Ah, the subject of popups. It can be quite controversial to many. Some studies show that people hate popups, find them obnoxious or even ruin their site experience.

And, I guess at some point we’ve all felt that way. 

But, we can’t ignore the stats from a conversion point of view. 

Research conducted by Sumo, found that the top performing 10% of popup forms convert at a huge 9.3%. With the average popup converting at 3% (which is above average in comparison to some other marketing channels). 

Now, there’s a difference between popups that add value and those that are just plain annoying – and we’re guessing those are the ones that really bug you. 

The popups we want to talk about are the ones that convert your traffic, build your email list, drive more sales or reduce your cart abandonment rate. 

How’s this for a benefit…Market statistics show that exit intent popups can help save 35% of potentially lost visitors. Use them intelligently, and popups are a game-changer. 

So, we’ll take a closer look at how to optimize yours, roundup the best practices in terms of design & copy, take a look at 5 great WordPress popup plugins and show you how you can translate yours if you’re selling internationally. And let’s face it, is there really a no to that question? 

Optimize your WordPress popups

There’s nothing worse than when you’re happily browsing an ecommerce store, only to be stopped in your tracks by a popup.

…or is there.

What if that popup was offering you a 10% discount on your first order if you sign-up to the newsletter. 

There’s your value. 

And there’s your conversion.

Naturally, popups that appear for no real benefit and interrupt the user experience are of course going to convert badly, which is where your negativity towards them might lie.  

But, let’s help put that right and look at how you can optimize your WordPress popups to ensure they’re converting with these quick tips:

1. Ensure your website visitors know exactly what they’re getting from the popup – provide details, build trust and add that all important value 
2. Keep them unobtrusive – don’t bombard your website users with numerous popups on every part of your site 
3. Understand where your users want to be targeted, if you have a high bounce rate from for example your homepage, then it might not be the best place for your popup
4. If you’re collecting leads, keep the fields to a minimum – short but sweet is better 
5. Don’t ruin your mobile experience! Make sure it doesn’t take up the whole screen and ruining their site experience
6. Test your popups and keep testing…It could be that they’re not right for your site, or maybe it’s just the offer you’ve created or maybe it’s where you’ve placed it 

For more great tips check out this article. 

Wow! Now that’s a great popup 

Good design helps grab the attention of your website visitors, and, ensuring you’ve added value to your popup will get that all important conversion. 

Popups will always be associated with an excess number of popup boxes that used to plague every website in the early days of the internet…not the most appealing. 

Perhaps that’s even where our mistrust of them comes from. That and the countless viruses these so called ‘offers’ came with (dark times). 

But, let’s get back to 2019 and check out a few great examples of companies doing popups right, both in terms of design and offer. 

The bold and beautiful 

Kate Spade plays around with design and color to create a popup that’s sure to stop you in your tracks when you arrive on the homepage. 

Top marks for keeping the color on brand and a bonus point for thinking outside the box – quite literally – by going for a circular design. 

And, let’s take a look at the value. Witty intro, 15% off your next order and just two bits of information needed, email & zip code. 

The stylish edit

Swimwear company Tigerlily has an email popup that’ll leave you with a lasting impression of the brand. 

Black and white wistful imagery with a last glimpse of one of their products. Plus the promise of giveaways and VIP offers if you sign up to their newsletter. It’ll get you hitting ‘join’ in a flash. 

Simplicity

Sometimes in sea of design noise, simplicity can stand out. Which is what Misen – a cooking tools ecommerce site – does with their popup. 

The black and white theme matches their brand website and its simplicity. And, instead of going down the route of a discount, they’ve chosen an engaging competition to capture email addresses. Also reiterating our point made earlier, they simply ask for one piece of information to get your details. 

We’ve taken a look at how to optimize and design a good popup, but what about choosing the right WordPress popup plugin for your site. 

Best WordPress popup plugins

There are a number of WordPress popup plugins to choose from all with varying levels of flexibility and customization. 

It’s important to choose the right WordPress popup plugin for your site, but one thing that’s great to know, is that all these popups are fully compatible with WordPress translation plugin Weglot. 

Let’s take a look at 5 of the best WordPress popup plugins, with a mixture of paid and freemium.

1. OptinMonster

A popular WordPress popup plugin, OptinMonster is a powerful conversion plugin that helps you easily grow your email lists. 

The key benefits of OptinMonster include:

• One interface for managing and creating your WordPress popups 
• Flexibility to build more than just a lightbox popup – slide-in, floating bar, inline/after post form or sidebar form 
• Up to 25 different premade popup templates to get started (depending on the plan you choose) 
• Drag-and-drop visual editor to create popups from scratch 
• Detailed targeting options – such as exit-intent triggers, to targeting based on cookie or geolocation
• Option to schedule popups to only run at certain times 
• Option to A/B test different popup strategies 

Pricing starts from $19 a month. No free trial but users can get a 100% refund within 14 days if they don’t like OptinMonster. 

2. Popup Maker

Active on more than 400,000 websites, and with more than 3,000 reviews of the WordPress directory, Popup Maker is a popular choice for WordPress users, helped by the offer of a generous free version. 

Key features of Popup Maker include:

• Simple interface to create popups – drawback, it doesn’t have a drag-and-drop editor 
• Flexibility to build countless popup options – slide-out popups, banner bars, floating sticky popups, notification popups, loading screen popups, video lightboxes, and of course, opt-in form popups
• Clever targeting options – e.g. you can target users who have already converted with a tailored offer and this goes further to specific posts/pages, post types, logged in status, user role, overall activity
• Decide on the frequency at which users see your popups using Cookies 
• Triggers for scroll and exit-intent if you’re using the paid version 
• Specific WooCommerce conditions – which allows you to target based on shopping baskets and subscription status 

Free version available. Paid plans starting from $16 a month.

3. MailOptin

MailOptin is an intuitive and powerful form builder, allowing you to create beautifully designed popups, call-to-actions and banners on your website that link directly to your email list.

Features and benefits include:

• Flexibility to add your popup/ banner signup form to any widget ready part of your website
• A/B split testing tool so you can play around with different text and positions
• Design features such as adding animations to your popups 
• Advanced analytics with actionable reporting & insights
• Exit intent technology 
• Create customized and targeted optin campaigns for logged in users or non-logged in users

Pricing starts from $79 a year. 

4. Elementor Pro 

Elementor, a popular WordPress page builder used on more than 1 million WordPress sites, launched its new popup builder feature available with Elementor Pro.  

This design focused WordPress popup builder allows you to create impressive and interactive popups on your WordPress website. 

Notable features include:

• Full design freedom – no restriction on design or functionality 
• Variety of different popups forms –  cookie consent notices, login forms, hello bars etc
• 100+ premade popup templates to choose from 
• Option to build popups from scratch through a simple interface 
• Advanced, intuitive targeting options which means you have full control on when your popup appears, how often it appears and who sees it

Elementor Pro prices starts from $49 a year, which includes this popup builder. 30-day money back guarantee for new purchases​. 

5. Hustle

With more than 80,000 active installs, Hustle is a popup maker that allows you to build email optin forms on your WordPress site. 

Building popups through Hustle is simple and you can customize every aspect of your popup, including – colors, font, style, etc in just a few clicks.

Key features include: 

• Overpowers ad blockers 
• A/B test different variations of your popups
• Detailed analytics about the performance of your each popup
• Exit intent technology 
• Variety of different popup forms – pop-ups, slide-ins, widgets, embeds and after post opt-ins
• Powerful conditions for targeting your audience

 Pricing is free with a premium version quote available on request. 

So, why translate your WordPress popups? 

If you’ve translated your website to open up the markets you’re selling your products and services in, then it makes sense to ensure the whole of your website is fully translated to give the same site experience to all your visitors. 

This goes for your WordPress popup plugin too. Your call-to-actions are one of the key ways you build leads to boost business growth and increase your conversion rate. 

If you’re doing business in new countries but not building your email list or saving your abandoned carts etc in these new markets, then you’ll simply be missing out on big opportunities. 

Translating your popup ensures you’re collecting data from all your new markets.

New site visitors won’t be able to read your catchy offers or email capture forms which means there’s little hope they’ll follow through on the action you want them to take.

How to translate your popups with Weglot

Translating your WordPress site is extremely effortless and seamless with Weglot. Weglot automatically detects all your content, which means whatever WordPress popup plugin you’ve installed, will also be translated into your new languages. 

Installing Weglot on your WordPress site is a simple and quick process that will ensure all your website content is automatically translated and displayed, as well as adding a customizable language switcher (no code required) to the front-end. 

Once you’ve installed your WordPress popup plugin of choice to your site you can start creating your first campaign in your original website language. 

Then it’s time to get Weglot involved! Translating your website will take just 5 minutes and requires only 4 steps. 

1. Install and activate the Weglot plugin on your WordPress site
2. Go to your Weglot tab on your WordPress dashboard 
3. Add your API key (this is available through your Weglot dashboard)
4. Select the original language of your site and the languages you want to add to your site, then click save 

Your WordPress site is now fully multilingual! 

And, now to translate your popup campaigns…The good news is, they’re already translated! Weglot automatically detects all the content on your WordPress site, so you’ll find the translations for your popups in your Weglot dashboard.  

(The only exception is if you’re using OptinMonster to create your popups. In this instance, you’ll need to create the same popup in each of your targeted languages, then through the OptinMonster dashboard you can connect each popup to a targeted URL. Thanks to Weglot you’ll have different URLs per language to choose from e.g. www.mysite.com/fr for French etc).  

Making an edit to the translated version of your popup is easy. Just go into your translation editor in the Weglot dashboard and search your translations list using the text from your popup (in the original language). 

And that’s it! Your international website is now fully translated and you have popup messages targeting to your new markets! 

Try Weglot for free! Our 10 day free trial gives you access to all our features – no credit card details required!