Gravity Perks: What a popup!

Recently the wizards over at Gravity Wiz have come out with a new perk as part of their Gravity Forms add-on pack. Gravity Forms is our preferred form plugin we’ve used on nearly every website we’ve worked on, and using Gravity Perks this takes this to a new level. And when we heard about Gravity Wiz’s new popup plugin we couldn’t wait to take a look.

Starting off strong, the plugin is part of the existing Gravity Perks suite adding even more value to an already exceptionally good value and time-saving suite. However, even compared to other popup plugins we’ve tried, it excels at a lot of functionality.

Firstly, a wonderful popup debugger (pictured) which allows site admins to see why a popup was triggered, how far away it is from being triggered and removing cookies etc. It’s absolutely beautifully designed for something as simple as a debugging tool, and allows for comprehensive testing which is crucial in ensuring popups are as effective as they can be. Yes, a lot of people hate them but they do drive attention and messaging, but targeting them to not be annoying is important!

Next is a feature barely documented by the wizards, yet we noticed and is one of the best features of the plugin. For many popups, you wish to have a call to action such a form to submit an email address and receive a voucher, or some other value proposition to customers. The plugin does not load the popup straight away, but instead preloads the popup when the customer gets close to the popup being opened which massively affects PageSpeed.

PageSpeed is incredibly important and with forms needing CAPTCHAs and potentially other scripts to help prevent spam, or to do other functions such as take payments, so the first thing PageSpeed will flag is inclusion of these scripts. Yet if you only need them in a popup, nothing will load until the popup is about to spring up! And for those fast users, a loading spinner is provided until the popup is ready. Genius!

And finally, many WordPress popup plugins will say they offer exit intent for their popup offerings. They do, but many of them are locked behind premium versions which add extra costs to a website which in many cases is not a great experience. Exit intent is included with Gravity Perks Popups which is incredible!

However the only downside we’ve seen is the popups do not have a fully visual editor and will likely need some HTML and CSS added to the popup editor to look great. This is potentially an upside though as it means heavy HTML and CSS is not output to your website, again affecting PageSpeed.

With that, that’s our quick overview and look into Gravity Perks: Popups and how we think it’s one of the best WordPress popup plugins to be launched in quite a while, and can’t wait to see the next thing the wizards at Gravity Perks are about to release.

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