Driving conversions and getting visitors to take action is critical for any website‘s success. An effective call to action (CTA) can significantly impact your website‘s ability to convert visitors into leads and customers.
This complete guide will explore everything you need to know about using WordPress call to action plugins to create high-converting CTAs.
What is a Call to Action (CTA)?
A call to action is an instruction to your website visitors encouraging them to take a desired action. CTAs invite and prompt visitors to:
- Sign up for a newsletter
- Download content like whitepapers or ebooks
- Click a link to visit another page on your site
- Purchase a product or service
- Fill out a contact form to get in touch
- And more
Effective CTAs use attention-grabbing elements like color contrasts, urgency signals, and benefit-driven copy to convince visitors to take action.
Well-designed and strategically placed CTAs can boost conversions and get more visitors completing desired actions to meet your business goals.
Why You Need a WordPress CTA Plugin
While you can manually add calls to action by hard-coding elements into your pages, using a dedicated WordPress CTA plugin makes the process much easier and more powerful.
CTA plugins provide user-friendly interfaces and pre-made templates to quickly build high-converting CTAs without needing design or coding skills. Top plugins also include powerful features like:
Advanced targeting and triggers to display CTAs to specific visitors under defined conditions to improve relevancy.
Analytics and A/B testing to track performance and fine-tune CTAs for maximum conversions.
Design flexibility and customization to match the look and feel of your website and brand.
Responsiveness across devices so your CTAs look great and function perfectly on all device sizes.
List building and email opt-in integration with top email services to easily grow your subscriber base.
The best CTA plugins combine design flexibility with advanced features for targeting, optimization, and analytics – eliminating the manual work of building effective CTAs.
Next let’s explore the leading options for WordPress call to action plugins.
Top WordPress Call to Action Plugins Compared
There are many great CTA plugins for WordPress available today, both free and premium. The key is finding the one best aligned to your specific goals, budget, and needs.
Below we’ve highlighted some of the top options with a comparison of features across popular categories:
| Plugin | Pricing | Design Options | Advanced Targeting | Analytics | List Building Integration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thrive Leads | $99/yr – $299/yr | Lightboxes Popups Ribbons In Content Forms + More | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| ConvertPro | $87/yr – $387 lifetime | Lightboxes Popups Notification Bars + More | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Elementor Pro | $49/yr – $199/yr | Lightboxes Popups Notification Bars + More | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Thrive Ultimatum | $99/yr – $299/yr | Countdown Timers Urgency Widgets + More | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Leadpages | $49/mo – $79/mo | Landing Pages Popups Alert Bars + More | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
This table shows that premium plugins like Thrive Leads, ConvertPro, Thrive Ultimatum, and Leadpages provide the most powerful combination of design options, targeting rules, analytics, and list building features.
Elementor is great for design flexibility but lacks some of the more advanced CTA features. They also have free popup plugins like Simple Side Tab which offer basic functions.
Ultimately assessing your budget, needs, technical skill level, and design preference will determine the best CTA plugin for your specific goals.
Next let’s do a deep dive exploring how these leading premium WordPress call to action plugins work.
How the Top WordPress CTA Plugins Work
Now that you have an overview of the capabilities of top WordPress call to action plugins, let’s look at how a few of the most powerful options work.
Understanding what’s available can help you select the best plugin match for your needs and budget.
Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is one of the most robust, all-in-one conversion focused plugins for WordPress.
It helps you create high converting CTAs including:
- Lightbox popups – Overlays displayed over website content
- Ribbons – Notification bars fixed to the edge of pages
- Two-step opt-ins – Multi-step forms for list building
- Content upgrades – Lock access to content behind opt-in forms
- Scroll boxes – CTAs fixed to the side as visitors scroll
And more.
Thrive Leads is extremely design flexible – it utilizes Thrive Architect, a visual page builder, for creating CTAs. There are also 100+ pre-made templates to choose from.
With advanced targeting, you can display CTAs to:
- Visitors on specific posts, pages or URLs
- Logged in vs non-logged in users
- New vs returning visitors
- Mobile vs desktop visitors
- And more
Thrive Leads also provides core analytics for tracking conversions plus A/B testing of different CTAs. There is deep integration with all major list building and email service platforms as well.
Overall it’s one of the most equipped CTA plugins available today.
ConvertPro
ConvertPro is another robust and full-featured CTA plugin for WordPress. It focuses heavily on popups and opt-ins.
Types of CTAs you can create include:
- Lightbox popups
- Slide in popups
- Notification bars
- Post-click popups
- Full screen takeovers
Plus more.
In terms of design, ConvertPro has 100+ templates and decent customization capabilities:
It has extremely advanced targeting and triggers – letting you target CTAs to specific posts, URLs, referral traffic sources, geolocations, and much more.
You can also set frequency capping so CTAs only display a certain number of times to visitors.
ConvertPro comes equipped with analytics to assess CTA performance and A/B testing to optimize conversion rates.
It also has deep integration with all email marketing and list building platforms.
Overall ConvertPro competes head-to-head with Thrive Leads in terms of capabilities and power.
Elementor Pro
Elementor Pro is a very popular WordPress page builder plugin. It has an add-on specifically for building popups and CTAs called Popup Builder.
Elementor Popup Builder lets you quickly build popup CTAs like:
- Lightbox popups
- Full screen popups
- Slide in popups
- Notification bars
The benefit of using Elementor for CTAs is that you get complete design flexibility:
As a full page builder plugin, you can build literally any custom layout quickly and easily without needing to code.
You also get basic popup targeting options to display to certain posts, URLs, and device types.
However, Elementor does lack some of the more advanced targeting and triggers that tools like Thrive Leads and ConvertPro have.
It also has no native analytics or A/B testing. You’d need to integrate third-party options for those features.
The advantage of Elementor Pro is complete creative control over popup design and layout. But you miss out on deeper data and targeting capabilities.
Leadpages
Leadpages is unique in that it is not a WordPress plugin, but rather standalone software integrated into WordPress via an plugin.
This gives Leadpages advantages in terms of page loading speed optimization.
With Leadpages you can create:
- Landing pages – Dedicated pages to capture leads
- Lightbox popups – Overlay CTAs
- Notification bars – Top/bottom bars
- Alert bars – Bars left/right fixed on pages
Plus more.
Leadpages templates are focused specifically on conversions vs general page building:
However, the editor is still drag and drop for easy customization:
You also get lead generation focused form and CTA blocks for your pages.
In terms of targeting, you can target CTAs by traffic source, URL, device type, and more. Frequency capping controls are also included.
Robust analytics are built-in to track conversions plus A/B testing to optimize pages and CTAs.
You can also create popups and landing pages to integrate directly with email service providers and list building platforms.
Leadpages excels at building dedicated, high-converting landing pages quickly and easily.
Key Features to Look For in CTA Plugins
Now that you’ve seen an overview of how the most popular WordPress call to action plugins work, let’s explore the key features and capabilities to look for when choosing a CTA tool.
Design Flexibility & Customization
The design, layout, copy, and visual appearance of your CTAs have a big impact on conversion rates.
Look for plugins that offer:
Pre-made templates – Professionally designed CTA templates you can use out of the box. Saves time vs designing fully custom CTAs.
Easy customization – Ability to quickly customize colors, fonts, sizing, layouts and more without coding.
Drag and drop builders – Visual page builders to customize CTAs via dragging, dropping and arranging elements visually. Easiest way to customize.
Responsiveness – CTAs should work perfectly across all devices. Plugin should handle responsiveness for you.
Animation effects – Attention-grabbing CSS animations improve CTA click through rates.
Design flexibility is key for matching your brand style and personality.
Targeting Rules & Triggers
Not all website visitors are equal. Showing the right CTA to the right visitor at the right time is crucial.
Advanced CTA plugins have robust targeting and triggers such as:
- Traffic source – Display to visitors from Google, social media etc
- GEO targeting – Display to visitors in specific countries/cities
- URL targeting – Show on certain pages or posts
- Scroll depth triggering – Display after scrolling past a point
- Exit-intent – Display when user is about to leave
- Frequency capping – Limit display count per user
The more advanced the targeting rules, the higher your CTA conversion rates can climb.
Analytics & A/B Testing
Understanding CTA performance and running split tests is key to optimization.
Ensure your plugin provides:
Conversion tracking – Track submissions, clicks and conversions for each CTA.
A/B testing – Run split tests of CTAs to determine the highest converting version.
Page level analytics – See which pages are generating the most CTA conversions on your site.
Analytics and A/B testing allow you to fine tune CTAs for maximum performance.
Email Marketing Integrations
If you want to grow your email list, the ability to connect your WordPress popup or forms to top email services is vital for list building.
Look for native or third party integrations with:
- MailChimp
- Constant Contact
- AWeber
- ConvertKit
- GetResponse
And more.
List integration streamlines collecting opt-ins directly within your CTAs.
Best Practices for High-Converting CTAs
While WordPress call to action plugins provide the tools, you still need to use smart strategy and best practices to drive maximum conversions.
Here are 7 science-backed tactics for dramatically improving your CTA performance:
1. Use high contrast colors – CTAs with bright, high contrast colors like orange buttons on white backgrounds capture attention while subtle, low contrast CTAs are ignored.
2. Limit to one CTA per page – Multiple competing calls to action dilute conversions. Guide visitors to one clear next step.
3. Speak directly to your audience – Use “you” oriented copy focused on reader benefits vs features.
4. Find the ideal placement – Test CTAs in sidebars, content, headers/footers, and as popups. Placement impacts performance.
5. Make CTAs large and clear – Don’t hide your calls to action. Big buttons/links clearly visible will convert better.
6. Use urgency triggers – Countdown timers, exclusivity claims, and limited availability signals boost response.
7. Provide social proof – Display numbers like “Join 25k+ subscribers”. Evidence of past action increases conversions.
Follow these best practices with your preferred WordPress CTA plugin for big conversion rate improvements.
Conclusion & Next Steps
Adding high-converting calls to action is one of the fastest ways to grow your website traffic, leads, sales, and revenue.
Powerful WordPress call to action plugins make the process easy and eliminate the need for design or coding skills.
Now that you know how the leading options work and what features to look for, you can select the right CTA tool for your specific goals and budget.
Most plugins offer free trials so you can test drive them first. Play around and explore all the capabilities.
Then ultimately invest in the solution that empowers you to quickly build CTAs that convert and unlock your website’s maximum potential.
What CTA use cases are you most interested in for your WordPress site? Share your plans and questions in the comments section below!
