Christmas Snow for WordPress documentation

Christmas Snow for WordPress adds a falling snow effect to your site using a lightweight HTML5 Canvas engine. It works as soon as you activate it, and you can change every part of the effect from a single settings screen under Settings > Christmas Snow.

You choose what the flakes look like (snowflake characters, emoji, soft dots or your own image), how much snow falls and how it moves, where it appears, who sees it and which weeks of the year it runs. A live preview panel shows your changes before you save, and six one click presets give you a starting point.

The plugin is for any WordPress site that wants seasonal decoration: holiday campaigns, blogs, business sites and WooCommerce stores. It is completely free, with no locked features.

Christmas Snow is a free plugin on WordPress.org. It does not need any other plugin. The snow starts working with its default settings as soon as you activate it.

The General tab is the first tab on Settings > Christmas Snow. It holds the master switch and the options that control how the effect behaves on every page.

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. Leaving it on is recommended.
• Pause in background tabs stops drawing while the browser tab is not visible.
• Stop the snow after sets how many seconds the snow falls on each 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 screen shows the plugin version and a status badge. A dismissible banner about ProPluginsLab's WooCommerce plugins also appears on this screen. Close it with the × button if you do not need it.

The right side of every settings tab shows three panels, so you can use them while you work on any 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 three Preview background swatches (dark, blue and light) to check how the flakes look on different backgrounds.
• Presets offers six one click looks: Gentle Drift, Classic Christmas, Heavy Blizzard, Golden Sparkle, Festive Emoji and Settling Snow. A preset fills in the Appearance and Motion settings. Your display rules and schedule are left alone. Click Save changes to apply the preset to your site.
• Shortcode shows [christmas_snow] and an example with attributes, ready to copy. See the Shortcodes section on this page for details.

The Appearance tab controls what each flake looks like.

Flake style

• Flake type has three options: Characters and emoji for classic snowflakes and emoji, Soft dots (fastest) for heavy snowfall, and Custom image to use your own artwork from the media library. For a custom image, a small transparent PNG or SVG works best.
• Characters lists the characters to use, separated by a space. Snowflakes, sparkles, stars and holiday emoji all work.
• Colours sets the flake colour. Click + Add colour to add more colours. With more than one colour, the flakes mix them at random (up to eight colours).

Size and opacity

• Smallest flake and Largest flake set the size range. Flakes are sized at random between these two values.
• Minimum opacity and Maximum opacity set how see-through the flakes are. Lower both 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 do not apply to your current choices are hidden automatically.

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

How much snow

• Flakes on desktop and Flakes on mobile set the number of flakes. Keep the mobile count well below the desktop count, because phones have far less drawing power.
• Mobile breakpoint is a width in pixels. Screens narrower than this use the mobile flake count.

Falling and wind

• Slowest fall and Fastest fall set the speed range. A wider gap between the two looks 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 sets 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 they spin.

Interaction

• Cursor interaction sets how flakes react to the mouse pointer: None, Push flakes away, Pull flakes in or Gentle wind towards the cursor. It costs a little performance on very dense snowfall.
• Interaction strength sets how strong that effect is.

Settling snow

• Let snow settle at the bottom builds a drift along the bottom of the screen as flakes land.
• Maximum drift height limits how tall that drift can grow.

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

Where the snow appears

Show on has three choices: The entire site, The home page only or Selected content types and pages. With the last option you can pick content types and list the post or page IDs where the snow should always show.

Never show on

• These IDs: a comma separated list of post or page IDs that should never show snow, for example 3, 27.
• WooCommerce cart, checkout and account pages: keeps the effect off these pages. This is strongly recommended, so nothing decorative sits between a customer and the pay button.
• Search results and 404 pages: keep the snow off those pages.

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 the user roles that should not see the effect. This is useful for keeping the snow away from staff while they work.

The Schedule tab lets the snow run only during a season.

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

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

The Advanced tab holds performance and control options.

Performance

• Frame rate limit caps how many frames per second the animation draws. Lower it to save battery on laptops and phones. 30 still looks smooth for falling snow.
• Load the script in the footer keeps the snow out of the way of your page rendering. Leave it 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 a page. Use it when you want snow on a few chosen pages only.
• Show the admin bar shortcut adds a snow indicator to the toolbar. It shows whether the snow is running on the current page and lets you preview the page with or without snow. Only administrators see it.

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

• Export settings: click Download JSON file to save your configuration as a JSON file. Use it as a backup or to move the setup to another site.
• Import settings: paste the contents of an exported file into the text 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, so you can check them at a glance.

The Plugins tab lists plugins and add-ons from ProPluginsLab, the team behind Christmas Snow. You do not need it to use the snow effect.

• Filter the list with All, Free plugins, Pro plugins and Add-ons.
• Click View details on a free plugin to see it, or Get plugin on a pro plugin or add-on.
• Plugins already on your site are marked as installed or active.
• Click Refresh to load the latest list. The list also refreshes once a day in the background, and a built in list is shown if your site cannot reach the internet.

To keep the list current, the plugin requests the catalogue from https://propluginslab.io/wp-json/cwg-feed/v1/products and the current offer from https://propluginslab.io/wp-json/cwg-feed/v1/promotion. The request sends only the plugin version and your site address. Your visitors never trigger these requests: the front end makes no external requests.

Visitors see snowflakes falling over your pages, drawn on a canvas layer that sits above the content. The look and movement follow your Appearance and Motion settings, and the pages where it appears follow your Display Rules and Schedule.

A few things visitors may notice:

• Depending on Cursor interaction, flakes move away from the mouse pointer, are pulled towards it, or blow towards it.
• With Let snow settle at the bottom on, a drift builds up along the bottom of the screen.
• With Let visitors turn the snow off on, a small button appears in the bottom left corner. The visitor's choice is remembered in their browser.
• With Stop the snow after set above 0, the snow falls for that many seconds and then fades out.

Visitors whose device asks to reduce motion do not see the animation (when Respect reduced motion is on). The canvas is marked as decorative, so screen readers ignore it.