How to Add a Countdown Timer Widget in WordPress (3 Methods)

Key Takeaways

in this video you'll learn how to add a countdown timer to your WordPress website and we'll cover three different scenarios of when it might be a good idea to add one so if you're ready let's get started so the first method we'll use is going to add a milestone countdown widget using the countdown timer ultimate plugin so you'll want to go to your WordPress dashboard from your dashboard go over to plugins add new and we're looking for a countdown timer ultimate this is the one we want from WP online support so let's go ahead and click install now once it's installed you'll also want to make sure that you activate the plug-in as well so that you can use it on your website once it activates it'll take you to their area and you see there's a new tab over here called countdown timer you can choose whether or not you want to subscribe and then and now we can choose a countdown timer to start so let's go ahead and click add timer and this is what are we wanting the timer to be say it's a birthday timer and now we can go through and set it up now note that the cathode timer goes off of your current settings in your current time zone that you have set up if you want to change this you can do that by going into settings general I'm going to open it up in a new tab so we don't lose our space so I'm going to right click open in a new tab under generals general settings and you can scroll all the way down to change the time zone here if you want it to be in your actual time zone now that I changed it you see that it's showing the time zone as New York right from here you want to set the expiration date that you want it to be on and you have a calendar that you can choose from so we'll set this for a week be done this will be the time that it'll expire and choose whether you want it to tick down or if you want just a smooth expiration from here you can choose how big you want the countdown timer or we'll leave it for the default and then you can pick the colors here that'll looks good so let's go ahead and click publish and then we can go to countdown timer and then you see the one that we just created then we just need to grab the shortcode so we can put it on the page or the post where we want it to go or this one I'm going to pick pages add new call it birthday go to I'm going to click enter to go to a new line and from here you can either just paste it or since it's a shortcode I'm going to add a block and search for shortcode I'll find that and then from here I'm going to right-click and paste the shortcode in here now we can click publish to see this in action will view the page very nice that's a very nice and smooth transition you see you can play with all the colors I make it look a little bit different however you're wanting it to look now if you prefer you could also put this over on a shortcode over on the side as a widget area so let me show you how you can do that we'll go back to our garden blog we'll go to dashboard and we'll scroll down go to appearance widgets and we need to find the text widget I'll grab this one left click and I'm dragging it up to my main sidebar and from here I'm going to right-click and paste that shortcode in there and you can give it a title role down we'll click Save and then we'll go and visit the site and now you see it's over in the widget area so that looks pretty good so that's method 1 using the countdown timer ultimate plugin let me show you the next method that will be adding a countdown timer we want to add a milestone countdown widget using optinmonster so let me show you how you can do that you'll want to have an optimizer account and go ahead and log in to optinmonster to create our countdown timer optim once you log in to your dashboard go ahead and click create new campaign and for this one we're going to do it pop-up so I'm going to make sure that pop-up is selected you can scroll down and choose the type of campaign you want to this is actually a sensitive time offer so we're going to click on that and it will automatically bring the ones that are designed with a countdown timer in mind so those are good and then you just want to pick the one that looks best for what you're doing you can preview it here see how that looks and once you preview it you can go ahead and use this template so say this is a holiday sale you name it and that's for your use only and then you want to find your website you probably only have one here and then let's start building it so what we'll do is we'll bring everything in and you can make the changes however you want so we'll get off the entire order that looks pretty good since we just changed it to 30 we need to change this button as well great and from here you want to choose the countdown that you want it to be I'm gonna put the in date out to about a week a little bit less than a week the visitors local time that's great it's it's going off of their local time so they don't have to figure out well what is my time if Eastern closes if this closes at midnight Eastern what does it closed at my time it'll automatically go by their time and from down here you can choose if you want to display all of those items or if you want to just take off the seconds and just have minutes the seconds is pretty powerful since it's continuing to countdown once you've designed it how you want it to look we want to also make sure that you hit display to make sure that the display is right so basically we're going to have this display when the time on page is at least 5 seconds to give them a time to get acquainted with our site you could also set this up as an exit intent pop-up if you wanted to that means when they're about to leave we're gonna keep it with time on pages at least 5 seconds just to show you what this looks like and we'll do the next step this is what we want to show them and then this is the summary of what everything looks like so we'll click Save and for this particular one we are actually setting it up to also get their email address they need to give us their email address to get the 30% off so then you can add an integration here and they integrate with several of the top email service providers and choose the one that works best for you if you don't have an email service provider when you're using optinmonster you can use Monster and that just means that they will collect them locally in your optinmonster account until you do end up getting a service provider it's a great easy way to get set up and get going without worrying about making sure that you have an email service provider set up so we'll do monster leads and then we want to publish this so we'll publish that and now we need to go back to our website to set it up so let's go back to our dashboard if you already use optinmonster you probably already have it installed but if you don't then you'll want to install the integrator plugin so let's go to plugins add new once we set that up we need to look for optinmonster this is the one we want so let's go ahead and click install and then we'll also want to activate it and set up the API key so let's go ahead and activate it and then we need to connect it to our account we need to find the API key that's in our dashboard so we'll go back to our optinmonster dashboard and then we'll go up here to my account and API let's go ahead and copy this great now we can go back right click paste that in there and connect to optinmonster once we see that settings have been saved we can go to campaigns and then we can refresh to see all of our campaigns that have come over the holiday so is the one that we were working on so let's go ahead and click go live you see it's it was disabled to begin with but now we want to go live now if I go to my website and now I have this great countdown timer showing up on my website and now the third method that you can use a countdown timer with is by using a plugin called seed prod Seabright is a great WordPress coming soon page it also does really well for under maintenance and you can use the countdown timer to show that off so you want to hit over to see prot calm and it's the pro version that has the countdown timer so you want to create an account and log in to see prod to get started under here you want to download the pro version of coming soon pro so we'll download that and next we want to edit to our website so let's go to our dashboard from there we'll go over to plugins add new and instead of searching for the plug-in we're going to upload a plugin upload the one that we just downloaded so we need to upload the coming soon pro and go ahead and click install now make sure you also stick around to activate it so we'll do that great once it activates you want to right-click and paste the license key so let's go ahead and check the license it's valid so we're good to go now we can go over to coming soon pro here under settings to make the changes that we need and we want to enable coming soon and then we also want to edit the coming soon maintenance page when we do that all of these templates come up and you see some of these have the countdown timer here so you just go through pick the one that's closest to what you want and then you can make the adjustments from there so I'm going to click on this one now you see it doesn't show the coming soon or the countdown yet you'll want to go over here under countdown and pick that and you can toggle that to enable the countdown and now you'll have the seconds and the minutes from here just pick the time zone that you're in do the date that you want it to end on and it will adjust then and do the format you do the hover over the information part you'll see how you can format it best but we like this way because we like the seconds counting down and then you can also choose whether or not you want to auto-launch when the countdown is then that would probably be best if you know that for a fact that it's going to be ready otherwise I would leave that off as default everything looks good so now let's click Save Changes and we can go back to our settings once we've made changes make sure that the enable coming soon mode is turned on and click Save Changes in and now you see up here coming soon mode is active and now we can open it up in a new incognito window because it won't work for us if we're logged in we won't see the coming soon part ok and now this is a great countdown timer for when our site goes live so those are three very effective methods and I only showed you scenarios in which you'd need to use them there are plenty other ways that you could use each and every one of these to fit what you're wanting it to do so let me know in the comments below which one are you going to choose to use and thanks for watching did you learn something from today's video if so subscribe to our YouTube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching