4 Best WordPress Popup Plugins (Free)

4 Best WordPress Popup Plugins (Free)

WordPress popup plugins can be an easy way to help collect leads and drive conversions, but they are not all made the same. 

When it comes to popups, the goal is to effectively target your customers without annoying them or pushing them away. And as far as plugins are concerned, you want one that’s useful, reliable, and worth your time. 

That is why we have combed the long list of options on the WordPress plugin repository to bring you the best WordPress popup plugins available for your website. 

In this article, we will outline the qualifications required to be considered for this list and share our top four choices for the best WordPress popup plugins. 

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Best WordPress Popup Plugin Requirements

The last thing you want is a plugin that doesn’t work with your site or isn’t worth your time. That is why all the plugins on our list have a minimum of 10,000 installs, have been tested up to WordPress 5.8, and have a 4.5-star rating or higher with 100 or more reviews.

On top of that, all of the plugins on this list are free to download and use (one plugin does have a stipulation that requires a paid account).

These qualifications ensure the plugins listed are loaded with features, reliable, and run smoothly without costing you any money. 

Top 4 WordPress Popup Plugins

Without further ado, let’s dive into our top WordPress popup plugins.

When it comes to the best WordPress popup plugins, Popup Maker is usually one of the first if not the very first name people mention. 

That is because it has amassed more than 700k active installations and has maintained a perfect 5-star rating with nearly 4.3k reviews. 

And the hype is real. Popup Maker enables users to create conversion-focused campaigns so they can grow revenue and bolster their email list on their WordPress site with popups, slide-ins, banners, and more. 

Popup Maker is super versatile and flexible. It can be bent and molded to create any type of popup, modal, or content overlay for WordPress websites. Its unique Popup Editor can be utilized to build any content you want inside of our popups as well as control popup sizing, position, animation, and much more.

Popup Maker has a ton of different popup options including: 

  • Email opt-in popups
  • Content upgrade popups
  • Lead gen popups
  • Ecommerce popups
  • Contact form popups
  • Coronavirus/COVID-19 announcements
  • EU cookie notices
  • Plus more

This plugin also integrates with all of the most popular form plugins in order to allow you to open a popup when a form is submitted or close the popup when a form inside the popup is submitted.

There are multiple ways you trigger a popup to open such as:

  • Open automatically (with optional delay)
  • Click button (or any other element) to open
  • Form submission (open a popup when a form is submitted)

Another plugin with nearly 2,000 reviews and a rock-solid 5-star rating, Popup Builder has been installed on more than 200,000 WordPress websites and gained popularity with good reason. 

Offering a broad range of WordPress popup types, conditions, and events, Popup Builder helps users create high converting, promotional and informative popups that increase conversion rates and boost sales.

With Popup Builder, you can target your buyer personas based on geographic segmentation, demographics, and/or user behavior for highly effective popups.

It features a user-friendly interface that makes it simple and easy to use. All of the popup types, events, and conditions are clearly separated and require no coding to use. 

Popup Builder’s features include: 

  • Create and manage unlimited WordPress popups
  • Customizable popups
  • Mobile-friendly popups
  • Popups that active when a user hovers over them 
  • Network/Multisite compatible popups
  • Much more

Another cool thing about this plugin is that it offers a custom JS/CSS coding opportunity for all of its WordPress popup types that allow users to make any popup unique and fully customizable. You can customize backgrounds, borders, overlays, texts, colors, and much more. 

Popup Builder is also fully integrated with many of the most popular third-party plugins such as WooCommerce, MailChimp, Ninja Forms, and more. 

Hustle

Hustle has earned more than 100k installs and a 4.5-star rating largely because of how easy it makes lead generation using simple set up opt-in forms, targeted marketing popups, and designer-made templates. 

It allows you to easily grow your mailing list and display targeted ads across your site with popups, opt-ins, slide-ins, widgets, and shortcodes.

With Hustle’s templates, you are able to quickly create popups, slide-ins, and embeds. Available templates represent a variety of different use cases (i.e. Black Friday, giveaway, COVID notice, newsletter signup), which allows you to get started with a design that aligns with your marketing goals.

All templates are mobile responsive and fully customizable allowing you to adjust colors, animations, layouts, drop shadows, display conditions, and more. 

Additionally, Hustle allows you to set up a range of behavior triggers for your popups and slide-ins such as time on page, scroll, exit-intent, and more, as well as set specific popup schedules for best results. 

Hustle is loaded with features and certainly with checking out. 

Brave

With just 10,000 installs, Brave is the baby of the group on this list, but it does boast an impressive 5-star rating. 

This powerful and intuitive conversion widget builder for WordPress allows you to visually create popups, lead generation forms, sitckybars, and sidebars in a matter of minutes.

Brave’s top feature is its drag and drop popup editor that lets you create unique and custom popups within minutes. The free version of the plugin comes with nine different elements(text, button, image, form, and more) that you can drag and drop into your popups and customize how you see fit. You can even add animations to popups. 

You can also set up targeting triggers for popups to control who sees popups when, as well as give popups custom goals that can trigger an action and notify you upon completion.

One unique feature about Brave is that you can customize the display frequency of a popup meaning that you can avoid annoying returning visitors by limiting how often they see popups. 

Brave also makes it easy to track the effectiveness of popups with advanced analytics showing how often a popup is viewed, clicked on, or results in a submitted contact form. 

OptinMonster (Bonus)

The last plugin on our list is a bonus plugin of sorts. 

OptinMonster has a 4.5-star rating, and that’s pretty impressive when you consider that it has topped more than 1 million installations on WordPress. 

The only reason it isn’t higher on this list is because it is a software as a service (SaaS), meaning that while the plugin is free, you need to have an OptinMonster account to be able to use it, as well as to gain newsletter subscribers using OptinMonster. 

However, starting at just $9.99/mo, OptinMonster does come loaded with features such as: 

  • Lightbox popups
  • Floating bar popups
  • Slide-in popups
  • Fullscreen welcome mats (fullscreen popups)
  • Gamified spin-a-wheel popups
  • Inline signup forms
  • Sidebar subscribe forms
  • Content locker popups (popups that require an email to unlock content)
  • Countdown timers
  • Yes/No popups
  • Mobile popups
  • Canvas custom popups (create and customize your own popup with drag and drop popup builder)
  • Prebuilt popup templates
  • Exit intent popups
  • A/B popup testing, popup targeting, and advanced popup analytics
  • And more

If you have room in your marketing budget for OptinMonster, it really is hard to beat when it comes to overall popup features and integrations.


Adding popups to your website can be a great way to target customers and convert sales, but creating popups using code can be time-consuming. 

Thankfully, with these popup plugins, you can quickly and easily add custom popups to your WordPress website with minimal effort. 

You can find all of the popups listed in this article on the WordPress Plugin Repository.

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