6 Best WordPress Announcement Plugins (Free & Paid)

In the vast digital expanse, WordPress stands as the cornerstone, shaping virtual landscapes for millions. Within this realm, announcements serve as the digital heartbeat, pulsating vital information to online visitors. Think of them as notifications – silent yet powerful, connecting websites with their audience. 

These notification bars, known by various monikers like alert bars, announcement bars, hello bars, sticky bars, or floating bars, are streamlined banners gracing websites with simplicity.  A splash of solid color adorned with concise text and a strategic call-to-action button, these unassuming bars possess remarkable power.

Why do these unpretentious notification bars matter? Imagine a platform to promote events, contests, or the fervor of a limited-time product launch. They become the digital heralds, weaving a sense of urgency and importance around these occasions. In the bustling online milieu, where attention is a prized commodity, these bars cut through the noise with elegance. In this article, we’ll discover the remarkable impact of these subtle bars in enhancing events, contests, and limited-time product launches within the digital realm.

Announcement Bar 

The “Announcement Bar” plugin, a subtle yet captivating digital communicator, invites users with its discreet yet attention-grabbing design. This virtual canvas, harmoniously integrated, becomes a conduit for essential messages, effortlessly blending with your site’s architecture.

The plugin provides diverse design presets and presentation options, granting you full control over the style and ambiance of your announcements, all within its lightweight yet feature-packed framework. It streamlines the management of website announcements, allowing you to automate and schedule them for specific time frames, ensuring announcements appear on your website quickly, easily, and more efficiently. You can easily personalize the plugin’s appearance with the available attractive design options or your unique styles, and it’ll function perfectly with any WordPress theme from the start.

You can modify the appearance and placement of the Announcement Bar, making it appear as a sticky bar on posts or pages, in sidebar widgets, or wherever the shortcode is added. In addition to all the available features, you can enrich your announcements with a ‘More…’ tag, allowing visitors to expand the content and include various other shortcodes (column, button, and map) for additional content within the Announcement Bar.

Key Features: 

Schedule announcements automatically for specific time periods.
Customizable announcement bar appearance with design presets or unique styles.
Compatible with all WordPress themes for universal use.
Ensures responsive, high-quality display on all devices and platforms.
Highlight messages effectively to capture visitor attention.
Ability to place announcements flexibly on bars, posts, pages, or widgets.
Offers to expand content with a ‘More…’ tag for in-depth information.
Easy integration with multiple plugins for enhanced features.

Price: 

The Announcement Bar plugin, available at $19, simplifies your tasks, offering effortless efficiency and a stress-free experience.

Easy Notification Bar

The plugin “Easy Notification Bar” is a versatile WordPress tool designed to enhance your website’s communication with visitors. It offers a straightforward solution for displaying important messages and announcements.

Incorporating “Easy Notification Bar” on your website brings a multitude of features to your fingertips. From customizable design options that seamlessly blend with your site’s aesthetics to flexible placement choices ensuring maximum visibility, this plugin offers the ultimate control. With the plugin, effortlessly notify visitors about current sales, hot products, warnings, or other vital messages via a notification bar, allowing you to incorporate them within the text or display them with buttons adjacent to your message using live customization options via the WordPress customizer. In contrast to other plugins that employ absolute positioning, this plugin elegantly embeds the notice bar immediately after the body tag, guaranteeing a conflict-free, perfect display on any well-coded theme.

The notification bar from this plugin is “static” by default, appearing at the top of your site and becoming “hidden” as you scroll, enhancing usability and SEO. In the new versions,  the sticky option allows you to keep the notification bar visible while scrolling down the page, ensuring uninterrupted visibility. You can also enable the close icon to give your users the option to click on an “x” icon within the top bar, allowing them to hide the message for their current session and any subsequent visits.

Key Features: 

Notification bar displayed on top, site-wide, or on the homepage only.
Simple configuration.
Provides a close icon for user convenience.
Option for sticky display, ensuring continuous visibility.
Easy customizable settings for background, color, text alignment, and font size. 
Ability to include an optional callout button.
Responsive design and lightweight. 

Price: 

The plugin is available for free, open to all users.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads, the premier WordPress lead generation plugin, is your ultimate list-building solution, incorporating advanced conversion tactics employed by intelligent businesses and forward-thinking marketers. With this plugin in hand, witness explosive list growth and unlock a multitude of incredible business benefits. 

Thrive Leads enables users to promote limited-time offers or communicate time-sensitive information through a simple notification displayed at the top of posts and pages. These notifications can convey brief messages or promote services, products, or offers. 

The plugin guarantees personalized user experiences as visitors can choose to close or keep the notification open. Users can choose from various Sticky Ribbon templates and customize text font size and Background Section padding. The plugin provides Trigger, Display Frequency, and Position options for strategic placement and timing to give your announcement bar an ideal option to use. 

Users can also optimize their notification bar headers for tablet and mobile devices, ensuring a smooth experience across platforms. Thrive Leads offers a comprehensive solution, allowing users to capture attention and convey messages effectively to their online audience.

Key Features: 

 Display notifications for events, sales, contests, opening hours, and limited-time offers.
Offer user control.
Choose from pre-designed Sticky Ribbon templates.
Easily customize text, images, and call-to-action buttons within the chosen template.
Adjust dimensions to fit specific design requirements.
Ensure seamless display on tablets and mobile devices with mobile optimization.

Price: 

The feature-packed Thrive Leads is a Pro plugin that will cost you $99/year. 

Ultimate Blocks

Ultimate Blocks redefines content creation with its arsenal of 22 essential blocks, providing limitless possibilities to enhance your website. In one plugin, discover all the essential blocks you need, enabling you to explore 22 ways to build excellent content and effortlessly elevate your website’s appeal.

Ultimate Blocks shines with its array of features, including the adaptable Styled Box block, offering four distinct templates – Notification Box, Feature Box, Number Box, and Bordered Box. Notably, the Notification Box stands out, enabling you to highlight vital information within your posts or pages. With four unique styles to choose from, this block provides flexibility and creativity, ensuring your notifications effectively capture attention. Furthermore, Ultimate Blocks introduces innovative notification widgets that seamlessly integrate, enhancing the user experience and making your website dynamic and engaging for visitors.

Key Features: 

22 custom blocks. 
SEO-Friendly. 
Lightweight and responsive. 
Easy to use. 
Desktop and Mobile Messages. 
Customizable background and text colors. 
Enable/Disable individual blocks. 

Price: 

Ultimate Blocks adopts a freemium approach, providing both a free and Pro version. The Pro version, available for $49/year with a single-site license, offers exclusive features to make it one special plugin to have in everyone’s collection. 

Bulletin

The Bulletin Plugin is a powerful and versatile tool designed for WordPress websites, empowering administrators to communicate important announcements and updates to their users effectively.

Bulletin, with its impressive 1k active installs and outstanding 5-star average review, emerges as the ultimate solution for website announcements. The plugin’s elegant design and user-friendly interface have garnered praise, making it the preferred choice for emergency alerts, sale offers, countdowns, Cookie notices, important notices of your website, and more. The plugin offers a versatile experience with support for desktop and mobile messages, customizable background and text colors, and various display options, including header, floating at the bottom, and sticky footer layouts. Users will enjoy the flexibility to customize their content, adjusting parameters like max-width, text alignment, and font size to create a uniquely tailored and visually appealing interaction interface.

The Pro version of the plugin, Bulletin, comes loaded with features, including buttons and call-to-actions with customizable links or JavaScript events, along with options for custom icons and stylish Google fonts for a unique look. Users can display multiple messages within one bulletin, using rotation or marquee style, and choose advanced placement options for specific pages or logged-in users. It also provides scheduling, expiration, WordPress Network support, and the option to dismiss bulletins with a specified hide duration.

Key Features: 

Create limitless bulletins using markdown and emojis.
Add buttons with links or trigger JS events.
Customize with trendy icons and stylish Google fonts.
Display multiple messages within a single bulletin.
Target specific pages or logged-in users for bulletin visibility.
Utilize live countdown and schedule bulletin expiration.
Include a close icon and adjust the hide duration.
Choose from header, floating, or sticky footer display options.

Price: 

The Bulletin plugin introduces advanced functionalities in its Pro version, which is available for $29 annually and offers unique features not found in the free version.

Simple Banner

Simple Banner provides a user-friendly solution to improve your WordPress site with attractive announcement banners. Using the plugin, you can easily create and manage banners that blend smoothly into your site’s design, offering a visually engaging experience.

The plugin serves users with a multitude of features, simplifying the process of displaying a sleek announcement banner or bar at the top of their website. Within the settings, users can seamlessly adjust links, text, and background colors and further personalize their design with custom CSS. A built-in preview section enables users to visualize changes in real time before saving, ensuring a tailored and seamless user experience.

Simple Banner might prove to be a valuable asset for users with its straightforward approach and easy functionalities. Its simple handling of complex tasks and its ability to fulfill basic needs effectively guarantee users a smooth and impactful enhancement of their websites and make it a standout choice.

Key Features: 

Flexible and easy to handle.  
Display an announcement banner or bar at the top of the website.
User-friendly control settings.  
Customizable color options for the bar’s texts, links, or background. 
Ability to add custom CSS. 
Advanced preview feature integrated into the settings to display your changes. 

Price: 

The usage of the Simple Banner plugin comes at no cost to you. It’s completely free. 

Conclusion: 

In the world of the internet, grabbing attention is like catching a fleeting star. That’s where WordPress Announcement Plugins shine brightest. These subtle notification bars, adorned with straightforward messages, are vital in making events, contests, and product launches unmissable. 

Read the article carefully and try to figure out which grabs your eye and suits your requirements perfectly. Write to us if you want to tell us something. Use our comment section. Until next time, farewell.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase using any of these links, we will get a small commission without any extra cost to you.