Making your WordPress website look seasonal is a great way to engage customers and get them in the mood for buying. The difficulty for owners is how to achieve this without having to carry out a major website overhaul, like a theme change, that you’ll need to reverse come January. The quick and easy solution, as with so many WordPress-related needs, is to use a plugin – or even a selection of them. Here are some of the best seasonal plugins we’ve found for Christmas 2022.
Santa’s Christmas Countdown
The Santa’s Christmas Countdown plugin serves several important functions. It puts Santa, the iconic face of Christmas, right there on your homepage, adding that essential seasonal decoration and letting your customers know that your website is all ready for selling them their festive goods. The countdown counter also plays a valuable role, increasing excitement as the days get fewer and, importantly, reminding shoppers that time is running out if they want things to arrive in time for the big day.
Christmasify
Easy to use and with great looking, professional graphics, you can use Christmasify to add a range of seasonal features that your customers will love. These include animated falling snowflakes, Santa Claus, Christmas decorations and, if you want to, you can even add some Christmas music. Of course, you can pick and choose which of these different effects you want, so you can skip the music altogether if you wish.
As this is a modern plugin, it works very effectively on mobile devices, however, it won’t work on older Internet Explorer browsers (up to and including version 9). You will need your website to be running on PHP 5.4 or higher if you wish to use it.
SantaPress
SantaPress is a high-quality (paid for) third-party WordPress advent calendar plugin that adds more than just a touch of Christmas magic. As an advent calendar, it gives you the chance to engage and entice customers with a small gift, image, quiz question or a piece of festive trivia every day in the run-up to Christmas. Clicking on a calendar door not only opens it to reveal what’s inside; it can also activate a pop-up or open a link to a product page.
What’s great about the plugin is that it’s highly versatile. There are eight different calendars to choose from and you can customise their layouts and features to suit the look of your site. You can even track visitor clicks to see how well it’s working.
WooCommerce Gift Wrapper
It’s not just how your website looks that can make it seasonal, you can improve your customer experience and increase revenue by offering a gift-wrapping service during the Christmas period. What’s great about the free WooCommerce Gift Wrapper plugin is that WooCommerce users can add gift wrapping and gift messages as an additional upsell product in their cart or checkout page.
For versatility, you can hide the option for some products and create a pricing structure for different gift-wrapping options.
Elf Agency Xmas Widget
Easy to set up and compatible with any WordPress theme, the Elf Party Xmas Widget is a feature-rich, third-party premium plugin full of possibilities. It lets website owners create a wide range of customised Christmas decorations and even personalised messages. Choose from fifteen different backgrounds, six seasonal fonts in unlimited colours, twenty festive icons, a range of animated snow options and more.
YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
YITH WooCommerce Wishlist is not a seasonal plugin, per se, however, if you use WooCommerce, we think it is one that your customers will use in the approach to Christmas and which can help you boost sales and prepare for the busy period. Essentially, this powerful eCommerce tool enables your visitors to browse your site for Christmas gifts and save them to a wishlist so they can quickly find them and buy them later. Even better, users can share wishlists with their friends and family and even on social media.
Of course, once Christmas is over, you can continue to use the wishlist all year round. This will provide you with a better idea of which products your customers like and are thinking of buying and give you the potential to create new, enticing offers.
Conclusion
Creating the festive mood and offering seasonal touches like gift-wrapping, advent calendars and Christmas wishlists are important to encourage visitors to engage with your content and buy from your store. Hopefully, you will have found the ones included in this post useful to you. For a speedier website and enough oomph to handle more Christmas visitors, check out our range of hosting plans.
