Create a Countdown Clock

Anticipation is contagious! If you're excited (or nervous) about an upcoming event, odds are, you're not the only one. Why not use our simple but powerful countdown generator to create a countdown clock, displaying the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the date of the event. You can share your newly created countdown, so it becomes a focal point for everyone involved.

We've seen countdown timers used to generate buzz and anticipation around a party or vacation. Teams use them to stay on track and focussed, by ensuring team members have a sense of the time remaining until a critical milestone date. Event promoters and online marketers have reported significant boosts in conversion rates by using an online contdown timer to create urgency and drive action. Even NASA, uses a giant outdoor countdown clock to build anticipation and focus.

Countdowns are "sharing magnets"! A countdown to a date that means something to you and your network of friends or customers is something you want to share, right? Well guess what, so do your friends, and their friends.

We run a relatively small website but we see 200-500 social shares per day of countdowns that are displayed on our website. That does not including the thousands of our countdowns that have been shared around and embedded on other websites.

Recently a Seattle household made the news and went "viral" on Instagram with a simple display of the number of days remaining in Trump's current presidency term. Tom Petty fans were intruiged by a countdown that appeared on the official Tom Petty website in early 2018. The hugely popular video game, Fortnite received a huge amount of attention and press coverage after introducing mysterious, in-game counters, leaving fans fascinated as to what they were counting down to.

As an online marketer or e-commerce company what's your worst enemy? For many it's customer procrastination. They want what you offer but they can always buy it later. Maybe they'll wait until they have more information, more money or more time. There are a million reasons to "do it later".

Dominant and successful online businesses such as Ebay, Amazon and Booking.com make extensive use of urgency as a means to drive action and increase conversions. You can barely visit a successful online store, or ticketing/booking website without being exposed to urgency or scarcity-based marketing tactics. "Less than 5 tickets left at this price", "Hurry, only 3 days until sale ends" or "Order by 5pm to receive next day shipping". These companies are ruthlessly analytical and their tactics are driven by data and experimentation. They use these tactics because they have proven to be effective. Countdown timers are a crucial tool in your urgency-marketing toolbox.

I made this quick video to show how simple it is to create a countdown and embed in it a blog or website.

Mobile web browsing has exploded - if you run a website you may find that more than half your visitors are using smartphones or tablets. Our countdown clocks use mobile friendly code and run very little code on the user's device meaning they won't slow down or otherwise interfere with the user experience. We go beyond mobile-friendly by auto-generating a double-resolution version of your countdown to take advantage of Retina®, and other high-resolution displays that are common on many of today's most popular devices.

You wouldn't put just any code into your website. Invalid or incompatible code can break the layout of your web page or display error messages to your visitors. Worse than that, malicious JavaScript code can jeopordize your visitor's security and privacy.

We have two layers of protection built in. Firstly, the code we issue is contained in an iframe, the browser's same-origin policy prevents the iframe content from accessing code in your page, effectivly isolating our code from your website's code. Secondly we serve all our countdowns over an encrypted connection, this prevents hackers from altering the countdown before it loads into your page.

Page load time is an important factor in visitor satisfaction as well as in search engine ranking algorithms. Be careful when using third party widgets as some of them contain blocking JavaScript code or large files which can negatively impact page load times. Because our countdowns are pre-rendered the code download is very small. We also use edge caching strategies to deliver your countdowns from the location nearest to each user. When we do need to load content from the main server we use sophisticated in-memory caching to pull the data directly from RAM which is faster than reading from a hard disc.