WP Popups Review: A Flexible, Targeted WordPress Popup Plugin

If you work with any type of popups on your WordPress site, you’ll want to check out our WP Popups review.

WP Popups is a complete revamp of the popular Popups plugin, which is active on 70,000+ sites according to WordPress.org. Because the new WP Popups plugin makes such big changes, the developer opted to discontinue the original Popups plugin and let people migrate to the new WP Popups plugin on their own time.

The new version of WP Popups brings a visual template builder, tons of detailed display rules, including WordPress-specific conditions, and plenty more.

Depending on which version you’re using, you can use WP Popups for email opt-ins, CTAs, login/registration forms, idle activity notices, coupons, and lots more.

Keep reading our full WP Popups review to learn more about the features and see the plugin in action.

WP Popups Review: The Feature List

WP Popups comes in both a free version at WordPress.org (WP Popups Lite) as well as a premium version with more features.

For our WP Popups review, we’re going to focus mainly on the free version at WordPress.org, but we will share what you can get in the premium version at the end of the review.

So what do you get in the free version?

• 5 different popup locations
• A visual template builder to control the design and content of your popups
• Detailed display rules to target specific content, users, devices, etc.
• 3 different trigger rules, including time on site and scroll depth
• Integrations with other form plugins like WPForms, Gravity Forms, MailPoet, etc.

Here’s how it works to create a popup with WP Popups…

Hands-On With WP Popups

Once you install and activate the plugin, you can go to WP Popups → Add New to create your first popup.

This will launch the visual popup builder interface, which uses roughly the same interface as the popular WPForms plugin, which is a positive in my opinion.

1. Choose a Template

Your first option is to choose between starting from a pre-made template or building your own design from scratch.

The free version comes with two pre-made templates – elegant and transparent – while the premium version adds a number of new templates:

I’ll choose an Elegant Popup for this review.

2. Add Content

Once you choose a template, you’ll launch the visual builder. You’ll see a live preview of your popup on the right and a bunch of settings options on the left.

First up, you can use the Content tab to add content to your popup using the Classic WordPress editor.

Beyond having access to the editor, there are two notable features here:

1. The plugin comes with pre-built shortcodes to help you insert social follow/like buttons.
2. You can include shortcodes from other plugins, like your favorite form plugin. This lets you create popup contact forms, opt-in forms, registration forms, etc.

As you make changes in the editor, you’ll instantly see those changes reflected on the live preview of your popup:

3. Configure Appearance

Next, the Appearance tab is where you can configure your popup’s position and design.

In the free version, you get 7 different position options:

• Bottom bar
• Bottom left
• Bottom right
• Centered
• Top bar
• Top left
• Top right

Basically, these positions let you create:

• Traditional popups
• Top or bottom notification bars
• Slide-ins in any corner

As you choose a new position, you’ll instantly see that reflected on the live preview:

Then, you can use the remaining settings to configure:

• Entrance animations
• Size – you can change the width, height, and padding
• Colors
• Borders
• Shadows
• Close button size and position

4. Set Up Display Rules

Once you’ve configured the content and design of your popup, you get into the fun part:

Display rules.

Display rules are where the WP Popups plugin really excels.

Basically, these let you control exactly where your popups appear and who sees them.

For example, you could only display a popup on certain categories of posts or to logged-in users.

But the really powerful thing is that you can group these conditions together into as many “rule groups” as needed.

For example, if you’re worried about Google’s mobile popup penalty, you can create a rule that says:

• If someone visits from Google Search AND is using a mobile phone, then don’t display the popup.

In total, the free version of WP Popups gives you 26 different display rules. You can target:

• Specific content – post types, page types, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, specific posts, etc.
• Devices – mobile, tablet, or desktop
• Referrers – e.g. coming from a specific website or coming from a search engine.
• Browsers – e.g. Chrome vs Firefox
• New vs returning visitors
• User roles
• User logged in status – that is, whether or not a person is logged in to your WordPress site
• Whether or not a user has previously left a comment at your site

You can mix-and-match all of these conditions using both AND and OR rules:

• AND – all conditions in a rule group must be met in order for the popup to display.
• OR – as long as the condition(s) in at least one rule group are met, the popup will display.

5. Configure Settings

To finish things out, you can go to the Settings to configure two important details:

• When to trigger your popup
• How long to wait before displaying your popup again if a user converts/closes your popup

To set up triggers, you can go to Settings → Triggers. There, you can choose between:

• Scroll depth – either % of page height or scrolled down pixels
• Seconds after page load
• Class

You can also combine these triggers together if needed.

Then, you can go to the Cookies/Close section to control how often to show your popups after users interact with them.

For example, if you set the Closing cookie duration equal to 30 days, a user who closes the popup won’t see it again until 30 days have passed:

And that’s it! Once you’re finished, you can Publish your popup and it will start displaying according to your rules.

What You Get With the Full WP Popups Version

Up until this point in our WP Popups review, you can accomplish everything that you saw with the free Lite version at WordPress.org.

But if you want access to even more features, you can also purchase the full version of WP Popups, which comes in three versions.

The premium version gets you access to:

• Built-in analytics and a Google Analytics Event Tracking integration to track your popups in Google Analytics
• Built-in A/B testing to compare popups
• Direct integrations with 10+ email marketing services, including Mailchimp
• Even more display rules
• More triggers, including exit intent
• Popup scheduling
• Geotargeting rules
• More popup positions, like fullscreen fillers
• More animations

You also get access to dedicated templates for new popup use cases including:

• Login/registration popups
• Age gates
• Automatic logout for idle users (show a popup after a certain amount of inactivity that lets users click to continue their session or automatically logs them out – like banks use).
• External link click notice

WP Popups Pricing

The premium version of WP Popups comes in three different plans – you can view them below:

Final Thoughts on WP Popups

Beyond just generally making it easy to create popups on WordPress, I think WP Popups excels in two spots.

First, you get so many display rules to control where your popups appear and who sees them. More than that, you get WordPress-specific display rules, like targeting logged-in users or specific user roles. While something like OptinMonster has a solid list of general display rules, it can’t match WP Popups when it comes to WordPress-specific rules.

Second, you get a lot of flexibility for the types of popups that you create. While you can certainly use WP Popups to create email opt-in popups and CTAs, you can also use it for a lot more than that because you can include shortcodes from other plugins in the content box.

With the Pro version, you also get dedicated templates for other use cases like age gates and login/registration popups.

All in all, if you want a great WordPress-specific tool for creating popups, definitely give WP Popups a look.

You can get started with the free version to test it out. Then, if you like what you see, I’d recommend going pro for more display rules, analytics and A/B testing, and other goodies.

Get WP Popups Visit at WordPress.org