One of the most crucial things for the success and growth of any website is to have an ever-growing number of page visits. This can be done by attracting new visitors as well, however, converting them into regular visitors, and thereafter into customers is more important in terms of growth, and especially for SEO.
One of the best ways to create and attract return visitors is to have a subscription option where you can regularly communicate with your visitors via email or other types of notifications. This is important whether you sell products and services or run a blog.
In this article, we look at 7 top subscription WordPress plugins that can help you to do exactly that.
Our top 7 picks
1. Newsletter
This is one of the top picks for this segment of plugins and has over 300,000 active installs and a 4.6-star rating.
Newsletter offers most of the usual features you would expect from this type of plugin right in their free plan. They include a subscription widget with unlimited subscribers and statistics, advanced targeting, single and double Opt-In, privacy checkbox for EU compliance, easy to use drag and drop composer, unlimited responsive newsletters, spam check and tracking, GDPR support, status panel, and importing subscribers.
Premium and Pro plans offer even more, with additional composer blocks, auto-responder, reports, automated newsletters based on the latest posts, and many other integrations.
WordPress Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/newsletter/
Pricing: Free, Premium starting at $65, per year, 3 sites
2. Popups by OptinMonster – Best WordPress Popup Plugin
With over a million active installs and a 4.3-star rating, Popups is another popular subscription plugin on WordPress.
In addition to the usual bells and whistles, one of the most attractive features of Popups by OptinMonster is the customizability it gives you with regards to widget design. 6 main formats are supported, Lightbox popup, Fullscreen popup, Floating bar, Slide-in, Mobile, and In-line.
Integration with many third-party plugins, page-level targeting, and conversion analytics is also great. But, their most unique feature is Exit Intention monitoring through mouse-pointer behavior tracking. This helps to increase opt-ins with last-minute subscription forms. This is also replicated on mobile devices with their InactivitySensor.
WordPress Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/optinmonster/
Pricing: Free, Premium starting at $9 per month, per site
3. MailPoet – emails and newsletters in WordPress
MailPoet has been making WordPress plugins since 2011, and their emails and newsletters plugin has over 100,000 active installs and a 4.7-star rating.
In addition to most of the standard features, MailPoet allows you to build and disseminate newsletters right from within WordPress and also automatic emails for new subscriptions and posts. It also provides support for WooCommerce to send emails regarding new products.
MailPoet’s Premium plans offer many more features, such as insights on subscriptions and audience engagement. The most exciting feature would be that the Premium plan is free for small website owners with less than 1,000 subscribers.
WordPress Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailpoet/
Pricing: Free, Premium pricing - €100.50 (Approx. $110.58), per year for 1250 subscribers
4. Ninja Forms – The Easy and Powerful Forms Builder
NinjaForms is one of the most popular plugins on WordPress. It has over 1 million active installs and a 4.4-star rating.
One of the most attractive features it offers is the drag and drop form editor. With the possibility of creating unlimited forms in their free plan, this plugin suits any website irrespective of size. It supports different field types for data types such as dates, emails, and phone numbers, and performs validation to ensure accurate data entry.
NinjaForms allows managing your subscriber list right from the WordPress Dashboard. In addition, it also supports Google reCaptcha, Akismet, question/response fields, and honeypot fields by default.
Premium plans provide further features not limited to conditional login, multiple formats, file uploads, and priority support.
WordPress Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/ninja-forms/
Pricing: Free, Premium plans start at $99.00
5. MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress
MailChimp is one of the best overall email subscription management tools. This plugin now brings that awesomeness to WordPress. It has over 1 million active installs and a 4.8-star rating.
One of the main benefits of this plugin is that it allows you to connect your WordPress website to your existing MailChimp mailing lists and combine the functionality. You can have great forms on your website and use them to build up your mailing list. It connects seamlessly with default WordPress forms as well as many other external plugins, most of which are mentioned on our list.
Premium plans bring multiple forms, advanced integration with WooCommerce, email notifications, and detailed reports & statistics.
WordPress Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/
Pricing: Free, Premium plans start at $59, per year, for 1 site
6. Contact Form by WPForms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for WordPress
This is the plugin with the most number of active installs on our list, 3 million. It also has a near-perfect 4.9-star rating.
WPForms provides a drag & drop editor for creating elegant forms with over 150 pre-built templates and workflows. In addition to subscription forms, you will be able to create feedback forms, contact forms, payment forms, and many other types of forms in minutes. They are all fully responsive, as well.
Their Pro version brings much more with multi-page forms, file uploads, conditional logic, and payment integrations.
WordPress Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpforms-lite/
Pricing: Free, Pro starting at $31.60 per year, per site
7. Email Subscribers & Newsletters
This plugin has 100,000 active installs and a 4.6-star rating. It has been created to satisfy all the standard requirements of a website owner with regard to subscription forms.
Some of the stand-out features of this plugin are automatic or scheduled emails for new posts, single and double opt-in, email notifications for new sign-ups, automatic welcome emails, an HTML editor for creating notifications, track read status on emails, localization support, and friendly support.
Premium plans offer much more like premium email templates, SMTP & Pro email services, high security, integrations with other plugins, and premium customer support.
WordPress Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/email-subscribers/
Pricing: Free, Premium starting at $9 per month / $6 per month (billed annually)
Conclusion
All these plugins offer the standard features you would need to create a great sign-up form, and build a subscription list very quickly. However, some of them offer unique features like the strength of MailChimp and versatile drag & drop editors. Make sure to choose one of these and set up a proper sign-up form for your website; this is essential for impressing your visitors and making them want to return.
Another important attribute of your website that will increase your return user base is the page load speed. The lower the loading time, the more impressed your visitors will be, and this increases the chances of them returning. One way to ensure this is to employ a good CDN plugin. Publitio’s Offloading plugin can do just this for you. It will completely migrate all your images and static files to their servers and optimize them for size and quality so that they load with the lowest possible bandwidth needs. Check out Publitio’s plugins for optimizing your images, videos, and other assets.
