Halloween is one of the best times of year to shake things up and have some fun. If you love this time of year as much as I do, then you’ve already decorated your house and office with cobwebs, candy bowls, and crazy-spooky characters. But who says spreading the Halloween spirit needs to stop there?
If you run a WordPress website, there’s never been a better time or an easier way to “trick” out your site Halloween-style. (Or to start planning how to dress it up for the other approaching holidays, if Halloween doesn’t do it for you.)
There are more than enough tools you can use to Halloween-ify your WordPress website this year. Mind you, a complete overhaul isn’t necessary in order to pull this off. Sometimes it’s the smallest touches that work the best!
Whether you prefer to trick your visitors or give them a treat this Halloween, any extra effort you put into Halloween-ifying your site is sure to get you noticed – and potentially earn you an extra look.
Here are just some of the ways you can add the perfect hint of Halloween to your WordPress website.
#1: Update Your Logo à la Google
We all know what Google’s logo looks like. It’s simple, clean, and colorful. But every now and again—usually around a major holiday or event—Google will switch things up and throw up a temporary logo design for our viewing pleasure. Halloween is one of those special occasions.
While you might not be able to pull off a full redesign of your logo like Wes Craven did for Google in 2008, you can make smaller alterations to it in the spirit of Halloween:
- Change the color scheme to include orange, black, or a blood red.
- Swap out a letter for a Halloween icon that resembles the original letter (“o” and “i” are always good ones).
- Use a font or new letter styling that looks like your favorite Halloween movie’s title screen.
Tools to Use: If you used a design program like Photoshop or Illustrator to create your logo, you can use it now to get really funky with this. If you don’t have one, Canva is a free and easy-to-use design tool.
#2: Alter Your Theme’s Color Scream (Scheme)
Earlier this year, I wrote about the psychology of color in website design. Color consideration is something you carefully plot out and define when first developing your brand’s color palette. But when it comes to holidays like Halloween, it’s okay to throw some of those rules out the window.
Luckily for us, WordPress themes make it easy to update color settings. So if you want to change your font colors, your theme’s background, or even the colors of your calls-to-action, go for it. Just make sure they don’t clash too much against the surrounding color palette and imagery. You want to give your visitors a startle–not a total fright.
Tools to Use: Most WordPress themes allow you to make updates to your color palette—that you can see reflected on your site in real time—within the Appearance > Customize panel. If you’re using one of WPMU DEV’s themes, the Upfront Builder will help you do this, too.
#3: Go Spooky with Your Font
Again, when it comes to something so ingrained in your brand’s identity like a font, it can be tough to break away from your pre-defined styles. However, with plenty of free fonts available online, this is a fun (and temporary) way to give your site a subtle hint of Halloween.
When it comes to changing up your fonts for Halloween, remember that less is more. Many of the fonts that look cool for Halloween are a tad dramatic, so try to relegate these to header text on your website—or in specific locations, like pop-ups, calls-to-action, and hero images.
Tools to Use: There are many free fonts available that all claim to be “scary,” “spooky,” or straight-up “Halloween.” To help get you started, I’ve picked the ones that are simple and clean enough to still look professional, while offering a unique twist on the typical Halloween-style font:
#4: Vamp Up Your Social Icons
The devil is in the details, right? For those of you with a heavy social media presence, it would make sense to give your site’s social icons some extra character. Think about it: if you know your site’s visitors will head over to your social links to share content or follow your page, this is the perfect place to add a touch of Halloween.
Tools to Use: Use free Halloween icons from the web (see more on that below) to custom-design your own social icons or you could use pre-made ones like these pumpkin vectors.
The Easy Social Icons plugin will enable you to upload those icons into WordPress and swap them out for the standard ones on your site.
#5: Make a 404 Error Even Scarier
Obviously, you don’t ever want someone to encounter a broken link on your site. But, if it should ever happen, why not give them an entertaining 404 page to land on?
Tools to Use: I’m a big fan of this animated 404 page available on ThemeForest. It’ll cost you a couple bucks, but I think it’s worth it if you want to give your lost visitors a random spook.
#6: Grab Your Visitors’ (Attention) Before They Leave
Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, a visitor was thinking about leaving your website without taking any action (gasp!). You’d want one more opportunity to grab their attention and at least get an email address before they jump ship, right?
Why not take this opportunity to add an exit-intent, newsletter opt-in message to your site? With most plugins these days, you can change the colors, fonts, animation, and other settings to whatever you want, so this would be easy to update as a new holiday approaches.
Tools to Use: When you want to make that last-ditch effort count, use the WPMU DEV Hustle plugin.
