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.
