A pop up on your website might be useful to tell the world about something. When used sparingly they can reach out to your viewers and encourage them to take some action.
From the time you entered this site a timer has been working in the background counting down. At the point a certain value is reached a message will appear on the screen inviting you to sign up to my site providing you are one of my clients.
How is it done?
I have located and used the plugin WordPress PopUp by WPMU DEV
Things to bear in mind when using pop ups, not everyone will see them. This is because some browsers have pop up blockers. So don’t assume everyone can see them. Most will however.
How to set up a pop up
Log into your site, go to the plugins page and locate and load WordPress PopUp. Once it has loaded activate it. It will appear in the menu on the left hand side.
Click on PopUp and Add New to create a new Pop Up. I used this and got it working quite quickly, if I don’t mention something, it is because I used the defaults and just focused on the goals of the pop up.
These are the steps I have taken in the form and why (if appropriate):
Heading (optional): One of my clients?
Subheading (optional): Let me bring the news to you!
In the main PopUp content are are wrote the following:
“Sign up to my newsletter, and I will bring the latest news and tips to your inbox. All I need is an email address (one I recognise from the website I built for you), a name and your organisation. Click on the button, the Newsletter form is at the bottom of the page”
Your message needs to be short, this one is arguably too long.
Underneath the content area are three boxes:
The first one is the text that will appear on a button.
The second one is the URL you will go to when you click on the button. So in this last box put the page address in this space. My completed form looks like the image below.
Moving down the form there are some other things we can change.
In my example, I have used the Simple Form (default), Use custom colours, here you can apply a colour from the palette used on your site.
I have skipped down the page and selected two other settings: PopUp display animation where I have chose Bounce and PopUp closing animation Fade Out
Next I have set up some behavioural settings. The first is Appear after 20 seconds. So someone arriving on the site will set a timer running and after 20 seconds irrespective of where they are provided they are on the website a Pop Up will appear.
For regular visitors a Pop Up can be annoying, so I have enabled the “Never see this message again” settings by checking the box. What this will do is place a cookie on the client browser. Provided they use the same browser they will not see the message for 365 days (default setting).
Everything else is default settings. My form looks like this.
Next I save my work. Do remember to do this at this point. I did not, tested the form and lost my settings. Scroll up to the top right of the form and click on the update button.
There is a button near the save button where you can preview the form. When I preview my form this is what I get back.
The last step is to change the status of the Pop Up from Inactive to Active, then save it.
Return to the users view of the home page and wait! After approximately 20 seconds the pop up appears. Test the link does what you want it to do. That’s it you are done.
There are lots of things you can do with this plugin, and there is a pro version available too.