5 WordPress Plugins to Prepare Your Website for Christmas
We are about to finish up with another great year and Christmas is around the corner. It’s the time of the year, when everybody is getting ready for Christmas, expecting to see a fair of cheer everywhere. If you want to add some Christmas spirit to your WordPress website as well, and greet your visitors with a fun atmosphere, then follow the list of the WP plugins below. They will help you to prepare your website for the Christmas and make it look festive and fun.
Christmas Animations
Christmas decorations and animations never seem to be enough. Decorating your website for Christmas can be as fun as decorating your workplace or your house. WordPress Christmas Animation plugin is a bundle of various Christmas related animations, cards and images.
The plugin also adds beautiful falling snow to your website. There are 30 Christmas images within the plugin, with slide in and slide out effects. You can add multiple animations to any of your website’s post or page of your choice. You can also edit Christmas image size and set the speed of the image rotation when it appears on the page. The plugin works perfectly on all themes and provides a lot of customization options for all its features.
Christmas Events
On Christmas people are looking for events and activities to get in the festive mood. If you also want to make your website visitors happy and plan to organize some holiday events for them, make sure they’re not missing them out. Event Calendar WD plugin will help you to spread awareness about Christmas events you organize. You can display calendars as widgets on your website sidebar or place the calendar shortcode on any of your website’s post or page. You’ll be able to create unlimited number of events and have either single or multiple events per day. The plugin has seven attractive views and comes with six build in themes. You also have the possibility to add new themes and give them your preferred custom styling.
Among the view modes Map views and Posterbord are my favorites, as they are really unique. You can have multiple organizers for a single event and show the event location on Google Maps. The Calendar supports structured event microdata, which helps search engines to easily understand and find the events on your website. You can attach tags and categories to all of your events. The plugin features a filter which enables you to display events by venues, organizers, categories. There is a possibility to show related events to the website visitors. You can also allow your website visitors to leave comments under your calendar events. If there are events that you are going to hold repeatedly, the Event Calendar WD plugin will handle them with ease. Just specify the event repeating rate and they will automatically appear on the calendar.
You can provide custom URL and also YouTube or Vimeo video URLs for displaying event details.
With Countdown add-on of the plugin you can add a countdown widget to Christmas, which would be a great addition to your calendar.
Santa Claus on Your Website
When we think about Christmas we also automatically think about Santa Claus. Bringing a Santa to your website will be great idea. Especially if the Santa is animated and can move all around your website. Merry Christmas Everyone plugin will turn your website into a fun and cheerful place.
There are two Santas to choose from, which are flying and sliding as your website visitors move the cursor over the page. The Santa follows the cursor and then lands on a random place on the page. You can add a URL of a website that you want your visitors to redirect to when they click on Santa. The plugin supports HTML5 Song OGG which will enable you to add sounds or background musing on your website. You can also add MP3 song URLs. The Santa with a blue bag on his back is super cute!
Christmas Images All Over Your Website
What make us feel that the Christmas is in the air is the presence of various photos and videos with Santa Claus, Christmas trees, gifts, decorations, cakes and cookies all around. Adding Christmas related images on your website will certainly give it a festive look. As the most popular image sharing platform, Instagram is full of such images at the end of the year. Don’t miss the opportunity to easily add different Instagram feeds on your website by using Instagram Feed WD plugin. This Instagram plugin is an advanced tool for showing multiple public Instagram feeds and hashtags, either by displaying them as widgets or by inserting them in your posts or pages using the feed shortcode.
There are three options for displaying feeds: Infinite scrolling, load more option and pagination. If you choose to display different feeds in your posts or pages, there are 4 great layout options to choose from: Blog style, Masonry, Thumbnail and Image browser. I want to point out Blog style and Masonry views, which stand out providing elegant and unique look to your blog.
Almost every setting of feeds is customizable. You have the possibility to choose either to redirect your website visitors to the image Instagram account or open it in the lightbox when they click on the image thumbnail. The advanced lightbox of the plugin enables you to display the accompanying image details, such as captions, likes, comments, and hashtags. You can also enable “Follow” button for your visitors to start following the accounts they liked. There is a possibility to display images in the lightbox with filmstrip effect. The lightbox can serve as a slider as well, with around 15 slide transition effects. The videos in the feeds will be played in the lightbox as HTML5 videos.
The plugin themes can also be fully customized to suit your website tone and spirit. You can adjust almost every feature of the themes and also add new themes with the custom header, user data, pagination and layout options.
The plugin is easy to use and SEO-friendly, which will help you to optimize your website post and pages with necessary SEO requirements.
Christmas Cards
Don’t forget to greet your website visitors with warm Christmas wishes written on colorful cards. Christmas Card plugin is there to make it happen easily and without sharing much time. There are nine beautiful cards within the plugin, that will go with almost any kind of website. The cards are shown only once to each visitor before they get to the actual website.
You can modify the cards, change their colors and, of course, edit the text on the cards to fit your targeted visitors. There are also 5 great Christmas songs available, to play as a background music, such as “Jingle Bells”, “Joy to the World”, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”. The plugin also allows you to add falling 3D snow with different variations to your website. It’s SEO- friendly and just super easy to set up. Chubby and cheerful Santa on The Happy Santa card is my fav.
Merry Christmas!
Christmas is a cheerful time for everyone. With these plugins you will be able to give your website a Christmas spirit and, of course, wish your website visitors a Merry and joyful Christmas.
All the plugins work perfectly and have been personally tested. In case you have any questions regarding any of them, feel free to leave a comment below. I’ll be glad to help you.
