6 tricks for customising your WordPress website for Halloween

From buying pumpkins to splashing out on fancy dress costumes – it’s thought that UK consumers spend more than 474 million on Halloween goods and services every year.

So, it goes without saying that the season is a great way for small businesses to make a little bit more money.

Coming up with a new product, a twist on a product or a new service is often the easy part.

Local beauty parlours can offer Halloween themed manicures, cafes can start selling cupcakes decorated with spider webs and ghosts, makeup artists can open late to do Halloween face painting, for example.

Updating your marketing can be a little bit more challenging though. After all, at big brands like M&Ms and Burger King entire departments work for months to perfect their Halloween communications.

So, in this blog, we’ll look at a few quick and easy ways you can update your WordPress website for Halloween so your customers know you’re offering something special.

1. Add a Halloween decoration plugin

Adding a hint of Halloween to your website can be as simple as installing a ready-made WordPress plugin.

The ‘Simple Halloween Decoration for your Page’ plugin, for example, lets you add spiders and flies to your page that crawl across the screen.

Search the WordPress plugin library for the most up to date options.

Or to read up on how to install WordPress plugins, watch our four-minute video tutorial.

2. Experiment with Halloween graphics

You don’t have to be a graphic designer to be able to add banner images and other Halloween-themed graphics to your WordPress site.

On websites like Canva you can access all sorts of Halloween graphics for free. The site features everything from Halloween ‘sale’ graphics to pumpkin carving party invites.

3. Consider a Halloween countdown clock

Whether you’re planning a Halloween event or running a Halloween sale, you might want to consider adding a countdown clock to your site to either add a sense of build up or create a sensation of urgency and scarcity.

You’ll find various countdown timer plugins in the WordPress library. Take a look at the number of installations each plugin has received, the date the plugin was last updated and the reviews to get a feel for which one might be best for your site.

As the name suggests, the Halloween Countdown plugin, has been designed specifically for the spooky season. This specific plugin allows you to add a black and pumpkin-coloured countdown timer to your site by simply adding the shortcode [hcount] to any page, post or text widget.

4. Run a Halloween poll

Interacting with customers is a great way to build brand loyalty and encourage repeat custom.

So why not add a fun poll to your website to get your site visitors to engage with you during Halloween?

You could ask about anything, from what they plan on dressing up as for Halloween to what their favourite trick or treat sweet is.

Again, you can use a plugin to add a poll to your website. Search the WordPress plugin library for options like Responsive Poll.

5. Update your cart addons

If you run an ecommerce site on WordPress, you might want to think about offering your customers Halloween-themed upsells at the point of sale online.

If you run your ecommerce site through WooCommerce, you can easily offer upsells through the Cart Add-ons extension.

The extension costs less than £30 to add to your WooCommerce site – although if you have a WordPress Ecommerce Hosting package with tsoHost, the extension is included in the cost of your plan along with dozens of other premium extensions.

6. Offer Halloween vouchers

This is another great Halloween marketing option if you run an ecommerce store.

As with the cart add ons mentioned above, it’s simple to offer Halloween vouchers if you run your ecommerce store on WooCommerce.

All you need to do is add the PDF Product Vouchers extension to your site.

The extension lets you customize and sell downloadable PDF vouchers for both specific products and store credit.

This extension usually costs more than £100 to buy. However, it’s included for free as part of tsoHost’s WordPress Ecommerce Hosting package.

Want more Halloween marketing tips for small business?

Read our Halloween marketing for small business blog for more tips and tricks including:

• Advice on Halloween marketing wording

• Ideas for Halloween social media imagery

• Learnings from big brand Halloween campaigns