7 Ways to Spread the Holiday Spirit With Your WordPress Site

Spreading the holiday spirit through your WordPress site can create a warm and engaging atmosphere for your visitors, improving their online experience during this festive season.

Whether you are running a blog, eCommerce store, blog, or nonprofit website, there are plenty of creative ways to spread the holiday spirit. From festive design changes to special promotions and interactive features, adding a holiday touch can boost engagement and conversions.

At WPBeginner, we believe in putting people first and spreading joy during the festive season. That’s why we consistently host giveaways and special sales during Christmas and Black Friday.

This approach has helped us connect with our readers on a deeper level while also leading to more pageviews, and happier users.

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 drive social media traffic to your website. During the festive season, users are more likely to share content that aligns with holidays.

If you have an online store, then promoting different holidays can help increase 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 lights, and bells to your blog. Many third-party WordPress plugins and themes for the holiday season can make your website 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 comes with premade seasonal templates that you can use to create a popup, sidebar, or floating bar and launch a successful campaign.

Its drag-and-drop builder allows you to easily create opt-in forms, popups, yes/no opt-ins, and banners. The tool basically helps you convert website visitors into customers or email subscribers.

We’ve used this tool several times during the festive season and noticed a significant increase in leads as a result. To learn more, see our OptinMonster review.

Once you have installed and activated the tool, 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 you want to promote on your website, and a list of premade templates will appear. 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.

At WPBeginner, we’ve hosted numerous giveaways using this plugin during events like our birthdays, Christmas, and Black Friday. We’ve found it to be super reliable, making the process smooth and helping us engage more with our audience. For details, see our RafflePress review.

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 times for the giveaway, and then use an image that represents the holiday as the background on the RafflePress popup.

Additionally, you can use other features of RafflePress, like mobile-friendly widgets, viral sharing, fraud protection, and more, to further improve your giveaway.

For 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.

We love that it lets you add holiday cheer to any page you want, including 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, see our step-by-step tutorial on how to create a landing page in WordPress.

4. Add Christmas Effects to Your Site

Christmasify is a free and fun WordPress plugin used to create holiday effects on your website. It 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.

We have used it on our personal blog during Christmas, and our users loved it. Many commented on how much it improved the festive feel of the site, making it more enjoyable during the holiday season.

Upon plugin activation, visit the DB Snow Flakes page 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

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, such as 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

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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