If you’re in the market for a good WordPress pop-up plugin, you will soon find out that there are many alternatives you can choose from. Each of these plugins will offer you various different features and pricing. It can be a confusing task if you don’t know what you are looking for, so here we will discuss it in details. You can read the gist of what’s important to consider and we will explain why it is so.
Furthermore, we will cover each of these important points in our individual pop-up plugin reviews.
Ease of Use and Installation
This of course is an important consideration for any software, including WordPress plugins.
A plugin with good interface and usability will save you a lot of headaches and can get your pop-up system running quickly, allowing you to tweak and test as needed.
Installation and set-up method should be taken into account as well. There are various different ways for plugins to work with your theme and website in general, some have a simple one-click function that does everything, while others need you to modify your theme files (which can be difficult for those not familiar with WordPress). Our reviews will take a good look at this, and we will highly recommend those easiest to set-up.
Support and Documentation
No good software is complete without a good documentation. Ideally, a plugin’s documentation should be able to answer basic questions about how to get it to work, how to customize it to your needs, how to remove it safely, and also how to troubleshoot problems that might occur. A good documentation can also be helpful if you want to hire developers to tweak the plugin more.
Support is just as important. Plugins, especially paid ones, should have a good support system where you can ask questions and get answers right away. Those that don’t, rank lower in our reviews.
Opt-in e-mail List Support and Compatibility
This is the number one need for a pop-up plugin, so we will review it extensively. At minimum, a good pop-up plugin should have a good support for the most widely used membership system, Aweber. Better points will be awarded for those that support others, such as GetResponse and DirectResponders. Aside from the number of membership and auto-responder systems it supports, we will also take into consideration how easy it is to integrate with.
Custom Pop-up Contents
A complete pop-up plugin will not only support opt-in e-mail list, but also allow you to put any kind of content you wanted. It can be additional information, surveys, or just about any HTML content you can think of. This feature is important if you plan to make full use of pop-ups on your website, and we will list them in details in our reviews.
Multimedia Support
Some plugins allow you to show multimedia contents on a pop-up window: mostly images and videos. If your site is going to have plenty of these, it’s a great idea to look for this feature.
Types of Pop-up
We will also cover what types of pop-up are available for you, do they only support entry pop-ups (those that show up when someone visits a website), or do they also support exit, delayed, or even pop-unders. Those with more alternatives will be rated higher.
Stylability and Placements
A good looking pop-up that catches the attention of visitors is likely to be used more. Therefore it’s also important to ask whether the visual look of a pop-up can be changed, and if it is easy to do or not. Another factor is whether you can choose where to show your pop-up: should it appear in the middle of the screen, on one of the four corners, or anywhere else? Another bonus is if you can show the content of your pop-up elsewhere on your website, for example on a sidebar widget area of your WordPress theme.
Design Templates
A plugin that comes with many different design templates for its pop-up will be helpful if you want to have some alternatives without having to tweak everything yourself. Look for this if you’re not used to designing for the Web and prefer pre-packaged, well-designed templates instead.
Lightbox and other Effects
Lightbox effect is when the entire website is dimmed out except for the pop-up that shows up, effectively grabbing visitor’s attention. This feature is not a must have, but it is helpful and is used on many sites, giving your user a sense of familiarity and ease of use. Other possible effects for a pop-up includes fade-in and drop down effects. All these are useful to give a little flair for your pop-up.
How it Deals with Pop-up Blockers
Years and years of pop-up abuse results in the rise of pop-up blockers that can be found on most browsers or even done with special-purpose software. You don’t want your relevant, useful pop-up to get caught in these blockers, so it’s important to see how a plugin handles this situation. A good one should let you show your pop-ups regardless of your pop-up blockers.
Pricing and Licensing
For paid plugins, our reviews will list not just how they are priced, but also any licensing restriction if available. Some plugins might only allow you to install it in one website, while other are less restrictive.
Refund Policy
Finally, we also need to take a look whether a paid plugin offer some kind of refund policy. It’s nice if you can test a plugin for a period of time, and get your money back if it simply doesn’t do as you need it.
