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Plugin Collections WordPress Plugins

OptinMonster Alternatives: 7 Best Free and Premium WordPress Optin Plugins of 2020

OptinMonster is widely considered the best email marketing and lead generation tool for WordPress users. However, for some website owners its impressive features list is overkill. While for others, the price tag is just too expensive. If you’d like to grow your email list or harness the power of pop-ups and optin forms, but aren’t ready for OptinMonster just yet, this collection of the best OptinMonster alternatives will give you some other options to consider.

What’s So Great about OptinMonster Anyway?

Best OptinMonster Alternatives

Before we get to the best OptinMonster alternatives, you might be wondering what’s so great about this tool anyways.  That’s a good question to ask if you haven’t used OptinMonster before.

After starting out life as regular WordPress plugin, OptinMonster is now a hosted service that can be used on any website, not just those powered by WordPress. As well as moving to a new platform, OptinMonster has gained many impressive new features since it initial release a few years ago.

Now with OptinMonster, you can create a wide range of pop-ups and form to help your website generate more leads. Whether you want to grow your email subscriber list, display custom messages in pop-ups, or increase your website’s goal conversion rates in some other way, OptinMonster can help.

Not only can you create pop-ups, full-screen welcome gate forms, slide-in forms, floating bars, and a whole lot more, you can also optimize your pop-ups and optins using the integrated split-testing tool. By comparing multiple variations of a form or message against each other, you can find the winning combination of text and design for your audience.

OptinMonster was also one of the first WordPress pop-up plugins to feature the exit intent trigger. This clever technology will only trigger a pop-up when a visitor is about to leave your site. If they are heading for the back button, or browser address field a pop-up will be displayed. Hopefully, they won’t be as annoyed as the form had just popped up as they arrived, and will be more likely to submit their email and join your list. However, as we’ll soon see in this collection of the best WordPress optin pop-up plugins, there are now many OptinMonster alternatives that include the exit intent trigger.

Before this turns into a full-blown OptinMonster review, let’s just say that this is a powerful and impressive tool to help you generate more leads from your website. It’s only real downside is its pricing and that’s where this collection of the best OptinMonster alternatives come in.

The Best OptinMonster Alternatives

While there isn’t really another plugin like OptinMonster, at least in terms of quality and features, there are many that come close.

Depending on which features of OptinMonster you want to use, you might be able to find free OptinMonster alternatives that meet your needs. For others, you might need to invest in a premium optin plugin to gain access to the functionality you project demands.

However, with premium plugins that compare well to OptinMonster available for as little as $25 (such as Ninja Popups), adding professional pop-ups and optin forms to your website needn’t break the bank.

Bloom from Elegant Themes

OptinMonster vs Bloom

Elegant Themes make some of the best WordPress themes around. However, they also have a small but impressive portfolio of WordPress plugins. One of those plugins is the listing building tool Bloom. Once Bloom is active on your website, you can start creating custom forms that can be displayed in pop-up windows, as slide-ins, or embedded into your content. The pre-built form designs are of a very high standard. However, you can easily tweak then through the form designer.

As well as the ability to customize your form designs, you get a good amount of control over how they work on your site. You can also split test your forms and settings to optimize them for the best results. The only area where Blooms is lacking, at least compared to OptinMonster, is the absence of the exit intent trigger. However, you can set pop-ups and other forms to be trigger when a user scrolls to a certain point on a page or have been on your site for a set period of time.

Best Features of Bloom:

  • Stylish form designs for growing your list.
  • Form customizer to create personalized pop-ups.
  • Good selection of form types include pop-ups, in-content, and slide-in forms.
  • Lots of form triggers and settings to control when and where forms are displayed.
  • Advanced reporting and split testing tools to enable form optimization.

Price: $89 for Bloom and 87 WordPress themes and 5 other plugins.

This powerful OptinMonster alternative can be yours if you join the Elegant Themes club on their $89 developer plan. This price also includes the excellent Divi and Extra WordPress themes as well as some other useful plugins, making it a great value offer and an affordable alternative to OptinMonster. For more information, be sure to check out our hands-on Bloom plugin review.

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Thrive Leads from Thrive Themes

OptinMonster Alternative

It’s fair to say that Thrive Leads is one of the main competitors to OptinMonster. In fact, the Thrive Leads feature list makes this plugin one of the best email optin form and lead generation tools available for WordPress today. However, it’s not without its downsides. Although Thrive Leads has more templates for your forms and pop-ups compared to OptinMonster, the quality of the designs aren’t all as strong as those from its main rival, although, there are some good ones in the library. If you’re looking for the finished article, Thrive Leads probably isn’t it, as you will need to do quite a bit of work to get the majority of the designs up to spec.

However, the Thrive Leads list building WordPress plugin does include a powerful editor. Through this tool, you can customize the design and content of your forms and pop-ups, giving you almost unlimited control over them. Compared to OptinMonster, Thrive Leads isn’t lacking when it comes to reporting tools either. You’ll always have a clear idea of which of your forms are performing well on your site, as well as which ones need more attention. When it comes to creating the perfect optin forms and other types of pop-ups for your WordPress website, like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads also includes a split testing tool.

Best Features of Thrive Leads:

  • More affordable than OptinMonster.
  • All the best pop-up triggers including exit intent.
  • Powerful drag-and-drop form builder tool.
  • Detailed reporting, analytics, and split testing tools.
  • Large library of form and pop-up window designs.

Price: $67 for just the plugin or $19 per month for all Thrive products.

When it comes to Thrive Leads vs OptinMonster, many people are happy to choose the former tool and don’t see doing so as a compromise in any way. In fact, you’ll often see Thrive Leads at the top of lists containing the best email optin and pop-up WordPress plugins.

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Ninja Popups

Ninja Popups OptinMonster alternatives

Ninja Popups is one of the most affordable OptinMonster alternatives. Sold through the Envato CodeCanyon marketplace, Ninja Popups has racked up an impressive 25,000+ sales at the time of writing this email optin form plugin comparison. Despite the low price of Ninja Popups, this list-building tool isn’t lacking in features or functionality.

Like the best OptinMonster alternatives, Ninja Popups has all the best pop-up triggers. This includes timed triggers, triggers based on user activity, and of course, the effective exit intent trigger. When it comes to form templates, Ninja Popups isn’t lacking here either. There are currently 60 new pop-up themes to work with, all of which can be customized through the drag-and-drop visual editor.

Best Features of Ninja Popups:

  • Impressive selection of customizable form templates.
  • Powerful form triggers including exit intent.
  • Optimize your forms with the A/B testing tool.
  • Drag-and-drop form designer tool.
  • Content locker and social media opt-in forms.

Price: $25 including lifetime access to updates.

If you want to grow your email list and generate more leads from your WordPress website, Ninja Forms is the affordable option that has plenty to offer.

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WP Subscribe Pro

WP Subscribe Pro alternative to OptinMonster

WP Subscribe Pro is a good value alternative to OptinMonster from MyThemeShop. Known for making some of the fastest loading WordPress themes around, MyThemeShop also has a useful portfolio of plugins to help upgrade your WordPress website, including one of the best WordPress review plugins available.

This email list building plugin makes it easy to display a range of nicely presented optin forms on your WordPress website. There’s also a good selection of animation effects to help grab the attention of your visitors, while the library of triggers will ensure your pop-ups work in the way that you want.

Best Features of WP Subscribe Pro:

  • Different high-quality form designs to choose from.
  • Unlimited color options.
  • Exit intent and other pop-up triggers.
  • Detailed settings to control pop-up behaviors.
  • Option of displaying related posts in a pop-up window.
  • Selection of other optin forms including before and after post content and a sidebar widget.

Price: $39 or $87 for 93 premium WordPress themes and 16 premium plugins.

There’s also a lite version of this plugin available. Although not as feature rich as the premium version, WP Subscribe could be a good free OptinMonster alternative for anyone on a budget. If you’re looking for a new theme for your website, the affordable multi plugin and theme package from MyThemeShop is hard to beat.

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Convert Plug

OptinMonster vs Convert Plug

Convert Plug is not only a feature-rich OptinMonster and Thrive Leads alternative; it’s also one of the most affordable pop-up plugins for WordPress. Described as an all round lead generation plugin, Convert Plug won’t just help you grow your email list, but it will also help you make more sales, get more page views, and generally help improve your site’s goal conversion rates – whatever they may be.

Best Features of Convert Plug:

  • Good range of pop-up triggers including exit intent
  • Split testing tool to optimize your pop-ups.
  • Multiple pop-up display locations.
  • Easily display custom content in pop-up windows.
  • Large library of high converting pop-up templates.
  • Customization options for all pop-ups.

Price: $21

If you’ve not seen Convert Plug in action before, you should really check out what this great value optin form plugin can do.

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Exit Popup

OptinMonster vs Exit Pop-up

If you aren’t sure how a plugin like OptinMonster can help you with your website goals, the free Exit Popup allows you to try out pop-ups and optin forms without investing any money. This plugin’s pop-ups can be used to display almost any content of your choice, including text, images, videos, and of course, forms. It’s not quite a fully featured OptinMonster free alternative, but it’s worth a look for those with basic needs.

Best Features of Exit Popup:

  • Set pop-ups to open on a range of triggers including exit intent.
  • Use HTML to display custom content in your pop-ups.
  • Control how and when the pop-ups are displayed.

Price: free

For a free introduction to how exit intent pop-ups and other OptinMonster substitute plugins work, Exit Popup is a good option.

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Icegram

OptinMonster vs Icegram

Icegram was created to help you capture leads and improve conversions. With a popular free version and a powerful premium option, Icegram gives you plenty of possibilities when it comes to adding those sought after OptinMonster-style features to your WordPress website. This is probably the best OptinMonster free alternative you’re going to find, so if you don’t want to spend any more money on your WordPress webiste, why not check out Icegram.

Best Features of Icegram:

  • Multiple pop-up options and modes.
  • Selection of pop-up triggers including exit intent.
  • Detailed pop-up targeting settings.
  • Library of add-ons available to upgrade Icegram.
  • Free and premium versions available.

Price: from free

With pop-ups, action bars, toast notifications, and messenger-style popups, the free version of Icegram gives you plenty of options for experimentation.

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Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are many good OptinMonster alternatives for WordPress users. However, for many website owners, OptinMonster is still the best way to capture leads and increase conversions. But if OptinMonster is too expensive or simply has too many features, tools like Bloom, Thrive Leads, and WP Subscribe Pro have plenty offer for often a fraction of the price.

Which WordPress optin form pop-up plugin will you use on your website? Let us know in the comments below.

Categories
Plugin Collections WordPress Plugins

How to Publish Professional Looking Reviews on Your WordPress Website

If you want to publish reviews on your WordPress website, this article is for you. In this guide, we’ll look at some of the best WordPress review plugins to help you learn how to make your review content look professional and most importantly, persuade your visitors to take action.

Whether you want to know how to start a WordPress review website or simply add some professionally formatted reviews to your blog, this guide is for you.

What Can the Best WordPress Review Plugins Do?

Before we get to the best WordPress review plugins, let’s quickly go over what these tools can do and how they can help. Typically, a good WordPress review plugin will add an extra set of boxes to the WordPress post editor.

Review WP Review Pro Admin Box

Through this control panel, you can enter more information about the item you’re reviewing. Depending on the plugin you’re using, this review information could include:

  • A product image.
  • Pricing information.
  • Custom review criteria.
  • Product score.
  • Buttons that link to where the product can be purchased.

This extra information will then be added to your WordPress post or page, turning a regular article into a professional looking review:

Best WordPress Review Plugins Example

The best free WordPress review plugins should give you a pretty good selection of options in terms of how your review content is presented and what information you can add. However, if you’re serious about creating a professional reviews website with WordPress, then investing one of the best premium review plugins for WordPress will not only make your reviews look more professional, but they could also help you generate more sales from your website, and in turn, make more money online through affiliate commissions and product recommendations.

So now we know what the best WordPress review plugins can do, and why you should be using one, let’s look at the free and premium options available.

The Best WordPress Review Plugins

Thankfully, there’s a great selection of free and commercial review plugins available for WordPress. Therefore, you can start adding nicely formatted reviews to your blog or website today for free. Many of these options are available on the freemium pricing model, allowing you to try a limited or lite version of the premium plugin, in a scaled down free version of the tool.

Anyway, to help you pick the right tool for your website, here are the best WordPress review plugins available today.

WP Review Pro

WP Review Pro

WP Review Pro is a powerful yet affordable premium WordPress reviews plugin. This tool is available from the reputable MyThemeShop, who also have a great selection of other WordPress plugins and themes.

WP Review Pro is packed with features that give you lots of control over how your reviews are presented. If you’re looking for an easy way to upgrade your review content, this plugin comes highly recommended.

Best Features of WP Review Pro:

  • Multiple rating systems.
  • Optional user comments ratings and reviews.
  • CSS animated reviews.
  • Create global review criteria for use throughout your site.
  • Detailed review customization options panel.
  • Works with all WordPress themes.

Price: $39 or $87 for all MyThemeShop plugins and themes.

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WP Product Review

WP Product Review Pro

WP Product Review from ThemeIsle has some great features that make it a top reviews plugin. There are plenty of different ways to use this plugin, making it ideal for a range of different types of reviews. From products and places to services and experiences, WP Product Review comes highly recommended.

Best Features of WP Product Review:

  • Easily create product comparison tables.
  • Integrates with Amazon for monetizing your reviews with Amazon Associates affiliate program.
  • Includes latest and top product reviews widgets.
  • Supports user reviews.
  • Publish Pros and Cons lists.
  • Support for rich snippets.

Price: from $75

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Rich Reviews

Rich Reviews

Rich Reviews is popular free WordPress reviews plugin that makes it easy to accept and publish user reviews on your WordPress website. Rather than being focused on helping you publish reviews on your blog, Rich Reviews has been built to help you upgrade your site by accepting reviews from your visitors, users, and customer. If you want to boost sales and other conversion rates, publishing user reviews with this free plugin is a great way to do so.

Best Features of Rich Reviews:

  • Easy way to accept and publish user reviews on your website.
  • Customization controls over how the reviews are organized.
  • Color and other display settings.
  • Support for rich snippets.
  • Integrates with Gravatar for displaying user photos.
  • Free!

Price: free

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WP Rich Snippets

WP Rich Snippets

WP Rich Snippets is a powerhouse of a WordPress reviews plugin. In just a few steps, you can transform your standard blog posts into informative and eye-catching reviews. If you want your content to stand out from the crowd when your target audience are researching a product, WP Rich Snippets is well worth checking out. It’s not free, but if you are serious about publishing professional looking reviews, this would be a good investment.

Best Features of WP Rich Snippets:

  • High-quality presentation.
  • Selection of review shortcodes and widgets.
  • Publish product Pros and Cons.
  • Create custom review criteria.
  • Support for WooCommerce-powered ecommerce stores.
  • Library of add-ons for more features and improved integration.

Price: from $69

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WP Reviews

WP Reviews

WP Reviews is a well-established WordPress reviews plugin that has plenty to offer. This plugin will add fully featured reviews system to your WordPress website, making it easy to enhance your content. If you’ve ever wondered how other blogs publish such professional looking reviews, they’re probably using the WP Reviews plugin.

Best Features of WP Reviews:

  • Stylish review box design.
  • Supports editor ratings and reader ratings.
  • Create custom review criteria.
  • Covers a wide range of review types, such as products, places, and more.
  • Library of review widgets and shortcodes.
  • Includes the powerful Author hReview WordPress plugin.

Price: from $69

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Reviewer WordPress Plugin

Reviewer WordPress Plugin

Reviewer WordPress Plugin is available from CodeCanyon for just $25 making it an affordable premium option in this collection of the best WordPress reviews plugins. After activating this plugin on your website, you’ll be able to publish reviews in a number of different ways. Generating product comparison tables is a breeze too with this plugin.

Best Features of Reviewer WordPress Plugin:

  • Wide range of review boxes and formatting options.
  • Quickly create sortable product comparison tables.
  • Create custom review criteria.
  • Advanced user rating system.
  • Support for rich snippets.
  • Lifetime access to plugin updates.

Price: $25

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Final Thoughts

As we’ve just seen, there are many different ways to start publishing reviews on your WordPress website. From free options like Rich Reviews to powerful premium plugins such as WP Review Pro, there’s a small but strong selection of review plugins for WordPress.

However, if you’re starting a new website from scratch, then you might want to consider using a WordPress review theme. These themes often not only have a design that’s been created especially for displaying reviews, but they also include all the review publishing functionality you’ll need. Two great examples of WordPress review themes include Divi from Elegant Themes and Schema from MyThemeShop.

Which plugins will you use to publish reviews on your WordPress website? Let us know in the comments below.

Categories
WordPress Plugins

How to Backup Your WordPress Website Now for Free with UpdraftPlus

Everyone knows they should be backing up their WordPress website. If you’re not sure if you should be backing up your website, then ask yourself how you’d feel if your site and all its content disappeared overnight and vanished without a trace.

If that isn’t something you’d be OK with, then now is the time to start backing up your WordPress website. Not only do you need to start backing up your WordPress website, but you also need to be confident that you can restore those backups should something go wrong.

In this article, we’ll be looking at a free and feature-rich WordPress backup plugin that not only makes it easy to take full and partial website backups on an automated basis but also has a restore process you can rely on. That plugin is UpdraftPlus, a free and popular tool with an impressive 4.8 stars out of 5 rating while also managing to rack up over 1,000,000 active installations.

Why Use UpdraftPlus to Backup Your WordPress Website?

UpdraftPlus Review

There are countless backup plugins for WordPress. But after trying out many of the best options on my portfolio of WordPress websites, I settled on UpdraftPlus. While most of the leading free WordPress plugins make it easy to take a backup, when it comes to restoring those backups, things don’t always run as smoothly.

Over the years, UpdraftPlus has become the free WordPress plugin I trust to take care of safeguarding my website. Whether I’ve updated a rogue plugin that’s caused the infamous WordPress white screen of death or I’ve accidently deleted an article, UpdraftPlus has come to the rescue many times.

UpdraftPlus supports most of the leading cloud storages services, giving you a safe place to store your backup files. Personally, I have my UpdraftPlus backup files automatically sent to Dropbox for safe keeping. However, you might prefer to use Google Drive or have them emailed to you directly.

If you want to know how to backup your WordPress website now for free, then UpdraftPlus comes highly recommended. There are also premium upgrades available that can make this plugin even more useful. However, for now, most users will be fine with the core free version of UpdraftPlus. So to help you start backing up your WordPress website today, let’s do a quick walkthrough of setting up the UpdraftPlus plugin.

How to Start Taking Automated WordPress Backups Today

As UpdraftPlus is available for free from the WordPress Directory, it can be added to your site in just a few clicks. Simply log into your WordPress Dashboard. Then click on the Add New item under the Plugins menu.

UpdraftPlus Add Plugin

On the next screen, enter ‘UpdraftPlus’ in the search field and press the Enter key. Once the results are displayed, click on the Install Now button next to UpdraftPlus, then the Activate button.

Install Plugin

In just a few clicks, you’ve added powerful backup functionality to your WordPress website, for free. Now it’s time to configure the plugin.

How to Setup UpdraftPlus on Your WordPress Website

Thankfully UpdraftPlus doesn’t clutter up your WordPress sidebar menu with another top level item. Instead, the link to the UpdraftPlus control panel can be found under the Settings menu.

UpdraftPlus Settings Menu

From this page, you can quickly enable cloud storage integration and have your backups sent to a service like Dropbox or Google Drive. You can also define an automated backup schedule in just a few clicks.

UpdraftPlus Panel

Once the Updraft Plus dashboard has loaded, click on the Settings tab to configure the plugin.

UpdraftPlus Settings

From the Setting page, you can define a backup schedule and then choose the storage location for your backup files. If you’re making a lot of changes to your site, on a regular basis, then I would recommend taking both files and database backups every four hours and retaining maybe 10 versions of each. If your Dropbox account doesn’t have enough storage space for this amount of files, then Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive might be better options for you.

UpdraftPlus Schedule

If you’re not making changes to your site that often, then you can safely set the backups to be taken less frequently, with fewer files to be retained. Once you’ve made a decision, you can move onto choosing a storage location for your WordPress website backup files.

UpdraftPlus Locations

Clicking on the service or destination of your choice gives you the ability to enable the integration. In most cases, you’ll need to click on an icon, such as Dropbox, save the settings, then follow the onscreen instructions to complete the process.

UpdraftPlus Authenticate

If everything went according to plan, you’ll be taken back to the UpdraftPlus dashboard and the plugin will start taking the first backup.

UpdraftPlus Progress

Once the backup has been created, you can view the files in your Dropbox account — or wherever else you choose to store them — either locally on your computer, or online in the cloud, just to be sure they are there.

UpdraftPlus Dropbox

You can also visit the Existing Backups tab in the UpdraftPlus control panel inside your WordPress admin area to view the successfully created backup files.

UpdraftPlus Existing Backups

Now you can view the backup files and restore them when necessary. If you have opted to store your backup in the cloud, there’s no need to download them first with UpdraftPlus. This free yet powerful WordPress backup plugin can grab them from your storage location and import them into your site automatically.

UpdraftPlus Success

Hopefully, all went well with your test restoration and you now have a robust backup strategy in place for your WordPress website. All without investing a penny. If you do run into any problems, then be sure to check out the FAQ and the UpdraftPlus support forums at WordPress.org.

Final Thoughts

On the subject of WordPress backup plugins, the proof is in the pudding and when it comes to taking and – most importantly restoring – website backups, UpdraftPlus passes with flying colors.

If you’re looking for a tried and tested free backup solution for WordPress then UpdraftPlus is my recommendation. However, if you’re looking for an even more hands-off and foolproof solution, and you don’t mind paying a few dollars per month, then choosing VaultPress is the better option. But for everyone else, UpdraftPlus is the best way to start backing up your WordPress website for free today.

Are you ready to start backing up your WordPress website? Let us know in the comments below.