The easiest way to add a Mailchimp popup in WordPress

A while back I published a blog post about how to add the Mailchimp pop-up subscribe form to WordPress. The solution was more of a hack than anything else however worked for most people.

Mailchimp Pop-up Subscription Form for WordPress

Fortunately WordPress themselves now offer a far simpler means of adding the Mailchimp pop-up form to your WordPress Website; with today’s release of Jetpack version 4.5 you can now add the form script as provided by Mailchimp directly into a new widget called Mailchimp Subscriber Popup that comes with Jetpack.

No more amending code needed to add the form to your website. It is important to remember that the form won’t show to visitors that have already seen the form on your website.

But did you know that a popup will hurt your Google ranking?

How the WordPress Mailchimp Subscriber Popup kills SEO

WordPress is widely known to be simple to crawl by the various search engines. It’s therefore surprising that Automattic (parent of WordPress) provide a simpler way to add the popup when Google have made it very clear (in a post from a few months ago) “that pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly”. Google continue that “showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page” or
“displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content” are “examples of techniques that make content less accessible to a user”.

Google spell out very clearly that a pop-up has a good chance of hurting your SERPs ranking. My advice is to forget about using the Mailchimp popup subscribe form and rather add a form to your widget area, page or post using an ‘SEO safe’ means such as using the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin.