Countdown Timers for WordPress – How to?

As someone running a WordPress site, you may want to run events or contests or other fun things that are timed, starting on a particular date or time, and ending at another specific point. Adding a countdown timer as a widget is the easiest way to keep track, and to allow your customers and visitors to do the same.

When Do You Need a Countdown Timer?

A countdown timer is a tool that can be used in a multitude of ways – perhaps you want to mark a milestone for your blog or business, get people excited for some event, sale or product that you are about to launch,  or even just to notify people when you have scheduled site maintenance, and when it’ll end.

Ways to Add a Countdown Timer to WordPress

While there are many different ways to add the timer widget to WordPress, including manual code – if you’ve been following our blog so far, you’ll know that the easiest way is to use plugins; so here are three of the best ways to do just that:

The T(-) Countdown Widget

While this one needs you to have a little HTML and CSS familiarity and isn’t exactly for beginners, it is also among the most popular plugins for this purpose –  which says something about just how flexible and configurable its shortcode-based HTML5 timer is.

Once you’ve installed and activated it, a look in Settings and locate T(-) Countdown. Here, you can select the time unit – from seconds to years – and add custom labels and CSS to the widget.

Next, open up any page or post in the WordPress editor, click on ‘+’ and search for the T(-) Countdown block. Clicking on it will add a default timer, and it can be tweaked and setup using options in the right-hand side panel, including any of the 13 available styles. The plugin comes with free support, and you can check the shortcode documentation for more tips.

Countdown Timer Ultimate

Like the previous plugin, Countdown Timer Ultimate also uses a shortcode to display timers. There’s no restriction to the number of timers, and it’s compatible with Gutenberg.

A welcome text greets you after you’ve activated it, and you’re free to skip it. Locate ‘Countdown Timer’, then ‘Add Timer’. Here, you can customize the timer and select from a variety of display options, such as animations and colours, and the plugin will set defaults for what you don’t customize. When satisfied with the results, click ‘Publish’.

Locate the shortcode in the ‘Shortcode’ field of the Countdown Timer Page, and copy it. Then, on any WordPress page or post you need the timer on, click ‘+’, select the Shortcode widget, paste your copied shortcode in the relevant field, preview it to be sure, and ‘Publish’.

If, instead, you’d like the timer in a sidebar, click ‘Appearance’, locate ‘Widgets’, and add the ‘Text’ widget to your sidebar. In its settings, paste in the timer shortcode from before, and you’re set.

While the free version should suffice for your everyday timer needs, the premium upgrade for this plugin lets you access more features and cool timer designs. For the curious, there’s also a free demo of the premium plugin.

POWr

As it is cloud-based, POWr needs a free account registration for you to begin using it.  The benefit to this, and POWr’s edge over the other two plugins, is that you can track the events that you’re adding timers for.

POWr isn’t simply a timer plugin, so once installed and activated, you can also access the forms and social features it comes with.

Visit POWr, click ‘Get Started’ and register for the free account. On your first login, you’ll land on the ‘My Plugins’ page, and you may now select ‘Countdown Timer’ from the left-hand menu and ‘create your plugin’.

On the new screen, you can customize your timer widget with dates, labels, and animations, among others. When you’re done tailoring it to your liking, click ‘Add to Site’ at the bottom, and you’ll be given choices for how to add the widget to the site. Clicking on the WordPress icon, for instance, will generate a shortcode to be used the way we described with Countdown Timer Ultimate while clicking on ‘Embed Code’ will generate code that you can insert directly into HTML.

With those methods, you can now add the countdown timers you’ve always wanted to your WordPress site.

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