7 Best Popup Plugins For WordPress To Grow Your List + More

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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.
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Love them or hate them, popups, especially those that push people to subscribe to your email list or to use a promo code, 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 popup plugin to help you do it.

To help you find the plugin that’s right for your needs, I gathered 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!

Elementor Popups

The team at Elementor built one of the most robust Popup Builders around, included in Elementor Pro, that offers an all-in-one solution for designing and managing popups in WordPress. Popups are the best way to get leads, conversions and sales. Just because most popups are ugly, doesn’t mean yours have to be the same!

Build Popups in the same place you build your website, so your site design remains consistent and you are able to get more conversions. We do this ourselves on WP Mayor and have found it incredibly easy to use.

This solution enables you to create all types of popups:

  • Fly In
  • Full Screen
  • Hello Bar
  • Bottom Bar
  • Classic
  • Slide-in
  • …and more.

You can use the popups in many ways too, including:

  • Email subscriptions to gather new leads
  • Login forms for your users to log in without leaving the current page
  • Promotion and sale banners
  • Content lock and upgrades for premium content or age restrictions
  • Notify site visitors about maintenance, news or updates that are important
  • Create a full-screen “welcome mat” for people the second they land on your site
  • …and much more.

You get the power of Elementor to create the popups that you need. You may even show popups on pages that are not built using Elementor. That’s right, all you need is to have Elementor Pro installed & activated on your site and you can use the full power of Elementor Popups.

MailOptin

MailOptin is a popular list building tool that can help you grow your email lists in a lot of different ways, including popups. You can also create other types of optins such as slide-ins, notification bar, sidebar and widget forms and lots more.

To create your forms, you’ll choose from the included templates and then customize your opt-in using the real-time WordPress Customizer (yes – the same type of interface that you use when you customize your WordPress theme).

There are many display triggers available which you can take advantage of to show your popup, such as:

  • Exit-intent
  • Click
  • Scroll depth
  • Number of page views
  • Time on site
  • Adblock usage
  • Referral detection
  • Device detection
  • New vs returning visitors

MailOptin integrates with all the popular email marketing services including Mailchimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, Drip, Constant Contact, and ConvertKit.

MailOptin stores all of your leads in an in-dashboard “lead bank”. And it can also help you set up email automation in conjunction with your third-party email marketing service. For example, you can have MailOptin send out new emails via Mailchimp whenever you publish new content. 

Ninja Popups

ninja popups example

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

Popup Maker

popup maker interface

Popup Maker is the most popular popup plugin listed at WordPress.org with over 300,000 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.

Popup Domination

popup domination example

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.

Sumo

sumo list builder

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.

Pick the Best Popup Plugin for Your WordPress Site

With great popup power comes great responsibility. Keep that in mind.

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 you should be careful…

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!

Colin Newcomer

Colin has been using WordPress for over a decade and is on a quest to test all 60,000+ plugins at WordPress.org. He has been a Writer and Product Review Expert for WP Mayor since 2017, testing well over 150 products and services throughout that time.

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4 Responses

  1. Hi
    I must admit that I am no big fan of Popups at all. I now it might be a great way to build a good mail list, but to be honest I always shut the down right away. Sometimes I even leve the site if that is first thing that hits me. I find it very annoying. If the contest is good enough and I want to follow a site, I will sign up anyway.

  2. At the moment there are a lot of pop-up plugins for WordPress.
    I tried dozens of them. But in terms of functionality, this one fits me better:
    Ninja Popups – I also advise, quite a convenient plugin.

  3. Extremely an exceptionally extraordinary rundown of WordPress related asset. I know sure of them,but some new ones I never knew about.its a very deployable popup plugins.

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