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Which is the Best WordPress Popup Plugin? (Performance + Quality Compared)

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 worst both.

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.

Comparing the best WordPress popup plugins

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 increase the server load and slow 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 make sure that the WordPress popup plugin that you choose actually works with your WordPress hosting environment. A lot of popup plugins are poorly coded, so their advanced features like A/B testing and reporting will not work with most advanced caching solutions that many hosting companies are now using.

The main purpose of using a popup plugins for WordPress is to help you capture leads and boost your email list subscribers.

You need to watch out for the above 3 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 as a criteria to evaluate all popular WordPress popup plugins.

Now 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 be comparing in our guide:

Now let’s take a look at each of them to find out which one is the best WordPress popup plugin to help you grow your website.

1. OptinMonster

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 set of targeting and personalization features. Simply put, it allows you to maximize your conversion potential like a marketing pro.

Features

OptinMonster dashboard

OptinMonster offers the most powerful set of targeting and personalization features in the market. They allow you to create different campaigns including popups, full screen welcome mats, floating bar, scroll boxes, etc.

Their targeting features allow you to target users by page they’re visiting, activity on your site, their geo-location, and literally dozens more.

You can create your own rules to display a popup which makes them more personalized and highly effective.

Below are some of OptinMonster’s most notable features:

  • Beautifully designed non-intrusive lightbox popups
  • Exit-intent popups which are displayed when a user is about to leave your site
  • Powerful targeting options with page level, geo-targeting, on-site retargeting, device based targeting, and more.
  • Adblock detection to display targeted messages to users
  • Device targeting with Mobile-friendly campaigns that look good on smaller devices
  • Trigger popups with exit intent, scrolling, inactivity sensors, time based triggers, and more
  • Dozens of ready-made beautiful popup templates
  • Drag and drop popup maker to easily create popups with your own images, fonts, and style
  • Multiple campaign types such as inline/after post optins, floating notification bar, countdown timers, fullscreen welcome mat, coupon wheel popups, and more.
  • Monster-links popups which trigger a popup by clicking on a link
  • Yes/No popups, two-step popups, and success message customization
  • Integrates with all top email marketing services, contact form plugins, eCommerce platforms, and more.

Looking at all the features, we can confidently say that it is the most comprehensive WordPress popup builder on the market. It has all that you’ll need to instantly grow your email list and boost conversions.

Performance

The biggest advantage of using OptinMonster comes with performance. It is a SaaS application which means that it does not use your WordPress hosting resources.

It loads asynchronously, which means it also does not slow down your perceived page load speed. This is crucial not just for user experience but also for SEO.

Last but not least, 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, choosing colors, images, fonts, with your own text and sign up form.

OptinMonster popup builder

However, if you don’t want to do that, then you’ll find beautiful ready-made popup templates to choose from. Each of these templates 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).

Bonus: WPBeginner users can use our OptinMonster coupon to get 10% Off.

Disclosure: OptinMonster is the popup plugin that we use on WPBeginner. Many popular bloggers and businesses use OptinMonster including the likes of Social Media Examiner, Michael Hyatt, NBA, and more.

WPBeginner’s founder, Syed Balkhi, is the co-founder of OptinMonster. He had this plugin built to help us get more email subscribers. Now he serves as an advisor to the company.

2. TrustPulse

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 FOMO (fear of missing out) effect, and encourages 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.

TrustPulse popup

  • Triggers FOMO – It uses urgency and social proof to trigger FOMO effect (fear of mission out). This encourages users to sign up or complete a purchase.
  • Real-time Tracking – It shows real-time purchases, activity, and signups
  • Smart-targeting – Show social proof popup to the right users at the right time
  • Customize popup – Use the default design or make it your own with easy customization options

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 to setup process. The default social proof popup works with very little modifications.

Creating a popup campaign in TrustPulse

It has an easy to use interface, which allows you to customize popup, set up targeting, view stats, and run customized campaigns on your online store.

Pricing: Free 500 sessions per month and then pricing starts from $4 per month (billed annually).

3. Bloom

Bloom

Bloom is a popular WordPress popup plugin made by Elegant Themes 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.

Bloom user interface

  • Automatic lightbox popup
  • Multiple optin types including sidebar, slide-in, and below post signup forms.
  • Basic post or page level targeting
  • Basic time delay, scroll, form submission triggers
  • Pre-built popup templates with easy customization
  • Integrates with popuplar email service providers

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 by optimizing the code and using WordPress best practices. However, if you have a busy site on 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 simple drag and drop popup maker. Creating new optins with Bloom is straightforward and the user interface is quite easy to figure out.

Choose a popup template in Bloom

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 mebership starting from $89 per year.

4. Sumo

SumoMe

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.

Sumo panel in WordPress dashboard

Features

  • Allows you to create free WordPress popup and opt-in form
  • You can use multiple optin forms
  • Connects with popular email marketing platforms
  • Comes with different styles and templates to use
  • Includes basic A/B testing and stats for your forms

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.

Design your popup with Sumo dashboard

It comes with a bit of a learning curve. The campaign builder is not the easiest but you’ll find your way around. We found it a bit harder to use particularly when it came to integrations and targeting.

5. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is another popular popup plugin for WordPress. It comes with beautiful popup templates and an easy to use popup builder.

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.

Thrive Leads

  • Multiple optin types including lightbox popup, inline forms, 2-step optin, slide in forms, and more
  • Simple drag and drop editor to customize sign up forms
  • Basic A/B testing and analytics for your forms
  • Page level targeting including categories, tags, post types, and more
  • Works with all popular email services
  • Mobile friendly popups for small devices

Performance

Thrive Leads does try to balance out performance and features. However, it is still slower than some other solutions on our list.

It is a standalone WordPress plugin, which means all the code resides on your WordPress site and utilizes your hosting resources.

This also means that like Bloom, 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 straight-forward 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.

Thrive Leads builder interface

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 $67 per year for a single site license.

Performance Comparison of Top WordPress Popup Plugins

For this article, we decided to actually try each WordPress popup plugin and test their 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 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
Bloom 1.23s 22 188.8KB
Sumo 1.24s 41 575.5KB
Thrive Leads 1.38s 26 736.4KB

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, best WordPress form plugins, custom HTML forms, and more.

Showing your popups at the right time to 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.

We hope this article helped you pick the best WordPress popup plugin for your website. You may also want to see our article on tested and easy ways to grow your email list.

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The post Which is the Best WordPress Popup Plugin? (Performance + Quality Compared) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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