Whether you want to advertise a sale, your newest product or a specific landing page a notification bar is the way to go. This simple addition to your site commands attention and helps drive traffic to your money making pages. But even if your WordPress theme doesn’t include this feature, it’s easy to add a notification bar with a plugin.

Depending on your needs, there are quite a few notification bar options available. But we’ve put together a list of what we think are your best options. Each of the plugins we’re sharing have been recently updated and offer the ability to add a link (which is perhaps the most important key feature of a WordPress notification bar). So let’s get started!

1. Easy Notification Bar

Add a simple notice bar to your WordPress site with the Easy Notification Bar plugin. This option really is the easiest on our list – just install and head to the live customizer to setup your notification bar. The plugin includes quick and easy options to add a tagline, set a text alignment, choose a font size, edit your button text, add a link and customize the background/text color. That’s it! You can add a notification bar to your WordPress site in minutes. Best of all, this lightweight plugin works with most themes (including our own Total theme) and plays nice with popular plugins (like the WPBakery Page Builder and Elementor).

2. FooBar

Add custom notification bars with FooBar. This popular plugin includes options for unlimited notice bars, multiple notification types (add announcements, CTAs and cookie notices), customization and styling options, 8 ready to use color schemes, visibility settings, emoji support and easy back or front end preview.

But for a more professional look you’ll definitely want to upgrade to Foobar Pro. This enables options for advanced notification bar layout options (including a countdown bar), gradients, custom colors and font sizes, 12 notification locations, impressive animation effects, and top notch support from the dev team

3. Brave

Looking for something with more options? Consider Brave. This all-in-one plugin offers tons of features for sticky notification bars as well as advanced forms, interactive popups, quizzes, cookie notice, social chat, related post recommendation, and so much more. And everything is easily customizable with the Brave drag and drop editor. You can add your own text, colors, countdown, button, images and overlays, icons, newsletter forms, etc with just a few clicks. So even if you’re a complete newbie to WordPress you can design the perfect notification bar (or other lead capture tool) with Brave.

4. Hello Bar

For a few more added options, we recommend checking out Hello Bar. The free version of this plugin includes basic design settings (like color, top or bottom placement, size and button style), 1 live A/B split test (premium is unlimited), display your Hello Bar to everyone or just on mobile (or limit it to your homepage if you upgrade). One thing to note is that you cannot remove the Hello Bar branding unless you upgrade to a premium plan, which starts at about $24/mo if you select an annual Growth plan.

5. NotiBar

Notibar is a free and feature rich notification bar plugin. It’s built with super clean design and live preview editor to let you add a top bar in the shortest amount of time. There’s tons to customize your notification bars with the plugin’s options for colors, text, click-to-action, container width, absolute or fixed position, alignments, dismiss button (to hide or toggle close your notice bar) and more. You can also define which pages a notice bar appears on (based on all pages, all posts or specific IDs).

6. WPFront Notification Bar

WPFront is a bit less intuitive, but nonetheless is a good option if you’re looking for a free notification bar plugin. The plugin features its own panel with options for sticky, scroll offset, bar height, auto-close, message, button action (link or Javascript) and more. But a unique feature is the ability to definite set dates and user roles to display your notification bars for. This makes WPFront a great choice if you want to promote limited time promos or special announcements for logged in subscribers (or even your authors).

7. WP Notification Bars

The WP Notification Bars plugin offers a simple way to create an alert bar for your WordPress powered site. Create an unlimited number of bars with custom text, buttons, etc. Plus there are settings to display your notification bar on specific pages (or posts), to Google or Facebook visitors – a great feature if you want to offer different notifications to visitors from various traffic sources. The plugin is also translation ready and includes colors pickers for custom background, text and button colors.

8. Top Bar

With the Top Bar plugin from WP Darko, you can design your own topbar to display messages and links to your site visitors. Choose your color, visibility on scroll, message and button text, as well as colors. There is a Pro version available for advanced options (bottom border, delay, option to close, font sizes, and user visibility).

9. Announcement Bar

The Announcement Bar plugin makes it easy to add alerts throughout your website. And since the plugin is fully responsive, your message will be visible to your readers on all their devices. The plugin includes lots of great options so you can create announcements that match your brand and your website. First decide if you want an announcement fixed to your header, footer or your sidebar. Then you can choose from 12 background colors/styles, 2 style elements (paperclip or bookmark), 3 transitions, and 5 custom fonts. Create announcements that really pop from your site to encourage your readers to click!

10. Apex Notification Bar Lite

The Apex Notification Bar Lite plugin includes a handful of options to create your own alert or notice bar. Choose from 5 pre-styled templates, or customize using 5 notice bar component and included social icons. The Apex Notification Bar Lite does offer options for a sticky bar – so the notice stays on the screen even when visitors to your site scroll down. Or you can enable the show/hide option to give readers the ability to close the notification. Want more? There is a premium version available for advanced positioning, scheduled bars, countdown timer, custom fonts and tons more customization options.

11. HashBar

Last on our list is the HashBar notification bar for WordPress. Compatible with the Visual Composer and King Composer, it’s a great addition even if you are using a page builder on your site. The plugin allows you to decide which pages it’s shown on, set the positioning, customize the colors and of course add your own text. But if you want access to the shortcode generator, sticky and transparent header styles, mobile breakpoint settings, notification bar scheduling and more you will have to upgrade to the premium version.

To wrap up, announcement and notification bars are a great way to draw attention to important information. You can direct your readers to an exclusive sale, new content, a newsletter signup, or other featured content. Hopefully this list has helped you find the right notification bar plugin for your WordPress site.

Have any questions? Or other plugins to recommend? Just leave us a comment below -we’d love to hear from you.