Love them or hate them, popups, especially those that push people to subscribe to your email list, are a digital marketing tactic that is here to stay.
But if you want to dip your toes into the world of popups, you’re going to need a WordPress popup plugin to help you do it.
To help you find the plugin that’s right for your needs, I collected some of the best free and premium popup plugins for WordPress.
Give the list a read, find the tool that looks best for your use and budget, and start seeing if popups can help you more effectively grow your email list or promote other offers on your site!
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a massively popular popup tool from, in part, Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner fame.
It helps you not just create popups on your WordPress site, but also target them in a bunch of beneficial ways.
To create your popups, you can start from one of the many pre-made templates and then customize them using simple drag and drop. You can, of course, also start from a blank canvas – but the templates are pretty good so that’s probably what you’ll use most of the time.
As for the format of your popups, you can choose between:
- Lightbox popup
- Fullscreen welcome mat
- Slide-in scroll box
And OptinMonster also includes a bunch of non-popup campaign types like:
- Inline forms
- Floating bars
- Sidebar forms
- Content lockers
- Countdown timers
To trigger your popups, you have a similarly broad array of options:
- Exit-Intent – displays the popup as a visitor is getting ready to leave your page for another chance to recover the visitor.
- Scroll trigger
- Timed display
- InactivitySensor – displays a popup when a visitor has been inactive for a certain amount of time.
- 2-step opt-ins – displays the popup when your visitor clicks a button.
Beyond the triggers, you also have a ton of different targeting options to make sure you only display popups to the right visitors. You can target popups based on:
- Referrer
- Certain posts/pages
- Geolocation
- Device – helpful for avoiding Google’s mobile popup penalty
- Cookie
- AdBlock usage
As you’d expect, OptinMonster also integrates with most popular email marketing services.
And even though OptinMonster is technically a standalone SaaS, it includes a dedicated WordPress plugin that makes it super simple to use OptinMonster on your WordPress site.
- Price: Starts at $9 per month (billed yearly)
- Where To Get: OptinMonster
2. Popups
What Popups lacks in naming creativity, it makes up for in ease of use and WordPress-specific targeting methods.
While it doesn’t offer as many features as OptinMonster, it’s great for more basic types of popups, has some neat WordPress-specific targeting methods, and it also has the benefit of being free!
With it, you can create popups that display in five different locations.
The popup builder tool isn’t drag and drop, but it’s still pretty simple and easy to use.
Once you choose how your popup will look, you can target it using AND/OR rules and criteria like:
- WordPress user role or logged-in status
- Whether or not a user has left a comment
- Specific posts/pages or categories
- Referrer
- Device
And you can also trigger by:
- Timing
- Scroll depth
- Manual
And the premium version adds additional triggers for:
- Exit-intent
- Specific elements that appear in the viewport
- Price: Free. Premium version starts at $39 for a single site license.
- Where To Get: Free Version | Premium Version
3. Ninja Popups
With over 30,000 sales and a ~4.4-star rating, Ninja Popups is one of the most popular WordPress popup plugins available at Code Canyon.
In addition to a huge array of pre-built templates for a variety of uses, it’s also packed with features like:
- Visual drag and drop popup builder
- 10 different popup positions
- 74 different animation effects
- Anti-adblock technology to get around ad blockers
- A variety of targeting options, like page-level, exit-intent, timing, and more
- In-dashboard statistics
- Content locker for email opt-in or social shares
- A/B testing
- Tons of email marketing service integrations
- Price: $34
- Where To Get: Ninja Popups
4. Popup Maker
Popup Maker is the most popular popup plugin listed at WordPress.org with over 200,000 active installs.
It helps you create a wide variety of popups like:
- Opt-in forms
- Cookie notices
- Slide-outs
- Video lightboxes
- And more
The popup editor tool helps you build your popups using the familiar WordPress interface, though it’s not a drag and drop builder like OptinMonster or Ninja Popups.
As for targeting, Popup Maker sets you up with a bunch of conditions to target specific content on your site, though most of the more advanced targeting options are locked behind a premium add-on.
And you can also choose from plenty of triggers, though once again most of the more advanced triggers are locked behind a paid add-on.
- Price: Free, but some important features are only available in paid add-ons
- Where To Get: Free Version | Premium Extensions
5. Popup Domination
Popup Domination is one of the oldest popup tools out there, which is a big part of why its tagline is “the world famous popup software that Pioneered an Industry.”
And while it has been around for a while, Popup Domination has made plenty of updates to stay competitive.
Not only does it come with a bunch of pre-built popup themes to help you get started, it also includes:
- Analytics so that you can see how your popups are doing
- A/B testing to optimize your popups based on that data
- A bunch of targeting options like exit-intent, on-click, page-level, referrer, device
- All the popular triggers like time, scroll depth, page views, and more
- Google Analytics Event Tracking integration so that you can see your data inside Google Analytics
And beyond those features, Popup Domination also has a unique pricing model in comparison to OptinMonster.
Rather than paying more for additional features, Popup Domination gives you all the features in each plan and only charges you based on how many popup views you have per month.
Depending on your needs, that might work out to be cheaper than OptinMonster.
- Price: Starts at $9 per month for up to 10,000 popup views
- Where To Get: Popup Domination
6. Sumo
The Sumo plugin isn’t just about popups – it’s a whole suite of tools for your WordPress site.
But one of the most popular tools in that bundle is List Builder which, you guessed it, helps you display email opt-in popups on your site.
You can use drag and drop to build your popups using custom images, buttons, and text.
Then, you can trigger your popup with conditions like:
- Exit intent
- Timing
- Scroll depth
And Sumo List Builder also includes A/B testing and analytics so that you can optimize the popups you use on your site.
Sumo List Builder isn’t as flexible in terms of the types of popups that you can create, but if you specifically want to build your email list using popups, it’s a great option.
The only downside is that you’ll need to pay for Sumo Pro if you want to remove the Sumo branding or get access to one-click integrations with most email marketing services.
- Price: Free, though there is a pricey Sumo Pro plan that adds more features starting at $29 per month.
- Where To Get: Free Version | Premium Version
With Great Popup Power Comes Great Responsibility
Now that you know some of the best popup plugins for WordPress, it might be tempting to get out there and start going popup crazy.
But don’t do that…
Ease into popups and make sure to do them in a way that’s as respectful as possible to your readers.
That way, you can build your email list and promote your offers without annoying your audience.
Know any other great WordPress popup plugins? Let us know in the comments so we can all learn something new!
It is very useful information. Thanks for sharing with us.
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