Virtually all websites these days feature some sort of popup message designed to get the user’s attention and/or follow through on some kind of call to action. These can be to sign up for a newsletter, agree to terms of use, to feature new products, services or content, or for any number of other reasons. Your initial reaction to reading the above may very well be: “Yeah, those things are really annoying.” And you’re not all wrong. They certainly can be annoying and oftentimes are. But more importantly, research shows they are effective. So the goal should be to maximize their effectiveness while minimizing the annoying factor. Choosing to not use them altogether simply because you’ve been to a lot of sites with popups that annoy you will cause you to miss out on opportunities to actually improve the experience for your website users, and also ultimately improve your bottom line. However, the purpose of this article is not to convince you of the utility or best practices with popups. For a very thorough discussion on that, check out Sumo’s excellent write up. What I want to share is the best method for setting up popups for your WordPress website, and for that the tool I most recommend is the Popup Maker plugin.
Popup Maker Overview
Popup Maker has over 400,000 downloads at the time of writing with a 4.9/5 rating on over 3500 reviews. Those numbers make it both the most popular and highest rated popup plugin in the WordPress plugin repository. As you’d expect, it is also very well supported by a respected development team. These are the first things we look for when choosing a plugin, and rarely would we even experiment with any that don’t check those important boxes.
Popup Maker Features
This is a very robust plugin, with a ton of available features out of the box including:
- Slide Out Popups, Banner Bars, Floating Sticky Popups, Notification Popups, Loading Screen Popups, Video Lightboxes, and Opt-In Form Popups.
- Form popups using: Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, etc.
- Support for the following marketing tools: MailChimp, AWeber, InfusionSoft, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Mail Poet, Mad Mimi, Hubspot, and Emma.
- Full control over look, animation, location, and theme of popup.
- Targeting based on page, user, category, device, and many more.
- Specific conditions for popular plugins such as WooCommerce.
- Full control over timing of cookies for popup (ie. whether the popup will show again, and if not, when that expires).
- Full control over triggers and timing for popup.
Ease of Use
Popup maker is a breeze to set up and use and has very thorough and clear documentation to guide you along the way. It also features excellent support for any questions not covered by the documentation.
Upgrades
The amount of features available for the free out of the box version is quite impressive. If you are finding you need a bit more, there are some low cost extensions with additional features including:
- Exit Intent Popups
- Advanced Theme Builder
- MailChimp Integration
- Advanced Targeting Conditions
- Forced Interaction
- Scroll Triggered Popups
- Age Verification Modals
- AJAX Login Modals
- Advanced Video Control
- Remote Content
- Scheduling
- Terms & Conditions Popups
- Popup Analytics
- Leaving Notices
- Aweber Integration
- Secure Idle User Logout
Note that some of the above is still possible using the core free plugin, it’s just that the extensions make the process more seamless.
Other Free WordPress Popup Options
It’s likely that Popup Maker will give you everything you need, but there are some other options out there which are worth considering.
As with most plugins, each of the above also has a premium plugin or service, but fairly rich features with the free version. However, in our experience, Popup Maker is your best bet for a free, easy, feature rich plugin to get popups going on your site today.
Related Guides and Resources
- Why Your WordPress Site Is Not as Secure as You Think: Key Misconceptions In the rapidly evolving digital landscape of 2025, a secure online presence is non-negotiable for…
