Are you looking for ways to spread the holiday spirit on your WordPress website?
By promoting different holidays on your website, you can increase user engagement as visitors are more likely to stay and interact with your seasonal content. This can even help boost your profits and sales.
In this article, we will show you how to easily spread the holiday spirit with your WordPress site using plugins and themes.
Why Spread the Holiday Spirit With Your WordPress Site?
Celebrating holidays on your WordPress website can improve your brand image. Customers are more likely to trust your brand if they see you as an approachable and fun-loving company.
Additionally, spreading the holiday spirit can also help drive social media traffic to your website because users are more likely to share content that aligns with holidays during the festive season.
If you have an online store, then promoting different holidays can boost your sales. You can offer seasonal discounts, create gift guides, or run holiday-themed contests to encourage people to shop on your site.
You can also add holiday decorations like snowfall effects, Christmas bells, and lights to your blog. There are many third-party WordPress plugins and themes for the holiday season that you can use on your website to make it look more festive.
That being said, let’s take a look at the best ways to spread the holiday spirit with your WordPress site. You can use the quick links below to jump to our different tips:
1. Create Seasonal Popups
OptinMonster is the best lead generation and conversion optimization software on the market.
It allows you to easily create opt-in forms, popups, yes/no opt-ins, and banners using its drag-and-drop builder. The tool basically helps you convert website visitors into customers or email subscribers.
OptinMonster even comes with premade seasonal templates that you can use to create a popup, sidebar, or floating bar and launch a successful campaign.
Once you have installed and activated OptinMonster, just visit the OptinMonster » Templates page from the WordPress dashboard. Here, you will see a list of holidays under the ‘Seasonal’ section in the left column.
You can now select the holiday that you want to promote on your website, and it will show a list of premade templates. For example, you can select the ‘Christmas Savings Sales’ template for your online store.
This template comes with a countdown timer and works well with the exit-intent technology.
This popup will be shown to your visitors when they are about to leave your website and can help boost your conversions. Plus, the countdown timer can also create a sense of urgency for your holiday sale.
Similarly, you can also use a slide-in popup, floating bar, or inline banner to promote the holiday by using these premade templates.
You can then easily customize these popups in OptinMonster’s drag-and-drop builder and even connect them to an email marketing service to grow your email list.
Apart from that, you can also schedule your Christmas campaign, do A/B testing, perform analytics, and create mobile campaigns, making OptinMonster a great tool for promoting the holiday spirit.
For more details, you can see our guide on how to build your email list with OptinMonster.
2. Run a Holiday Giveaway
Another way to spread the holiday spirit on your website is by hosting a seasonal giveaway. This is a competition where entrants must complete actions like signing up for your email list, commenting on your blog posts, or following you on social media. Then, you give away a product or service for free to the winners.
Many small businesses and WooCommerce stores use giveaways as part of their marketing strategies because they are much more cost-effective than running paid advertisements.
To create a giveaway for your website, we recommend using RafflePress, which is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market.
It comes with premade templates and a drag-and-drop interface that makes it super easy to run a holiday giveaway on your website.
All you have to do is add a prize name, start and end time for the giveaway, and then use an image that represents the holiday as the background on the RafflePress popup.
Additionally, you can also use other features of RafflePress, like mobile-friendly widgets, viral sharing, fraud protection, and more, to further improve your giveaway.
For more detailed instructions, you may want to see our tutorial on how to run a giveaway in WordPress with RafflePress.
3. Spread Holiday Cheer With Seasonal Web Pages
If you want to create customized pages on your WordPress site that promote holiday cheer, then you can use SeedProd.
It is the best WordPress page builder plugin on the market that comes with a drag-and-drop builder, premade templates, advanced blocks, integrations with email marketing services, and more.
You can create a pricing page, coming soon page, landing page, home page, 404 error page, or even an entire custom theme with SeedProd.
After installing and activating the SeedProd plugin, just visit the SeedProd » Landing Pages section from the admin dashboard and click on the ‘Add New Landing Page’ button.
This will take you to the ‘Choose a New Page Template’ screen, where you can select any of the premade templates offered by SeedProd.
Once you do that, you will have to add a name and URL for the template and click the ‘Save and Start Editing the Page’ button to continue.
SeedProd’s drag-and-drop builder will now open up on the screen, where you will see a block column on the left with a template preview on the right.
You can now change the whole look of the template by adding a different background image, adding a heading block, buttons, videos, and more. In our example, we have created a simple login page.
However, you can add a contact form, giveaways, opt-in form, countdown timer, pricing table, navigation menu, and more to create a landing page that represents the holiday spirit.
Once you have customized the page, you can click the ‘Connect’ tab at the top and then choose an email marketing service that you want to connect to your landing page.
This can help boost your email list and gain new subscribers for your newsletter.
For detailed instructions, you can see our tutorial on how to create a landing page in WordPress.
4. Add Christmas Effects to Your Site
Christmasify is a free WordPress plugin that can be used to create holiday effects on your website. The plugin allows you to add jingle music, a flying Santa Claus, Christmas decorations, fonts, and much more.
Upon installing the plugin, all you have to do is visit the Chrismasify menu tab from the WordPress admin sidebar.
Here, you can choose jingle music from the dropdown menu and check the box next to the Christmas effects that you want to add to your WordPress blog.
After that, don’t forget to click the ‘Christmasify My Website’ button to store your settings.
5. Add Falling Snowflakes to Your Website
DB Falling Snowflakes is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add falling snowflakes to your website. This can create a festive atmosphere and increase user engagement.
Upon plugin activation, you can visit the DB Snow Flakes menu tab from the WordPress dashboard to configure the start and end dates for the snowflakes.
This way, you won’t be using snowflakes excessively, and they will only start falling on your website on your chosen date.
You can even choose the snowflake size, color, and speed from these settings. For detailed instructions, just see our tutorial on how to add falling snowflakes on your WordPress blog.
6. Create Seasonal Weather Effects
The Weather Effect plugin is completely free and lets you add falling effects for different seasons, including Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Day, and more.
With the Weather Effect plugin, you can set up falling Christmas bells, Santa, gift boxes, a snowman, autumn leaves, and more. You can even configure the size of all these effects by visiting the Weather Effect menu tab from the WordPress dashboard.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.
You can now visit your WordPress site to view the different effects.
7. Use a WordPress Holiday Theme
We don’t usually recommend our users change their WordPress theme for a specific event or holiday season. This is because it can distract from your business’s branding and confuse your visitors.
However, if you have a personal website, then you can change your theme to create a festive atmosphere and increase user engagement.
A holiday theme can help you stand out from your competitors and promote your holiday specials like sales or discount offers.
Here is our handpicked list of the best WordPress themes for the holidays.
Christmas Bell is a free and multipurpose WordPress theme that can be used to give your website a warm and festive atmosphere.
We recommend this theme specifically for Christmas due to its built-in Christmas decoration features like Christmas-themed images, snowflakes, bells, and other elements.
Other features of the Christmas Bell theme include the ability to add a custom logo, featured content slider, header media options, holiday fonts, social media integrations, WooCommerce compatibility, and more.
Overall, the theme adds a fun and festive feel to your WordPress website, making it a great choice for the Christmas season.
Snowflakes is another free WordPress holiday theme with seasonal photos. It comes with bright colors and a cheerful, festive look.
Snowflakes has multiple color options, navigation menus, image galleries, header media options, hero content, and so much more.
You can use this theme to transform your site for the holidays and create a welcoming environment for your users. We recommend this theme if you have a photography website and want to add some holiday spirit to it.
We hope this article helped you find the best ways to spread the holiday spirit with your WordPress site. You may also want to see our tutorial on how to add Halloween effects to your WordPress website and our expert picks for the best holiday gift ideas for bloggers, designers, and developers.
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Jiří Vaněk says
I once created a website for children, specifically for a kindergarten. The most impactful addition was when I implemented a plugin on their WordPress that simulated gentle falling snow. It immediately created a Christmas atmosphere when people looked at it (we live in a country where snow is simply associated with Christmas).
Ralph says
As a personal blog owner i don’t think it is worth my time doing such things. It is nice for big websites. However i have some christmas posts related and use special tag for them. In December I use this tag to feautre these posts on home page and nothing else to boosts my CTR. Not a big thing, but it works.
WPBeginner Support says
That is a valid strategy if you did not want to use the tools on this page
Admin
Ishmal Majid says
Only 1 and 2 along with falling snow at the home page can do a great work for marketers and make big bucks for them. Great ideas.
WPBeginner Support says
The other options can help depending on the site
Admin
Ram E. says
4 and 5 are my favorites! But i didn’t know until now that plugins like these exist. I mean I’ve seen such effects before and always thought they were custom coded. It only proves there are more to be discovered in the WP plugin repository.
I hope adding snowflakes won’t slow down my site.
WPBeginner Support says
Glad to hear we could share and ideally the slowdown should be minimal.
Admin
Konrad says
I always appreciate it when a website changes for holidays, these decorations are sweet I especially love DB Snowflakes.
Ahmed Omar says
Holidays are coming soon
good ideas to improve site appearance, and gives more joy to the site
Thank you
WPBeginner Support says
You’re welcome
Admin
Suresh says
Many ways to make your WordPress website more profitable during the festive season.
WPBeginner Support says
We hope you find the recommendations helpful
Admin
Rebecca says
these are great! thanks!
Alexandra Petean-Nicola says
I love those simple but effective Christmas plugin. There are just enough to give you the holiday feel but they aren’t a drastic change to your design.
JC says
I have to say as a beginner, I rely more on your site and the great information to share more than any other site. I’ve looked at them all just about – lots and lots of scams out there. I save your content so I may refer back to it (which I do a lot).
Just wanted to share some positive feedback with you. A great site filled with much needed information for those of us who are new to WP and performance marketing, as well. Thanks.
Editorial Staff says
Thank you JC for the the kind words. Really appreciate it
Admin