How to Add a COVID-19 Notice to Your WordPress Website

Are you looking for a way to keep your customers in the loop with the uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic?

With the rapidly changing situation, you might be dealing with changing business hours, new social distancing rules, shipping delays, or any number of other situations in which you need a way to quickly communicate changes to your customers.

On your website, one of the quickest and most noticeable ways to communicate these types of changes is with a popup. Popups are hard for people to ignore, which is exactly what you want when you’re trying to share important information.

To help you connect with your customers, we’ll show you step-by-step how to add a popup COVID-19 notice to your WordPress website for free using the WP Popups plugin.

Here’s an example of what you’ll be able to create:

How to Create an Effective COVID-19 Notice On WordPress

To create a COVID-19 notice, you can use the free version of WP Popups that’s available at WordPress.org.

Here’s how to set everything up…

1. Decide What Content to Include

With a COVID-19 notice, your main goal is to quickly and effectively provide answers to your customers’ most important questions during the Coronavirus pandemic.

What these questions are depends on your business. As you interact with customers, you probably have a good idea of what those questions are.

We encourage you to base your content around the real issues that your customers are dealing with, but here are some examples:

• eCommerce stores – customers are probably concerned with shipping delays, what your stock status is (e.g. will your supply chain be affected), etc.
• Local businesses – customers are probably wondering about opening hours, social distancing rules (do they have to book an appointment now?), etc.
• Suppliers – customers will want to know if their orders will still be delivered on time, etc.

In a lot of situations, you might have too much information to communicate in a single popup.

In that case, a good compromise is to:

• Give a short answer to the most important questions in the popup.
• Add a link in the popup that takes visitors to a page or blog post with more detailed information.

2. Install the WP Popups Plugin

Now, it’s time to get into the technical stuff.

To get started, install the free WP Popups plugin by:

• Opening your WordPress dashboard.
• Going to Plugins → Add New.
• Searching for “WP Popups”.

3. Create Your Popup and Choose Layout

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, go to WP Popups → Add New to create your COVID-19 notice popup.

You can choose to start from one of the premade layouts. Or, you can click to select a blank template to design things from scratch.

4. Add Your Content

Next, you can add your content using the text editor in the Content tab. You can use the editor to add formatting, including inserting links to posts that contain additional information.

As you add content, you should see the preview of your popup automatically update:

5. Customize Design

Once you’ve added your content, go to the Appearance tab to customize your popup’s appearance.

First, use the Popup Position to control what type of popup to create. For example, if you want to create a notification bar instead of a centered popup, choose the Top Bar or Bottom Bar options.

You can also use the other options to control the size and style of your popup:

6. Choose Display Rules and Trigger

Next, go to the Display Rules tab to control where/when to display your popup.

To display your popup sitewide, you can leave the settings as the defaults. However, you can also add your own display rules if you only want to display your popup on some parts of your site.

For example, you could only display a delayed shipping notice on the eCommerce portion of your site:

To control when to trigger your popup, go to the Settings tab and select Triggers.

To display your popup as soon as a visitor lands on the page, set the Seconds after page load equal to zero:

7. Publish Your Popup

To make your COVID-19 popup notice live, click the Publish button in the top-right corner.

That’s it! Your visitors will start seeing the notice according to the settings that you chose.

To gain even more control over your COVID-19 announcement, consider upgrading to the full version of WP Popups to access features such as:

• More positions and triggers
• Geotargeting (e.g. only display your notice to visitors from affected locations)
• Scheduling (e.g. only run your notice during store hours)
• Lots more