Announcement Notification Bar – Notification Top Bar & Sticky Call to Action Banner vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

The Announcement Notification Bar is your go-to solution for creating effective announcement bars, scrolling notification bars, ** sticky notification banners**, and sticky headers on any WordPress site. If you are struggling to get visitors to notice your promotions or important updates, this WordPress top bar plugin provides a simple, high-visibility area that grabs attention without ruining the user experience. Unlike aggressive popups that can annoy users, a floating bar or footer notification offers a polite way to highlight discount codes, shipping policies, or maintenance alerts. It sits efficiently at the top or bottom of the screen, ensuring your key messages – like a Black Friday deal or a new feature launch – are always visible, helping you reduce bounce rates and improve conversions. Use Cases This versatile message bar adapts to various needs across different industries: Retail & E-Commerce: Run a free shipping bar or a flash sale countdown message to encourage instant purchases. A sticky promo bar ensures the offer stays in view as customers scroll. Bloggers & Publishers: Drive consistent traffic to your newest articles or affiliate partners with a scrolling news ticker or a catchy headline in a fixed header bar. Business & Corporate: Inform clients about holiday operating hours, service outages, or vital company news using a clear, professional alert banner. Events & Webinars: Build hype for upcoming live streams or workshops by placing a clickable event notification right where every visitor looks first. Why Choose This Notification Bar? We built this plugin to be both powerful for developers and easy for beginners. You don’t need to touch a single line of code to get a professional-looking marketing bar up and running. From the live preview in the dashboard to the smart targeting rules that let you show specific messages on your homepage versus your blog, every feature saves you time. Boost Sales: Highlight discount codes, flash sales, and special offers in a promo bar. Increase Engagement: Use emojis and animated scrolling text (running line) to catch eyeballs. Inform Users: Post important updates, maintenance alerts, or holiday hours in a clear top bar. Responsive & Lightweight: Loads fast and looks great on all mobile devices. Key Features Multiple Display Styles: Choose from Simple Text, Running Line (Marquee/Ticker), or Carousel (Rotating Slider) styles. Flexible Positioning: Place your sticky bar at the Top or Bottom of the page; keep it fixed or let it scroll. Full Customization: Control colors, fonts, and heights to match your brand identity perfectly. Emoji Support: Add emojis directly to your message for a friendly, modern touch 🎉. Advanced Call-to-Action (CTA): Add a button, make the whole bar clickable, or keep it as simple text. Smart Display Logic: Target your notification bar to the Homepage, Blog, or specific Posts/Pages. User-Friendly Controls: Includes a dismiss/close button so users can hide the bar (cookie support included). Mobile Responsive: Looks great on all devices (iPhone, Android, Tablet). Performance Optimized: Lightweight code ensuring fast page load times. Display Styles Simple: Clean and straightforward display Running Line: Scrolling text animation for attention-grabbing messages Carousel: Rotate between multiple messages automatically Call-to-Action Options No call-to-action for simple announcements Add a button with custom text and link Make the entire announcement notification bar clickable Display Control Choose exactly where your announcement notification bar appears: * Homepage * Blog page * Individual post types (Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types) * Automatic detection of public custom post types Privacy Policy This plugin includes an optional deactivation feedback form. If you choose to submit feedback when deactivating the plugin, the plugin collects and transmits the following data to the developer: Plugin name and version WordPress version Site name and URL The deactivation reason you select Any optional text you enter in the feedback field Your email address (only if you tick “You may contact me to help resolve the issue”) Purpose: We use this data solely to improve the plugin. We never sell, share, or use it for any other purpose. Retention: We permanently delete all submitted feedback within 7 days of receipt. Opt-out: Submitting feedback is entirely optional. You can click “Skip & Deactivate” at any time to deactivate without sending any data. Site owners can also disable the feedback form entirely by adding the following to their theme’s functions.php or a custom plugin: add_filter( 'anb_enable_feedback_collection', '__return_false' );

Compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load automatically with the powerful Smush image optimizer to keep your WordPress site fast, without losing quality. Smush makes it easy to optimize images, compress images, and deliver images faster across your entire WordPress site. This all-in-one image optimizer automatically reduces image file sizes, enables image lazy load, and serves modern formats like WebP and AVIF, all without breaking image quality or adding extra work. Whether you’re running a blog, store, or portfolio, Smush helps you optimize images at scale and keep your site fast with a trusted WordPress image optimizer. Trusted by 1+ Million Sites | 4.8/5 Star Rating Get everything you need to optimize images and speed up your site. Smush works out of the box with no complicated setup – just install and let it handle the rest. Compress images without losing quality Reduce image file size automatically while keeping your images sharp and clear. Smush is an easy-to-use image optimizer which let’s you compress images using both lossless and lossy compression, giving you the best balance of quality and performance without extra work. You can also compress images outside the media library using Directory Smush, making it easy to optimize images stored in theme folders, plugins, or other directories on your server. Lazy load images for faster pages Enable image lazy load across your site so images load only when needed. This image optimizer improves initial page speed and creates a smoother experience for visitors without extra configuration. Serve WebP and AVIF images automatically (PRO) Convert images to WebP and AVIF and serve them automatically to supported browsers. Smush helps you optimize images using next-gen formats to reduce file size and improve load times across your WordPress site. Deliver images faster with an Image CDN (PRO) Serve images through a global image CDN to reduce latency and improve load times for visitors around the world. 119 global CDN servers Up to 500 GB of bandwidth Faster image delivery based on visitor location Improved performance for image-heavy and high-traffic sites Automatically resize and fix image dimensions (PRO) Eliminate common PageSpeed warnings and improve layout stability with automatic image sizing. Smush dynamically resizes images to perfectly fit their containers, regardless of original size, helping fix the “Properly size images” warning in Google PageSpeed Insights. It also automatically adds missing width and height attributes to your images, improving rendering speed and reducing layout shifts. This helps you meet the “Ensure images have explicit width and height” recommendation without any manual work. Optimize your entire site, automatically Smush works across your whole site as a powerful image optimizer to optimize images as you upload them and maintain performance over time without manual work. Optimize images automatically on upload Compress images in bulk or individually Works with your existing media library No need to re-upload images Enable image lazy load across your site Convert images to WebP and AVIF Deliver images with an integrated image CDN Automatically resize and serve correctly sized images Optimize images outside the media library with Directory Smush Built for performance Smush improves page speed and overall performance by reducing image weight and improving how images are delivered. Reduce page load times Improve user experience Better performance for image-heavy pages Supports image lazy load and preload images (PRO) for faster perceived performance Works with your existing setup Smush is built to work with your current WordPress setup, including popular themes, page builders, and plugins. Compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, and more Works with WooCommerce stores No need to change your workflow Easy to enable and configure Designed to be simple You don’t need to be a performance expert to optimize images with Smush image optimizer. Works out of the box Simple settings when you need them No technical knowledge required Safe to use on any site Why choose Smush? There are plenty of image optimization plugins, but Smush focuses on making it easy to optimize images, compress images, and improve performance without complexity. As a leading WordPress image optimizer, Smush gives you powerful optimization tools without the technical hassle. Trusted by over 1 million WordPress users Built specifically for WordPress Regular updates and improvements Backed by the WPMU DEV team Get started in minutes Install Smush, activate it, and start to compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load right away. This easy-to-use image optimizer helps most sites see improvements immediately without changing how they upload or manage images. About Us WPMU DEV is a premium supplier of quality WordPress plugins, services and support. Learn more here: https://wpmudev.com/ Don’t forget to stay up to date on everything WordPress from the Internet’s number one resource: WPMU DEV Blog Hey, one more thing… we hope you enjoy our free offerings as much as we’ve loved making them for you! Contact and Credits Originally written by Alex Dunae at Dialect (dialect.ca, e-mail ‘alex’ at ‘dialect dot ca’), 2008-11.