7 Best WordPress Countdown Plugins

Online stores must engage their customers daily. One of the primary goals is to get reluctant shoppers to the checkout cart. 

You can encourage more purchases by building anticipation for new products and creating a sense of urgency with limited-time promotional offers. Countdown timers help increase consumers’ need to participate because they fear they will miss a good deal. 

Want to add a countdown timer to your eCommerce website? Try one of these WordPress countdown plugins below.

1. Countdown Timer Ultimate

Countdown Timer Ultimate is a fully responsive plugin for creating unlimited timers on your site. You can add the timer to any WordPress page or post, using the Gutenberg shortcode block.

“The key with countdown timers, as with the use of urgency in general, is that they offer useful information to customers – that a sale will end soon, or perhaps that they have an hour or two left to order if they want to receive items the next day,” writes Graham Charlton, editor in chief at SaleCycle.

You can customize this tool to fit your brand’s style. In a few easy steps, you can adjust the rotating circle background color and width. You can even show or hide the days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

2. HurryTimer

Shoppers like to buy when they can nab a limited-time offer. Research found that brands can encourage shoppers to make an immediate decision by creating a perception of scarcity. With fewer items on the market, consumers want bragging rights that they purchased your product or service.

With HurryTimer, you can create scarcity for your own brand. This multi-purpose countdown timer will help you drive clicks, increase sales, and highlight upcoming deadlines. You can build evergreen campaigns that give each visitor their own unique countdown timer, regardless of their local time zone. 

Upgrade to the plugin’s premium version to get user session detection for evergreen timers and a sticky announcement bar. You’ll also get access to recurring campaigns—self-repeating countdown timers that run according to a set of rules.

3. Countdown Timer

Create a simple, yet functional timer on your WordPress site in minutes with Countdown Timer. Without any coding knowledge, you can use the plugin to add a countdown timer to your posts and pages.

Countdown timers can persuade hesitant consumers to make a purchase. John Bruce, a full-time copywriter and former cable-access host, explains:

“If you’re putting on a storewide sale, make sure your shoppers know it’s for a limited time only. As they add items to their cart, investing more and more time in their shopping session, they’ll see the clock counting down.”

This tool allows you to create unlimited timers on your website. You can choose the position of the timer and adjust the day, hour, minute, and second fields. Plus, you can add a message to display after the time expires.

4. Sales Countdown Timer

Countdown timers can directly impact product sales for your brand. eCommerce site Kennedy Blue increased its sales by 50% with the help of a countdown timer.

Sales Countdown Timer does the heavy lifting of maximizing the revenue of your sale campaigns. This tool displays a sales countdown timer on single product pages and shop pages.

You can set up the timer to notify customers about sales ending soon or limited product quantities. For WooCommerce single products, you can schedule specific sales campaigns. You also can select the position of the countdown timer on the product page: before the product price, after the product price, before the “add to cart” button, or after “add to cart” button.

Communicate with your shoppers as often as possible. When you schedule a future sales campaign, you can display an upcoming sales message using shortcode.

Promotions can help boost your brand’s sales. However, too many limited-time offers can cause consumer fatigue and create an untrustworthy experience for the shopper. So, before you start promoting another flash sale, evaluate your marketing efforts from the buyer’s perspective.

“It might be tempting to create a fake deadline to boost short-term sales but doing so risks the integrity of the brand and could lose customers for good. Setting clear parameters around limited-time offers and ensuring promotions close as advertised will help retain customer trust in the brand,” states Mike Austin, co-founder and CEO at Fresh Relevance. 

If you still need a quality timer, check out WordPress Countdown Widget. This plugin adds a countdown timer to your blog posts and sidebars. It supports color customization and language translations.

6. Finale Lite

No one wants to miss out if they think someone else is having fun or getting access to something exclusive. Trustpulse reports that 60% of people make purchases because of FOMO, mostly within 24 hours.

You can earn more sales by enticing shoppers with Finale Lite. This WordPress countdown plugin allows your brand to create urgency through promotional campaigns. You can run scheduled sales campaigns, like flash sales, pre-launch offers, daily deals, and early-bird deals.

Shoppers need a clear deadline to encourage them to go to your checkout page. Customize a  countdown timers on your product page to remind shoppers about the deadline.

There’s also a rule builder to create rules for certain campaigns. You can add a timer to hand-picked products or all products in a specified product category.

7. Countdown Timer

Last on our list is the Countdown Timer plugin by Yaidier Perez. This WordPress plugin comes with eight timer templates, allowing you to customize every timer to fit your website’s style. You can display the remaining time in years, months, days, or hours.

With the implementation of any marketing tactic, you’ll want to run experiments on its effectiveness. Run A/B tests to see how countdown timers affect consumer behavior on your own store. Do they boost conversions? What happens if you change the copy or color of the countdown timer?

Countdown Timer makes it easy to test different types of timers. You can add a box shadow effect, a smooth transition, or a vertical position.

Creating a sense of urgency is an effective way to nudge consumers to make a purchase. From limited-time offers to flash sales, multiple strategies exist to get shoppers to the checkout page.

Try one (or two) of these WordPress countdown plugins for your eCommerce store today!