If you want to market more effectively, offer better customer support, or just better connect with your visitors, a floating action button is a versatile tool to have in your toolkit.
A floating action button does what the name says – it “floats” somewhere on your site, usually in the bottom-right corner. You can then make it perform different actions such as:
- Starting a phone call
- Sending an email or a chat message via different services
- Sharing on social media
- Opening a page on your site or linking to an external site
- Etc.
Buttonizer is a freemium WordPress plugin that helps you implement flexible floating action buttons on WordPress. You’ll be able to choose from a huge array of actions, create button groups to offer multiple buttons at once, target and trigger your buttons by different conditions, plus more.
In our hands-on Buttonizer review, we’ll take a detailed look at Buttonizer and what it can do.
Buttonizer Review: What Does the Plugin Do?
First off, Buttonizer comes with a huge array of actions for your buttons:
- Go to URL – send users to any internal or external URL.
- Place a phone call – call a number (great for mobile visitors).
- Send an email – send an email.
- Start a chat – start a chat on SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Twitter DM, LINE, Viber, Telegram, or WeChat.
- Share on social media – supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, VKontakte, and Waze.
- Open a popup – open a popup from popular plugins including Elementor Popup Builder, Poptin, Popup Maker, or Popups. You can include any content in the popup (such as a contact form, survey, or email opt-in form).
- Perform actions – copy URL to clipboard, print the page, go to top or bottom of page, go back one page.
- Custom JavaScript function – run your own custom JavaScript function.
You can either create individual buttons. Or, with the Pro version, you can create groups of buttons that expand when clicked. You can also create unlimited buttons and use targeting rules to use different buttons in different situations.
For each button, you’ll be able to fully customize the colors, icons, etc.
You’ll also get detailed targeting rules. You can target by:
- WordPress content
- User device (e.g. only show the “call” button to mobile visitors)
- WordPress user role
You can also only show your buttons during certain times of day, which is great if your business has set operating hours.
Beyond that, you can control when to make your buttons appear using triggers such as:
- Time on page
- Scroll depth
- Exit intent
Finally, Buttonizer includes a Google Analytics Event tracking integration that lets you track engagement in Google Analytics, which is super cool. You’ll be able to track exactly which buttons get clicked. If you combine this with Google Analytics Goals, you’ll also be able to track conversion rates. For example, you could track what percentage of visitors click on your “Call Us” button.
Keep reading for a hands-on look that shows these features in more detail.
Buttonizer Pricing
Buttonizer has a free version at WordPress.org that you can get started with.
By itself, the free version is already pretty useful. It lets you create unlimited floating action buttons with almost all of the button options.
However, the Pro version adds most of the advanced features when it comes to:
- Targeting rules
- Trigger rules
- Custom messages
- Analytics
- Animations
You also need the Pro version to create button groups, which are another especially useful feature (more on button groups later on).
You can view a detailed comparison of the free vs Pro features at the bottom of the pricing page.
Buttonizer offers three different pricing tiers – the only difference is the number of sites you can use the plugin on. For the cheapest two tiers, there’s a one-year and lifetime license option, while the agency plan only offers a one-year license:
- 1 site – $15 for a one-year license or $59 for a lifetime license
- 10 site – $89 for a one-year license or $269 for a lifetime license
- 1,000 sites (essentially unlimited) – $149 for a one-year license
How to Use the Buttonizer Plugin for WordPress
Note – I’m using the premium version for this section, though you’ll get the same basic interface and features in the free version at WordPress.org.
Buttonizer is super easy to use thanks to its visual interface. Rather than trying to fit inside the back-end WordPress dashboard, the entire Buttonizer interface uses a real-time preview.
It’s basically like the WordPress theme customizer – you’ll see a live preview of your website on the right and then you can configure your buttons using the sidebar on the left.
Buttons vs Button Groups
Buttonizer gives you two different “levels” of buttons:
- Buttons – free – this is a single button that does one thing.
- Groups – paid – this is a collection of one or more buttons that are grouped together.
With a single button, the button is visible right away. Visitors just need to click it to perform the desired action.
Here’s an example with a “call now” button – visitors just click it to place a call:
With a button group, you can add multiple buttons inside the single floating button.
Visitors will first see a button with a plus sign (or, you can choose your own custom icon):
When they click that icon, it will expand to show all of the buttons in the button group (you can choose different layouts for the expanded buttons):
I think button groups are a neat feature for quickly giving your visitors access to all the most important content on your site. From one unobtrusive (but noticeable) button, you can quickly highlight:
- Customer service options
- Sales routes
- Promotions
- Your blog
- Etc.
Again, the free version lets you create unlimited buttons. However, you need the premium version to create button groups.
Button Actions
When you add a button, the first thing you’ll want to do is choose the button action.
Again, you can choose from the huge list that I mentioned earlier:
Once you choose an action, you’ll see some settings that apply to that specific action. For example, if you choose the WhatsApp Chat action, you’ll be able to enter the WhatsApp number to send the message to as well as the default message:
You can also optionally add a label, which is the small bit of text that appears next to the button in the screenshots above.
Button Style, Icons, and Animations
You can set button styles at both the button and the group level.
If you opt to set styles at the group level, the individual buttons will inherit those styles by default, though you’ll still get options for customizing each button (such as adding a label or changing the icon).
In the Style tab, you can:
- Choose colors (or use an image for your button background)
- Choose and customize the icon (or use an image instead of an icon). You can choose any icon from the Font Awesome library.
- Customize the label size and style.
For example, to change the icon, all you need to do is click the Select Icon box to open the icon picker:
For button groups, you’ll also be able to choose different menu styles and animations:
- Menu Style – change the layout of individual buttons in that group.
- Animation – add animations when the button appears. You can also repeat these animations on a certain time delay, which helps you draw attention to the button.
For example, here’s what a different layout looks like:
If you’d prefer to use a different button approach, Buttonizer also includes two menu styles that offer a more “traditional” type of button:
- Text w/ icon
- Text only
With these menu styles, Buttonizer includes the button label inside the button instead of floating to the side like some of the examples that you saw above.
Here’s an example of the Text w/ icon layout:
The Text only layout is almost exactly the same – it just doesn’t include the icon.
Targeting Rules
To help you make sure the right people see your buttons, Buttonizer comes with detailed targeting rules. You’ll be able to target by:
- Device – show/hide buttons on mobile or desktop.
- Content – you get detailed rules to target specific pages, categories, content types, etc.
- User roles – only show buttons to certain WordPress user roles.
What’s neat is that you can set these at both the button and the group level. For example, you could hide the “Call Now” button for desktop users without affecting the other buttons in the group.
To target content and user roles, you’ll set up what are called page rules.
In the page rules interface, you’ll be able to build your rules using a detailed set of and/or conditions, which lets you mix-and-match them as needed:
For example, you could both target certain types of content and certain user roles at the same time.
Scheduling Rules
Another flexible setting for controlling your buttons is time scheduling. One situation where this is useful is if your business has set hours. You could display a “Call Now” button during your hours and an “Email” button when you’re closed.
You can create unlimited time schedules and apply them as needed. For each time schedule, you’ll be able to add daily hours and also exclude certain dates, such as holidays:
As with the other targeting rules, you can set this at both the group and button level.
Trigger Rules
To help you control when your floating action button appears, Buttonizer includes multiple trigger rules, just like you might get with a popup plugin.
The default behavior is to permanently show the button, but you can also choose to trigger your button by the following options:
- Time on page – the button will appear after the visitor has been on the page for X seconds.
- Show on scroll – the button will appear after a visitor scrolls down X px or X percent of the page.
- Exit intent – you can trigger the button either when a visitor is about to leave the page (traditional exit intent) or when a visitor has been inactive for two minutes.
You can set up these triggers from the Advanced tab of the settings:
Final Thoughts on Buttonizer
Overall, I think that Buttonizer is a really useful tool.
Because it gives you so many different button actions and configuration options, I think that virtually any type of WordPress site could benefit.
For example, you can use it for:
- Sales
- Lead generation
- Customer support
- Marketing
- Engagement
- Content promotion
You can play around with it using the free version at WordPress.org. However, I think the button groups feature alone is worth upgrading to the Pro version.
At just $15 for use on a single site, it’s one of the cheapest plugins that you’ll find. Plus, you’ll also get access to the detailed targeting and trigger rules, which open up even more flexibility.
One Response
Thanks for the great review Colin!