Full-screen mat

What to watch for. It opened the moment you arrived, covering everything. Dismiss it with either button and the page is yours.

The most interruptive thing here, used sparingly

A mat is not a popup over a page; it is a page in front of a page. Nothing shows through, nothing scrolls behind it, and there is no way to read on without dealing with it. That is the whole point, and it is also the reason to use it perhaps twice a year.

It earns its place for a launch, an age gate, a single question that genuinely has to be answered before the content makes sense, or a seasonal campaign where the offer is the page. Used for a newsletter signup, it is the fastest way to teach people to close your site.

Give people two ways out

This one has a primary button and a quiet decline underneath. Both close it, and the wording of the decline is yours to write. A mat with only one escape route, or with a cross hidden in a low-contrast corner, is the pattern that gets plugins written about for the wrong reasons.

Escape closes it too, and so does the overlay, unless you turn those off. The defaults assume you want people to be able to leave.

Why this one is in Pro

The free plugin implements three formats completely: modal, slide-in and announcement bar. The mat is not a locked version of one of those — the code that lays it out and animates it lives in the Pro plugin and is not present in the free one at all. That distinction matters more than it sounds: shipping a format you cannot use is exactly what the WordPress.org guidelines call trialware, and this plugin does not do it.

Remove Pro and a campaign built as a mat does not disappear or get rewritten. It renders unstyled, because the code for that format is gone. Put Pro back and it looks exactly as it did.

How this one is set up

• Format: full-screen mat
• Trigger: page load
• Primary button plus a worded decline
• Closes on Escape and on the overlay
• Frequency and scheduling as any other campaign
• Elements: heading, text, button, close link