How to create popup in WordPress – I think this is one of the most difficult posts I’ve written in a long time, since I wanted to be as neutral as possible.
Normally I create WordPress popups with Elementor Pro as I use Elementor as a pagebuilder on my websites.
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How to create popup in WordPress
But in this post, I am going to try to be as clear as possible and speak from a neutral point of view.
Ideally, if you use a pagebuilder in your WordPress and it has the functionality to create popups, you should use them instead of uploading extra Javascript scripts.
That said, let’s get into the subject so you can see how to create popup in WordPress.
What is a popup or pop-up window?
First of all, I want to explain to you in my own words what popups are.
Pop-ups that load websites are frowned upon in some quarters and should not be overused.
In certain sectors they are used in an erroneous way, hindering the UX (user experience) and completely damaging the user’s opinion of our website.
An emerging window or popup should never be invasive and should allow the user to navigate through the website in question.
From a digital marketing point of view, popups are often used to capture the visitor’s email with a lead magnet or simply asking for a newsletter subscription.
With a good WordPress popup plugin we can avoid being invasive, achieve our goal, and not damage the visitor’s UX.
There is an unwritten rule: only skip a single popup at a time to visitors.
Another issue is how popups affect the WPO and the loading speed of the web. As I always say, if we trust what Google PageSpeed or Core Web Vitals tells us , the first element we take out of the web are popups, because their javascript usually has a significant impact on performance.
Types of popups or emerging windows
Popups are used for multiple things within the UX of a website, but there are many types of popups.
We can classify the types of popups based on how they jump:
- Popups that jump when entering.
- Popups that jump on exit.
- Popups that jump after a certain time or when the user performs an action.
But we can also classify them based on where they jump:
- Top bar.
- Bottom bar.
- Center popup.
- Bottom side popup.
- Full size popup.
These are just examples. The line is very fine and we can mix different types of popups to achieve our goal without being too aggressive.
Best Free WordPress Popup Plugins
Over the years, there have been tons of plugins to create and manage popups on a WordPress website.
In the field of popups, it has happened as in the field of sliders, in 10 years we have seen plugins of “all colors”.
I have seen good plugins like Popup Maker or OptinMonster and I have seen very bad plugins like Thrive Leads.
In fact, there is no perfect pop-up plugin, but you should use the one that best suits your needs. If you just need a simple popup, as I told you before, you can use the functionality of your pagebuilder.
In case your pagebuilder or theme does not have this functionality, now we are going to talk about some popup plugins for WordPress.
Popup Maker for WordPress
Popup Maker is one of the best popup plugins for WordPress and also one of the most used. Although personally, it is not one of the ones that I like the most, I am aware that it is one of the ones that offer the most for free.
The Popup Maker editor doesn’t quite convince me, although the features it offers aren’t bad at all considering that it’s a free plugin.
Popup Maker allows us to create simple popups, both informative and lead capture.
It has few triggers, although it has quite a few options to act based on user behavior:
In the display conditions we also have many options and even exclusion for mobile devices and tablets:
And one of the advantages of Popup Maker is that the design part is almost done:
The negative part is that we cannot customize the appearance of the preconfigured popups as much as with other plugins, since it is also difficult to adjust everything with the unintuitive interface that it has.
As I said, Popup Maker has a lot of options for a free plugin. However, creating a popup with this plugin may not be as intuitive and easy as with other solutions, such as Elementor Pro popups.
Obviously, there is also a paid version of Popup Maker that adds a lot of interesting features, but I think there are much better alternatives.
If you want more information about Popup Maker for WordPress, you can find it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/popup-maker/
OptinMonster for WordPress
We cannot talk about the best WordPress popup plugins and not mention OptinMonster, as it is one of the most well-known plugins for capturing leads and implementing lead magnets.
The paid version of OptinMonster has tons of features and is a true lead magnet implementation suite. The free version that is in the repository allows us to create popups or emerging windows with very good results.
One of the problems with OptinMonster is that we must create an account, even if it is free, since part of the service is a SaaS:
OptinMonster allows you to create all kinds of popups or emerging windows , it even brings us preconfigured templates to be able to use them directly.
OptinMonster is very focused on collecting the visitor’s email and that’s why it has integrations with many email marketing providers:
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Like I said, OptinMonster is VERY powerful, but many features are not available in the free version and we need the paid one:
Still, OptinMonster is a great option for both informational popups and popups where visitors leave us their emails.
The free version or Popup Builder of OptinMonster can be found in the official WordPress repository: https://wordpress.org/plugins/optinmonster/
Elementor Popups
As I said at the beginning of the post, I am an intensive user of Elementor Pro.
When using Elementor Pro, I always use the Elementor popups, but I’ve been doing this for many years and that’s why I’m also used to using other solutions (plugins).
The good thing about Elementor, when it comes to shaping popups, is that you can use the pagebuilder for the appearance:
In display conditionals, you can use the full power of the Elementor Pro Theme Builder:
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On top of that, Elementor Pro gives us a lot more options, making it a pretty complete popup system:
As I mentioned, if you don’t use Elementor there is no point in installing it just to use its popup system.
Of all the popup or popup systems that I have seen in pagebuilders, Elementor is one of the most powerful. https://wordpress.org/plugins/elementor/
Other WordPress Popup Plugins
So far we have mentioned 3 options to implement popups in WordPress, but there are many more.
Before finishing the post I want to do a little analysis of how the ecosystem is right now.
I want to clarify that I believe that popups are essential for certain digital marketing strategies and that, when used properly, they do not harm the experience of visitors when browsing the website.
Popup Maker accumulates more than 700,000 active installations and the free version of OptinMonster more than 1 million, but there are many more options and more and more appear all the time.
Of the new plugins that have appeared lately for WordPress popups, I love Brave Popup Builder (paid version).
I also really like an Elegant Themes classic, Bloom, which has survived a totally unfair fork a few years ago called Rapidology.
Apart from these, there are hundreds of plugins to create and manage WordPress popups, but they come and go.
Going back to the beginning, I cannot “impose” on you which are the best WordPress popup plugins . You have to choose a plugin that meets your needs and has updates; the rest, it doesn’t matter.