
It doesn’t have analytics or A/B testing, which could be a con for some. However, Elementor Pro connects to google analytics, HubSpot and other 3rd party integrations, so this is easily remedied.
Features:
- Easy to use
- Drag & drop builder
- Built into Elementor Pro
- Entrance & exit animation
- Responsive/ mobile-friendly
- Conditions, triggers and rules
- Fully customisable
- Optimised for speed
- SEO friendly
- Integrates with Google analytics
- Integrate CRM tools (like HubSpot and Mailchimp)
- And more
Price: Elementor Pro is $49 per year for 1 website.
2. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is another easy to use popup plugin that is optimised for performance and has lots of features. With over 1 million active installations, it is one of the most popular WordPress popup plugins.
The interface is really clean and simple, and, like Elementor, gives you different layouts and templates to choose from (you can choose from popups, floating notification bars, countdown timers, content lockers, fullscreen welcome mats, and slide-in scroll boxes).
What we like about OptinMonster especially is that it has everything you need, built into one account. So you have all of your targeting and customisation features, alongside its tracking and conversion analytics.
We also really like the rule builder, where you can set rules and triggers in And / Or layout blocks. This keeps the controls of your popup really organised and easy to manage.
You can also create a coupon wheel (gamified discount) with OptinMonster, which is a pretty cool tool. This is a popup that allows your customers to spin a wheel full of offers. The winning rewards players with a rush of dopamine, making them feel great, which increases conversations.
OptinMoster is also fully responsive and fast. It loads asynchronously so it doesn’t slow down your perceived page load speed.
And it’s customisable, needing absolutely no coding or development experience. Although it doesn’t have quite as many customisation options as Elementor Pro, you might choose OptinMonster if you want in-built conversion analytics and the option of a discount wheel.
Features:
- Easy to use
- Drag and drop interface
- Conditions, triggers, rules
- And/Or rule based
- Exit intent and other triggers
- Powerful targeting
- A/B split testing
- Conversion analytics
- 100+ pre-made templates
- 26 animation/sound effects
- Responsive/mobile friendly
- SEO friendly
- Integrates with lots of email marketing services
- Integrates with Google analytics
- And more
Price: from $9 per month
3. HubSpot’s Free Popup Tool
HubSpot is a powerful CRM system offering a huge amount of marketing, sales and service tools. You might have already seen our review of their WordPress chatbot and WordPress calendar, which we thought were both clean and simple and optimised for performance.
Well, HubSpot also offers a free popup tool, in their ‘forms’ tools. And the best thing? If you already have the HubSpot plugin, then you don’t need to download anything else (so it’s not going to slow down your website’s performance).
It’s built into HubSpot’s CRM plugin. So you can capture your leads and store them in your HubSpot database for further organisation and business optimisation. It also has conversion analytics.
The popup itself is extremely simple. So, it might not be what you’re looking for if you’re wanting a popup with loads of customisation or animation options. But if you want a super easy to use and simple popup, and already use HubSpot CRM, then you don’t need anything else.
Its builder is incredibly user friendly and is organised into 3 popup sections. You have your callout section, where you can grab the users attention with an offer etc, a form section, where you can have an email or subscribe form (or link to another page or something else), and a thank you page, where you can thank your customers for completing the form section.
As we said, the customisation options are limited. You can add a featured image, change the text, and change the colours, and that’s about it. But, it’s enough to build a clean and simple popup. They also have a ‘follow up email’ section, which is a nice addition.
Some other cons are that triggers are limited to 50% page scroll, exit intent or an elapsed time of 7 seconds minimum. And you have to go pro for advanced visitor tracking (like device type, session count, days since last visit, etc).
Features:
- Easy to use
- Built into HubSpot CRM plugin
- In-build analytics
- Basic customisation
- Exit intent
- Responsive/ mobile friendly
- SEO friendly
- Email integration
- And more
Price: Free. But you’ll have to upgrade for some advanced features, starting at £38 a month.
4. TrustPulse
TrustPulse is a bit different to the other popups on this list.
Instead of having loads of features and popup options, Trust Pulse specialises in one specific type of popup.
But, this is something that it excels in. What it does is show real-time buyer purchases to your website viewers. It uses geolocation to show a brief description of where the buyer is, and what they are purchasing (which you can customise in the settings).
This uses FOMO (fear of missing out) and social proof to get you more conversions. If customers see that other people are buying your products, then they’re more likely to trust you and want to buy your products too.
None of the other plugins on this list offers this, so it’s perfect if you want this tool for your website (and you can even use it alongside another popup plugin). Or, another option for getting FOMO on your webpage could be to use a countdown timer with a discount offer on your page, using Elementor or OptinMonster.
But if you specifically want a popup that gives your website viewers real-time purchase notifications, then this is the popup for you.
This is great for e-commerce websites, but we know it won’t suit all WordPress businesses.
Features:
- Easy to use
- Real-time tracking
- Geolocation
- Triggers FOMO
- Social proofing
- Smart targeting
- Customisation options
- Fast loading/ asynchronously
- Responsive/ mobile friendly
- Integrated easily with Elementor
- SEO friendly
- And more
Price: From $5 per month.
5. Popup Maker
With 700,000 active installations, Popup Maker is another one of the most popular WordPress popup plugins. You can make a basic popup for free, and it’s really easy to do.
We like the basic interface that blends in perfectly with the WordPress layout, looking similar to the ‘add post’ or ‘add page’ template. Like OptinMonkey, it also has an And/ Or rule builder, making the popup triggers easily organised.
One drawback to Popup Maker is that the popup settings are on one page, and you have to go to a different page/ themes section to change basic customisation (such as text, colours). We’re not sure why they didn’t just include this on the main page.
There are also fewer customisation options than other popup plugins on this list. So although you can make a simple popup without code, you’d probably want to be able to use some CSS for further customisation.
It does, however, have its own subscribers’ section and conversion analytics, which is pretty handy. And there are additional premium features that you can purchase.
Features:
- Easy to use
- Basic customisation
- Basic animation
- Basic triggers
- Exit intent (pro)
- Responsive/ mobile friendly
- SEO friendly
- Analytics (pro)
Price: Free but you have to upgrade to get exit intent, advanced targeting, and more (starting from $87 per year).
What is the best WordPress popup plugin?
In conclusion, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that we choose Elementor popups as the best of the WordPress popup plugins, and the one we recommend the most.
It’s just a great plugin overall. It’s easy to use, fully customisable and optimised for speed and performance.
But if you are wanting something outside of Elementor, OptinMonster is another great choice, and there are some pros and cons to both choices.
Both are solid options for a WordPress popup plugin but OptinMonster will give you more rule options, in-built analytics and the option of a discount wheel. Everything is also controlled on one page, which will make it easier to use for some.
But Elementor popups is the most customisable, visually appealing, and is built into Elementor Pro. Elementor Pro is the best value plugin all-round (and offers so much more than just a popup builder).
