I just had some simple requirements for the popup I needed:
- reliable, it has to popup each time, again and again
- fully functional on ipad, etc.
- shortcode triggered (and simple to use)
- display popup in the center of the screen, also on ipads and other OS tablets
- it had to work with a slider shortcode because we show our brochures with the popup.
- the popup’s had to look friendly as we don’t want to scare the visitors of our site, and a bit less important, it would be nice if the location of the close button was adjustable. (people read a brochure from top-to-bottom you know…)
- a plugin that had regular updates (I learned in another web building program that a popup is using a lot of resources and I don’t want to look for a new popup plugin after each WP update)
- The plug-in I was looking for should have a way of triggering the popup with a simple shortcode, using a button or just plain text. (and I really mean simple, not using a lot of DIV codes and html)
These requirements seemed rather standard to me, especially since there are hundreds and hundreds of popup plugins for WordPress available.
However, choosing a popup plugin took a lot of time:
- Some plugin’s were not updated since for over a year
- Others promised easy implementation with shortcodes but i found them difficult to implement and the results were not as expected
- Many plugins did not appear correctly on a tablet
- Some popup’s killed my whole site upon activation, and required me to use FTP to restore my site
- Some were promising, until I implemented the slider shortcode but then nothing happened
I looked at more than 100 popup plugins. Downloaded around 60 of them and tested more than 40.
I expected to have a lot of choice: but in the end only ONE WordPress Popup plugin was able to full-fill my requirements and worked as expected. That plugin is WPPopupMagic.
The only “downside” is it could do a lot more than I needed, but the user-interface is so simple it didn’t matter!
I bought the popup (the developer even gives a 30 days money-back guarantee) and I made over 60 (perfectly working) plugin’s in so little time. Something I have never been able to do before. Even with shortcodes from TablePress, Meta Slider or just plain text… the popup work properly).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure some of the plugins I tested would have worked eventually. However, when I need to invest a lot of time to get a simple plugin working or when it’s not compatible many other plugin’s and themes, that’s tells me something about the plugin.
I would like to thank the creator of the WPPopupMagic for making my life a whole lot easier! I recommend it 100%.
Note: Bas is using over 100 popups on this single site which are mainly triggered by links.
