5Sec Snow WordPress Plugin Review
What is the 5Sec Snow WordPress Plugin?
5Sec Snow does exactly what it says, 5 seconds to snow effects. At this time of year, there is no better way to add a bit of a festive feeling to your WordPress blog or Woocommerce store than a bit of snow. 5Sec Snow is a fabulous little snow effect plugin to add a bit of festive cheer to your website with next to no effort. The plugin costs just $11 and can be bought from CodeCanyon here.
There is no easier way to add a bit of customisable snow to your WordPress site. There are several features that you can customise from number
Who is 5Sec Snow plugin for?
Being a WordPress plugin, this can be used by anyone wanting to festively spruce up any WordPress site. Most often, ecommerce stores use winter effects to show off winter sales and the like. If you need a simple way to add some great looking snow effects, you should consider this plugin.
What options are available in 5Sec Snow plugin?
Not everyone wants massive snow crystals wandering down the page, so it’s good to see there are options available to customise the user experience. The admin backend has a good list of customisable features as show below.
From the standard settings menu, there are 8 types of snowflakes to choose from, standard white snowflakes in several sizes including small snow, ice blue snowflakes, coloured gift boxes and festive baubles. The settings menu is available from Appearance>5Sec Snow.
To save processing power (and possible user sanity!) you can reduce the number of snowflakes on the screen at one time, from the default 30 to a maddening 110.
The speed option alters the speed of the snowfall, from very slow to very fast, I like to leave this to the default normal, the blog text is visible just fine.
Wind is an interesting setting, it can be set to no wind, some wind, moderate wind, strong wind and blizzard. This alters the path of the snow and the snowfall pattern, I leave it on strong to have a nice effect, moderate is the default, blizzard is a bit over the top.
Melting is what happens when the snow hits “the ground” or in this case, the bottom of the page. The default normal melting looks good, the snow melts at a decent speed and looks good. Other options are no melting, fast melting and slow melting.
Rotation affects the rotation of the snowflakes, only really noticeable with the medium and larger snowflakes, gift boxes and baubles. As with melting, the options are no rotation, slow, fast and normal.
The advanced settings add a few more options, not all essential to get the snowflake effect. If you only want to have the snowflakes visible over the holiday period, as I do, you can set a disable date from the calendar.
The flakes are links option is interesting, it says that if enabled, flakes are clickable – the default is flakes are not clickable. I found that the flakes did not affect links.
A very important option for those less of cheer is the turn off snow button option. This adds some code which can be altered to match the colour scheme of the site as well as the button text.
Another important option is only display snowflakes on the front page, 5sec Snow offers the option to limit the snow effect to this single page rather than every page on the site. This works well for me as I don’t need it on every single page.
Mobile users can avoid the snow altogether if you set the disable on small screens and set the height or width in the box, anything below this will not have the snowflake effect.
The last two options, includ ejQuery and minified version of JS should be left as is. The plugin author states that the jQery code is highly optimised at 3kb.
See the 5Sec Snow plugin in action
I made this quick demo video of the various snowflake settings and options and the real effect on this site using the 5Sec Snow plugin. The video is not my proudest achievement but it shows some of the effects – the festive music was added to brighten up the video – nothing to do with the plugin. I attempted to show real time changes but recording dual screens didn’t really look as good as I had hoped.
