Christmas Snow for WordPress documentation

Christmas Snow for WordPress adds a falling snow effect to your site. It draws the snow on a lightweight HTML5 Canvas. The snow starts as soon as you activate the plugin, so you don't have to set anything up first.

When you want to change how it looks, open Settings > Christmas Snow. The tabs cover the flake style, how the snow moves, where it appears, who sees it and which weeks of the year it runs. A Live preview panel updates as you change settings, and six one click Presets give you a starting point.

The plugin suits blogs, business sites and WooCommerce stores that want some seasonal decoration. WooCommerce cart, checkout and account pages are excluded by default. Visitors who ask their device to reduce motion don't see the animation, and the plugin is completely free with no locked features.

Christmas Snow for WordPress is a free plugin. Install it from the WordPress.org plugin directory in your WordPress admin.

The General tab under Settings > Christmas Snow holds the main switches for the effect.

Snowfall

• Enable snowfall is the master switch. Turn it off to stop the effect everywhere without deactivating the plugin.
• Respect reduced motion skips the animation for visitors who asked their device to reduce motion. This is recommended, and many sites need it for accessibility.
• Pause in background tabs stops drawing while the browser tab is not visible, so the effect costs nothing in the background.
• Stop the snow after sets how many seconds the snow falls per page view. When the time is up, no new flakes appear and the snow fades out. Use 0 to keep it snowing.
• Let visitors turn the snow off adds a small button in the bottom left corner. The visitor's choice is remembered in their own browser, and nothing is stored on your site.

Placement

• Layer (z-index) sets how high the snow sits in the page stack. Lower it if the snow covers a sticky header or a popup.
• Limit to a container takes an optional CSS selector, for example .site-header. Leave it empty to cover the whole window.

The header of the settings screen also shows the plugin version and a status badge. It tells you whether the snow is live, off, waiting for its season or in shortcode only mode.

Three panels stay on the right of every settings tab.

Live preview shows the snow with your current settings and updates as you change any setting. Click Pause to stop the animation. Use the Preview background dots to switch between a dark, blue and light background.

Presets gives you six one click looks:

• Gentle Drift
• Classic Christmas
• Heavy Blizzard
• Golden Sparkle
• Festive Emoji
• Settling Snow

A preset fills in the appearance and motion settings for you. Your display rules and schedule are left alone. Click Save changes to keep the result.

Shortcode shows the [christmas_snow] shortcode and an example with attributes, ready to copy. See the Shortcodes reference on this page for details.

The Appearance tab controls what each flake looks like.

Flake style

• Flake type: choose Characters and emoji, Soft dots (fastest) or Custom image. Characters give classic snowflakes and emoji. Dots are the fastest option for heavy snowfall. An image lets you use your own artwork, for example a small transparent PNG or SVG from your media library.
• Characters: the characters to use as flakes. Separate each one with a space. Snowflakes, sparkles, stars and holiday emoji all work.
• Colours: the flake colour. Click + Add colour to add more colours (up to eight). The colours are mixed randomly across the flakes.

Size and opacity

• Smallest flake and Largest flake: flakes are sized randomly between these two values.
• Minimum opacity and Maximum opacity: lower both values for a subtle effect that sits behind your content.
• Softness: blurs the flakes for a dreamy look. Anything above 0 costs some performance.
• Depth effect: makes distant flakes smaller, slower and fainter, so the snowfall gains a sense of depth.

Fields that don't apply to your current choices are hidden automatically. For example, Characters only matters when the flake type is Characters and emoji.

The Motion tab controls how much snow falls and how it moves.

How much snow

• Flakes on desktop and Flakes on mobile: keep the mobile count well below the desktop count. Phones have far less drawing power to spare.
• Mobile breakpoint: screens narrower than this width (in pixels) use the mobile flake count.

Falling and wind

• Slowest fall and Fastest fall: a wider gap between the two makes the snowfall look more natural.
• Wind direction: negative values blow the snow to the left, positive values to the right.
• Gusts: slowly swings the wind back and forth instead of holding one direction.
• Sway: how much each flake drifts from side to side on its way down.
• Spin the flakes turns rotation on, and Spin speed sets how fast the flakes spin.

Interaction

• Cursor interaction: choose None, Push flakes away, Pull flakes in or Gentle wind towards the cursor. Letting the pointer push the snow around costs a little performance on very dense snowfall.

Settling snow

• Let snow settle at the bottom builds a drift along the bottom of the screen as flakes land.

The Display Rules tab decides where the snow appears and who sees it.

Where the snow appears

Under Show on, choose one of these:

• The entire site
• The home page only
• Selected content types and pages, which lets you pick content types and list specific post or page IDs that always show snow

Never show on

• These IDs: comma separated post or page IDs that should never show snow, for example 3, 27.
• WooCommerce cart, checkout and account pages: on by default and strongly recommended, so nothing decorative sits between a customer and the pay button.
• Search results and 404 pages: turn these on to hide the snow there too.

Who sees it

• Devices: All devices, Desktop only or Mobile only. Device detection happens on the server, so a page cache that does not vary by device may serve the wrong result. Leaving this on All devices and lowering the mobile flake count is the safer choice.
• Visitors: Everyone, Logged in users only or Logged out visitors only.
• Hide from these roles: tick user roles (for example Administrator or Editor) that should not see the effect. This is useful for keeping the snow away from staff while they work.

The Schedule tab limits the snow to a season.

1. Turn on Only show during a date range.
2. Set your start and end dates.
3. Click Save changes.

The range repeats every year, so you only set it once. Ranges that cross New Year work correctly, for example 1 December to 6 January. Outside the range, the status badge in the settings header shows that the snow is waiting for its season.

The Advanced tab has performance and control options.

Performance

• Frame rate limit: lower this to save battery on laptops and phones. 30 fps still looks smooth for falling snow.
• Load the script in the footer: keeps the snow out of the way of your page rendering. Leave this on unless something needs the script earlier.

Control

• Only load where the shortcode is used: ignores the display rules entirely and waits for [christmas_snow] to appear on the page. Use this to show snow on only a few pages.
• Show the admin bar shortcut: adds a snowflake item to the toolbar. It shows whether the snow runs on the current page and lets you preview the page with or without snow. Only administrators see it.

The Tools tab helps you move, back up or reset your configuration.

• Export settings: click Download JSON file to save your configuration. You can move it to another site or keep it as a backup.
• Import settings: paste the contents of an exported file into the box and click Import settings. Everything is validated before it is saved.
• Reset: click Reset all settings to put every setting back to how it was when you first installed the plugin.
• Current configuration: shows your saved settings as JSON, for reference.

The Plugins tab lists plugins and add-ons from ProPluginsLab, the team behind Christmas Snow. You don't need this tab to use the snow effect.

• Filter the list with All, Free plugins, Pro plugins and Add-ons.
• Click View details on a free plugin or Get plugin on a pro plugin or add-on.
• Plugins already on your site are marked as installed or active.
• Click Refresh to update the list by hand.

To keep the list current, the plugin requests the catalogue from propluginslab.io once a day with WP-Cron, and again when an administrator clicks Refresh. The request sends the plugin version and your site address in the user agent, nothing else. Product icons load from propluginslab.io when you open the tab. If your site can't reach the internet, the tab shows a built in catalogue. Your visitors never trigger these requests.

The settings screen also shows a dismissible banner about ProPluginsLab's WooCommerce plugins. Click the close icon to dismiss it.

Visitors see snow falling over the pages where your display rules allow it, or on pages that contain [christmas_snow]. The snow is drawn on a canvas that screen readers ignore, because it is marked as decorative.

What visitors experience depends on your settings:

• Phones get their own, lower flake count.
• Visitors whose device asks to reduce motion don't see the animation while Respect reduced motion is on.
• The animation pauses completely while the browser tab is in the background.
• When Stop the snow after is set, the snow falls for that many seconds and then fades out.
• When Let visitors turn the snow off is on, a small button appears in the bottom left corner. The visitor's choice is remembered in their own browser.
• When Let snow settle at the bottom is on, a drift builds up along the bottom of the screen.
• WooCommerce cart, checkout and account pages don't show snow by default.

The front end makes no external requests.