How to Add a Site-Wide Announcement in WordPress (Bar, Popup, or Slide-In)

Most WordPress tutorials about site-wide announcements stop at notification bars. That’s a problem, because notification bars are only one of three formats that work for site-wide messaging. Lightbox popups and slide-ins are equally valid, depending on how urgent your message is and how much attention you want it to grab.

This guide covers all three. You’ll learn what each format does best, how to pick the right one for your situation, and how to set up a site-wide announcement step-by-step using the ConvertForce plugin.

What Is a Site-Wide Announcement?

A site-wide announcement is a message that appears on every page of your WordPress website, regardless of which page a visitor lands on. It’s used to communicate something that applies to your whole audience. It can be a sale, a shipping policy, a launch, a maintenance window — without forcing visitors to find a specific page to see it.

Common use cases include:

Limited-time sales and promotional offers
Free shipping announcements
New product or feature launches
Scheduled maintenance or downtime notices
Cookie consent and privacy notices
Holiday hours or seasonal updates
Important policy changes

The reason these work site-wide rather than on individual pages is simple: you can’t predict which page a visitor will land on first. If your free shipping promotion only shows on your homepage, anyone arriving via Google search to a product page or blog post will miss it entirely.

3 Ways to Display a Site-Wide Announcement

There are three formats that work for site-wide announcements, and each one fits a different kind of message.

Notification Bar

A notification bar is a thin sticky strip that sits at the top or bottom of every page. It stays visible as visitors scroll, which makes it ideal for ongoing messages that don’t need immediate action — free shipping promos, cookie notices, holiday hours.

Bars are the least disruptive of the three formats. They’re always visible without ever blocking content, but they’re also the easiest to ignore. Use a bar when you want persistent visibility without interrupting the browsing experience.

Lightbox Popup

A lightbox popup is a modal window that appears over your page content with a dimmed background. It’s intentionally interruptive — visitors have to engage with it (or close it) before they can continue browsing.

Popups demand attention, which makes them the wrong choice for low-priority messages but the right choice for high-stakes announcements: a flash sale countdown, a major policy update, an end-of-year offer that converts directly to revenue. The trade-off is that aggressive popups annoy visitors. Use them sparingly and trigger them with a delay or exit intent rather than firing on page load.

Slide-In

A slide-in is a small panel that slides in from the corner of the screen, usually the bottom-right without blocking page content. It sits somewhere between a bar and a popup in terms of attention: more noticeable than a bar, less interruptive than a popup.

Slide-ins are a good middle ground for medium-priority messages: newsletter signup prompts, soft promotions, version update announcements. They draw the eye without forcing a response.

Which Format Should You Use?

Here’s a quick comparison:

Format	Visibility	Disruptiveness	Best for
Notification Bar	Always visible	Low	Ongoing offers, shipping promos, cookie notices
Lightbox Popup	High attention	High	High-priority launches, flash sales, major updates
Slide-In	Medium attention	Medium	Newsletter prompts, soft promotions, feature updates

ConvertForce supports all three formats natively from the WordPress block editor, which means you can switch between them without changing plugins or learning new interfaces. The setup process is nearly identical for each — only the design canvas changes.

How to Add a Site-Wide Announcement in WordPress with ConvertForce

ConvertForce is a free WordPress conversion plugin that runs natively on the Gutenberg block editor. It supports all three site-wide announcement formats — bars, lightbox popups, and slide-ins — and works without any page builder dependency.

For this tutorial, we’ll set up a notification bar (the most common format for site-wide messaging). The steps are nearly identical for the other two formats, and we’ll cover what changes at the end.

Step 1: Install and Activate ConvertForce

From your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New and search for “ConvertForce.” Find the plugin in the results, click Install Now, then click Activate.

You can also download the plugin directly from the WordPress.org plugin repository and upload the zip file manually.

Once activated, a new ConvertForce menu item appears in your WordPress admin sidebar.

Step 2: Create a New Campaign

Go to ConvertForce → New Campaign in the admin sidebar.

Give your campaign a name you’ll recognize later, like “Holiday Sale Bar” or “Free Shipping Announcement.”

Step 3: Choose Your Display Type

ConvertForce supports three campaign types: Bar, Lightbox, and Slide-In. For a site-wide announcement bar, select Bar.

If you’d rather use a lightbox or slide-in instead, the rest of this tutorial applies almost identically — only Step 4 (the design step) really differs. We’ll cover what changes at the end.

Step 4: Choose an Announcement Bar Pattern

ConvertForce includes several pre-designed patterns to start from:

• Cookie bar
• Sale notification bar
• Free shipping bar
• New Year sale bar

You can also choose Start From Scratch to design your own.

For this tutorial, we’ll use the New Year Sale pattern as a starting point. Patterns give you a fully designed bar with all the right blocks already in place — you just edit the content and styling to match your message.

Step 5: Customize Your Announcement Bar

The campaign opens in the WordPress block editor, which means designing your bar works exactly like editing a regular WordPress post. Click any block to edit it directly.

From the Settings tab in the right sidebar, you can configure the bar’s layout — orientation, justification, alignment, gap between items, minimum height, max width, and the close button.

From the Styles tab, you can adjust background, box shadow, padding, margin, border, and border radius.

Click any individual block (the heading, paragraph, or button) to change text color, button style, font, and so on.

A typical announcement bar contains:

• A short message — for example, “🎉 Limited Time: 25% Off All Plans”
• A CTA button — for example, “Claim Discount”
• A close icon

Keep the message short. Visitors should understand it in under two seconds.

Step 6: Set Display Conditions to Site-Wide

This is the step where “site-wide” actually gets configured. Open the Campaign tab and look at the display conditions.

By default, ConvertForce shows your campaign on the entire site — exactly what you want for a site-wide announcement, so you can leave the default in place. If you ever want to exclude specific pages (for example, hiding a sale bar from the actual sale landing page so it doesn’t feel redundant), you can add exclusion rules here.

You can also set the position of the bar — top of the page or bottom — from the Position section. Top placement is the standard for announcements; bottom placement is more common for cookie consent.

Step 7: Configure Triggers and Display Behavior

Triggers control when your bar appears. Display behavior controls how often it appears and what happens after a visitor closes it.

The free version of ConvertForce includes the page load trigger, which displays the bar as soon as the page finishes loading. For a site-wide announcement that’s meant to be persistently visible, page load is exactly the right choice.

ConvertForce Pro will add three more triggers, all coming soon:

• Exit intent — fires when a visitor moves their cursor toward the close button (or scrolls up rapidly on mobile)
• Scroll depth — fires after a visitor has scrolled a specific percentage of the page
• User inactivity — fires after a visitor has been idle for a set amount of time

For display behavior, you have two controls:

• Display frequency — how often the same visitor sees the bar (every page load or once per session)
• When closed — what happens after a visitor dismisses it (keep showing or hide forever)

For most site-wide announcements, the friendliest combination is “Once per session” plus “Hide forever.” Visitors who close the bar shouldn’t have to keep dismissing it on every page they visit.

Step 8: Publish and Test

Once your bar is configured, click Publish. Your announcement bar is now live across your entire WordPress site.

Open your site in an incognito window (so cached display rules don’t affect you) and run through this quick checklist:

• The bar appears on every page, including the homepage, blog posts, and product pages
• The bar looks good on mobile — no overflowing text or broken layouts
• The CTA button links to the right page
• The close button works and respects your “when closed” setting
• The bar doesn’t conflict with your theme’s header on either desktop or mobile

If anything looks off, head back to the campaign editor and adjust.

Want a Lightbox Popup or Slide-In Instead?

If a bar doesn’t fit your message, the same plugin handles lightbox popups and slide-ins with nearly identical steps. The only real difference is what you build on the design canvas in Step 4 — everything else (display conditions, triggers, behavior, publishing) works the same.

Lightbox Popup

A lightbox popup replaces the thin bar canvas with a full modal you can build using any WordPress block — images, videos, multi-column layouts, custom forms. Position settings don’t apply (the modal centers itself on screen), and you’ll usually want to adjust the page-load delay so visitors get a few seconds with your content before the popup interrupts them.

For a complete walkthrough, see our guide on how to add a lightbox popup in WordPress.

Slide-In

A slide-in places your campaign in a corner of the screen — usually bottom-right — without blocking the rest of the page. The setup is the same as a bar, with corner placement settings replacing the top/bottom positioning. (Slide-in tutorial coming soon.)

The takeaway: once you’ve built one campaign in ConvertForce, the other two formats take only a few minutes. Display rules, triggers, and behavior controls are shared across all three.

Best Practices for Site-Wide Announcements

A few principles that consistently make site-wide announcements more effective:

Run one announcement at a time. Stacking a bar plus a popup plus a slide-in on the same page overwhelms visitors and makes none of them effective. Pick the format that fits your message and commit to it.

Match the format to the urgency. A flash sale belongs in a popup. A cookie notice belongs in a bar. A newsletter prompt belongs in a slide-in. Mismatched formats either underperform or annoy visitors.

Exclude the page you’re promoting. If your bar promotes a sale, don’t show it on the sale landing page itself — it just adds visual clutter where the visitor is already converting.

Always include a close button. Visitors who feel trapped by an announcement will leave your site entirely. Make the close button obvious and easy to tap on mobile.

Test on mobile separately. Mobile screens have far less real estate than desktops. A bar that looks clean on a 1440px monitor might consume 15% of a phone screen.

Keep the message short. A site-wide announcement competes with everything else on the page for attention. If readers can’t grasp the message in two seconds, they won’t engage with it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Final Thoughts

Site-wide announcements aren’t just notification bars. Bars, lightbox popups, and slide-ins each serve different message types, and the best format depends on the urgency of what you’re announcing rather than on what your plugin happens to support.

ConvertForce covers all three from the WordPress block editor, which means choosing between them becomes a campaign-level decision — pick the format, design it with familiar blocks, set it to display site-wide, and publish. If you’ve been settling for a bar because that’s what your old plugin offered, it’s worth installing ConvertForce and exploring the other two formats. The right format often makes a much bigger difference than the message itself.

Download ConvertForce free to get started.