Are you looking for the best WordPress popup plugin?
A good WordPress popup plugin helps you convert website visitors into email subscribers and paying customers.
There are dozens of WordPress popup plugins that can help you improve conversion rates.
However, most of them will either slow down your website, offer inaccurate statistics, or worse.
In this article, we’ll compare the most popular WordPress popup plugins on the market, so you can see which is the best WordPress popup plugin.
3 Things to Watch Out for with WordPress Popup Plugins
Popups need to be used carefully. Poorly made WordPress popups can easily become annoying and ruin the user experience along with your brand’s reputation.
You need to pick a solution that offers proper behavior interaction, targeting, and personalization features, so you can offer the best user experience while ensuring maximum conversions.
Performance is another issue with most WordPress popup plugins. Since many WordPress popup plugins use WordPress to track analytics, this significantly increases the server load and slows down your website.
As you already know, a slow page speed negatively affects your SEO rankings.
This is why you need a WordPress popup plugin that offers powerful conversion features without slowing down your site.
Last but not least, you need to ensure that the WordPress popup plugin you choose actually works with your WordPress hosting environment.
Many popup plugins are poorly coded, so their advanced features, like A/B testing and reporting, will not work with the most advanced caching solutions that many hosting companies are now using.
The main purpose of using popup plugins for WordPress is to help you capture leads and boost your email list subscribers.
You need to watch out for the above three things when choosing the WordPress popup plugin for your website or online store.
Contenders for the Best WordPress Popup Plugins
Now that you know the common problems with most WordPress popup builders, you can use it to evaluate all popular WordPress popup plugins.
Since there are dozens of popup plugins, this process can be rather time-consuming. That’s why we did the research for you.
Here are the best WordPress popup plugins that we will compare below:
Without any further delay, let’s look at each of them to find out the best WordPress popup plugin to help you grow your website.
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the most popular lead generation software on the market. It allows you to easily convert website visitors into subscribers and customers.
It comes with a powerful WordPress popup builder and the most comprehensive targeting and personalization features. Simply put, it allows you to maximize your conversion potential like a marketing pro.
Features
OptinMonster offers the most powerful set of targeting and personalization features in the market. They allow you to create different campaigns, including popups, fullscreen welcome mats, floating bars, scroll boxes, etc.
Their targeting features allow you to target users by the page they’re visiting, activity on your site, geo-location, and dozens more.
You can create your own rules to display a popup, making them more personalized and highly effective.
Below are some of OptinMonster’s most notable features:
Looking at all the features, we can confidently say that it is the most comprehensive WordPress popup builder on the market. It has all you’ll need to grow your email list and instantly boost conversions.
Performance
The biggest advantage of using OptinMonster comes with performance. It is a SaaS application that does not use your WordPress hosting resources.
It loads asynchronously and does not slow down your perceived page load speed. This is crucial not just for user experience but also for SEO.
Lastly, since OptinMonster doesn’t use WordPress to store analytics, your stats will be the most accurate, and it will work with any hosting environment.
Ease of Use
OptinMonster comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop popup builder. You can simply design your own popups by adding a background and choosing colors, images, and fonts, with your text and sign-up form.
However, if you don’t want to do that, you’ll find beautiful ready-made popup templates. Each template is fully customizable using a simple point-and-click editor.
Adding popups to your website is also very easy. You don’t need to edit any WordPress files or add code to your website. You can simply install their WordPress connector plugin.
Pricing: Starting from $9 per month (billed annually).
2. TrustPulse
TrustPulse is a WordPress popup plugin that uses social proof to help you boost conversions on your website.
It shows social-proof notifications on your website to help build user trust, trigger the FOMO (fear of missing out) effect, and encourage more users to signup or make a purchase.
Features
TrustPulse helps you instantly win user trust by sharing social proof using less-intrusive but highly effective popups. Here are some of the features that make it unique among our list of best WordPress popup plugins.
Performance
If you run an eCommerce business, then speed is crucial for more sales on your website. TrustPulse does not affect your page load speed and improves the user experience at the same time.
It is a SaaS app and does not use your WordPress hosting resources. All the code used to display popups loads asynchronously from the cloud servers.
Ease of Use
TrustPulse comes with an insanely easy setup process. The default social proof popup works with very few modifications.
It has an easy-to-use interface, which allows you to customize popups, set up targeting, view stats, and run customized campaigns on your online store.
Pricing: Free 500 sessions per month, and then pricing starts from $5 per month (billed annually).
3. Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is another popular popup plugin for WordPress, used by over 114,000+ website owners. It comes with beautiful popup templates and an easy-to-use popup builder.
There are also advanced targeting features that allow you to show more personalized offers to visitors based on posts, categories, tags, and more.
Features
Thrive Leads is designed to help you capture leads on your WordPress site and grow your email list. Here is a quick overview of its features.
Performance
Thrive Leads does try to balance out performance and features. However, it is still a bit slower than other solutions, like OptinMonster.
It is a standalone WordPress plugin, which means all the code resides on your WordPress site and utilizes your hosting resources.
This means that features like reporting and A/B tests may not work properly on certain hosting companies or with popular caching plugins.
Ease of Use
Thrive Leads is pretty straightforward to use and comes with multiple templates. It also comes with a basic popup maker with drag-and-drop functionality to customize your popup form.
There is a slight learning curve involved in displaying optins on your website. Many beginners would struggle a bit when setting up a popup.
You’ll see different options for Lead Groups, Lead Shortcodes, Thrive Boxes, and other features without much explanation. This means users will have to explore them to learn what they do.
Pricing: Starting from $99 per year for a single site license.
4. Bloom
Bloom is a popular WordPress popup plugin made by Elegant Themes, which is one of the oldest commercial WordPress theme shops.
Available, as a standalone WordPress plugin, Bloom provides an easy-to-use WordPress popup maker for bloggers.
Features
Bloom comes with a decent set of features covering the basic requirements you would need from a good WordPress popup plugin.
Performance
Bloom comes as a stand-alone WordPress plugin, which means it loads all the code from your WordPress site. This means it uses your server resources and affects your page load time.
It tries to mitigate this by optimizing the code and using WordPress best practices. However, if you have a busy site with limited server resources, then this will slow down website performance.
Based on your WordPress caching plugin settings, reporting stats and features like A/B testing might misbehave.
Ease of Use
Bloom is extremely easy to use with a simple drag-and-drop popup maker. Creating new options with Bloom is straightforward, and the user interface is quite easy to figure out.
The trouble comes in when you are configuring display settings. There are too many options to choose from, which makes the user interface a bit confusing.
Pricing: Comes with Elegant Themes membership starting from $89 per year.
5. Sumo
Sumo is a free popup plugin for WordPress which allows you to add popups to your website. They offer a premium version which offers more options.
Features
The free version is limited in features and adds Sumo branding to your popups.
Performance
Sumo loads code asynchronously, which reduces the impact on performance. Depending on your campaign design, the effect on performance may vary.
Ease of Use
Sumo integrates with your WordPress site. However, you’ll need to manage your account from their website and use the Sumo dashboard to design your campaigns.
It comes with a bit of a learning curve. The campaign builder is not the easiest, but you’ll find your way around it. We found it a bit harder to use particularly when it came to integrations and targeting.
Performance Comparison of Top WordPress Popup Plugins
For this article, we decided to actually try each WordPress popup plugin and test the impact on a website’s performance and speed.
Basically, we created a demo website and used the default settings of each plugin to create a basic WordPress popup. After that, we used Pingdom to test the page load speed.
Following are the results of our tests.
| Popup Plugin | Page Load time | Requests | Page size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OptinMonster | 1.03s | 17 | 225KB | |
| TrustPulse | 894ms | 14 | 130KB | |
| Thrive Leads | 1.23s | 17 | 170KB | |
| Bloom | 1.23s | 22 | 188.8KB | |
| Sumo | 1.24s | 41 |
|
In our results, we found OptinMonster to be the fastest WordPress popup plugin with the least effect on performance.
Conclusion: Which is The Best WordPress Popup Plugin?
Considering the criteria we set up, OptinMonster comes up as the best WordPress popup plugin. It is the fastest popup builder and comes with incredible tools to boost conversion rates.
It is also the easiest to use, with beautiful popup templates and a powerful drag-and-drop editor. It works with all popular CRMs, email marketing platforms, the best WordPress form plugins, custom HTML forms, and more.
Showing your popups at the right time to the right users is what makes them more effective. OptinMonster includes powerful page-level targeting options, personalization, and event-based triggers.
If you are running an eCommerce store, then we would recommend OptinMonster + TrustPulse. This allows you to maximize conversions with social proof and OptinMonster’s powerful cart abandonment features.
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