A website that shows a popup soon after the page has loaded will suffer in ranking over the websites that don’t have popups. Google strives to give its users the best possible experience and it’s a well-known fact popups are not seen kindly by visitors to a websites. Google knows this and is going to help reduce the frustration caused by the annoying popups. Enough is enough, websites that show popups on mobile devices where the content is covered by the popups will have their ranking merit reduced.
Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html
We have always followed Goggles Best Practice when designing websites for Albury Wodonga and local businesses. We have never put a popup function on any of the website we built and now, years down the track it looks like the king is finally recognising the frustration the popups cause.
Popups that take a small section of the screen or popups that are out of the way are fine. So not all popups are bad, just the ones that pop up as you’re reading the core of the information you need and they take up the screen space which stops your concentration. Interestingly, studies show websites that have popups to get the visitor to sign up for newsletters have a greater subscriber rate than the sites that don’t have newsletter popups. However I couldn’t find any mention or information on subscriber retention rate.
Summary: Popups suck! Need a popup on your website removed, or its function moved to the sidebar where it won’t annoy your website visitors. Contact us today and let’s discuss the best way to fix that popup mess.