If-So Review: Dynamic WordPress Content Personalization

What Is If-So and How Does It Work?

If-So is a WordPress plugin built around one powerful idea: showing different content to different visitors based on specific conditions. Instead of a one-size-fits-all page, you create "triggers" — rules that determine what content appears for whom.

The workflow is straightforward. You install the plugin, create a trigger with one or more conditions, write your conditional content (plus optional default content for everyone else), and then drop a shortcode wherever you want that dynamic content to appear. It works with any page builder or the default WordPress editor, though it has a particularly nice integration with Elementor.

The conditions are where If-So really shines. You can target visitors based on user behavior (new vs. returning), geolocation (country, state, city, or time zone), referral source, URL parameters, device type, time and date, and more. There are honestly too many conditions to cover in a single review, which speaks to how deep this plugin goes.

Personalizing Content by Visitor Behavior

The simplest way to get started with If-So is visitor behavior targeting. You create a trigger, set the condition to "new visitor," and write a welcome message. Anyone hitting your site for the first time — identified by the absence of cookies — sees that personalized greeting. Returning visitors see either different content or nothing at all, depending on what you set as the default.

There's a practical caveat here: the detection relies on cookies. If a visitor clears their cookies or uses incognito mode, they'll be treated as new again. That means you'll get some false positives. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's worth understanding the limitation before you build an entire strategy around new-vs-returning segmentation.

Where this gets more interesting is when you layer it with referral source targeting. Imagine you write a guest post for another blog and link back to a landing page on your site. With If-So, visitors arriving from that specific blog see a personalized welcome — something like "Welcome, [Blog Name] readers!" That kind of touch ingratiates people to your brand and makes the transition between sites feel seamless.

Geolocation Targeting: Country, State, City, and Time Zone

One of the most compelling features in If-So is geolocation-based personalization. You can target visitors by country, state, city, or even time zone, and serve them location-specific content. The obvious use case is something like "Free shipping to the United States" for U.S. visitors, but the possibilities extend well beyond that — local promotions, region-specific pricing, or language customization.

Country-level and time-zone targeting work reliably. In testing, targeting the United States and the Central time zone both displayed the correct content immediately. However, drilling down to the state and city level revealed some accuracy issues. A Minnesota-based test showed the plugin identifying the visitor as being in Illinois instead — a problem that traces back to the ISP and geolocation database, not necessarily If-So itself.

This is a known limitation of IP-based geolocation across the web. Even major retailers like Best Buy sometimes get it wrong. So while country-level and broad regional targeting are dependable, take state and city-level personalization with a grain of salt and test thoroughly before going live with hyper-local campaigns.

A/B Testing and Dynamic URL Parameters

If-So includes built-in A/B testing, which is a genuinely useful addition for conversion rate optimization. You set up variants with percentage-based traffic splits — 50/50, 33/33/33, or weighted however you like — and the plugin randomly assigns visitors to each variant. A "reoccurrence" setting ensures that once a visitor sees variant A, they continue seeing variant A on subsequent visits, keeping your test clean.

The analytics dashboard is simple but functional. You can see views and conversions for each variant in a straightforward table. You can also cap the test at a specific number of sessions — say 100 or 1,000 — so the test automatically stops and you can pick a winner. That's a smart feature that prevents tests from running indefinitely without a decision.

Dynamic link conditions offer another clever approach. By appending a query string to your URL, you can trigger specific content to display regardless of other conditions. This is particularly powerful for ad campaigns — you can customize landing page content based on the actual search keywords someone used in Google Ads, making the page feel tailor-made for their query.

Using If-So with Elementor Pro Templates

Here's where If-So goes from useful to genuinely powerful: combining it with Elementor Pro's saved templates. Instead of being limited to the plugin's basic text editor for your conditional content, you can design full sections in Elementor, save them as templates, grab the template shortcode, and paste it into your If-So trigger.

This means you can have entirely different hero sections, feature blocks, or call-to-action areas depending on who's visiting your site. A visitor from California might see beach imagery and west coast pricing, while someone from New York gets a completely different visual experience — all designed with Elementor's full drag-and-drop toolkit.

The setup is a bit tedious since you're bouncing between Elementor templates and If-So triggers, copying shortcodes back and forth. But the payoff is enormous. You're essentially building a fully personalized website experience without any custom code. For anyone serious about conversion rate optimization, this workflow opens up possibilities that would otherwise require enterprise-level personalization tools.

The Caching Limitation (and the Workaround)

Every tool has a tradeoff, and for If-So, it's page caching. Since cached pages are pre-rendered before a visitor arrives, there's no opportunity for the plugin to evaluate conditions and swap content. This means any page using If-So personalization needs to be excluded from your caching plugin.

In practice, this isn't as painful as it sounds. You're unlikely to personalize every single page on your site — most personalization happens on key landing pages, homepages, and sales pages. Excluding a handful of pages from cache while leaving the rest of your site fully cached is a reasonable tradeoff.

The If-So team has also indicated that a JavaScript-based workaround is in development, which would allow personalization to work even on cached pages. That would effectively eliminate this limitation entirely once it ships.

Final Verdict: Is If-So Worth It?

If-So earns a solid 8.7 out of 10. It's a genuinely usable personalization plugin that makes dynamic content accessible to WordPress users without requiring any coding knowledge. The range of conditions — from geolocation to referral source to A/B testing — covers the most important personalization scenarios, and the Elementor integration takes it to another level entirely.

The limitations actually work in the plugin's favor. It's scoped enough that you won't over-engineer your personalization and create a maintenance nightmare. A little personalization goes a long way, and If-So gives you exactly the right tools to implement it effectively.

There are some fit-and-finish improvements that would make the interface more polished, and the caching limitation is worth noting. But for the price — especially at the lifetime deal — this plugin delivers serious value for anyone looking to boost conversions through personalized content experiences.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.