Countdown timers are an easy way to add urgency to a page.

The clock is ticking and it has no hesitation in letting you know that.

You’ve probably seen them on sales pages or replays of webinars – often letting you know that the offer will disappear or increase in price once the time reaches zero.

[ujicountdown id=”Test” expire=”2014/04/25 00:00″]

That one is the best (free!) countdown timer I’ve found for WordPress.

You can install it from the regular WordPress plugins link – just search for Uji Countdown.

It’s free because they’d like you to upgrade to the pro version but so long as you don’t need more than one timer on a page – and apart from a demo page like this one I can’t really think of a reason that you’d want to do that – and are happy with the default style of counter, it’s free.

You can see the default counter style above.

It’s available in 6 different sizes from “ultra small” to “very large” (I’ve used “medium” in the example above).

You can select whether or not to display labels underneath the boxes – for me, it makes sense to do that but since it’s an option in the plugin I guess there are some people who don’t want to.

It’s also intelligent enough to know that 1 is singular – if you watch it long enough, you’ll see the caption change from “seconds” to “second” when it ticks through to 1.

And if you’re getting close to the deadline, you can set an animation option for the seconds countdown.

I’ve not switched that on for this page because I found it really distracting. But when you’re getting down to the last few hours my gut reaction is that it could be very effective at either getting more buyers or driving people off the page.

Or – likely – both.

Which, depending on your viewpoint, could be good or bad.

But the option’s there.

Setup is easy – you can change the colours with a simple drag and drop colour chooser or if you’re techier you can put in the colour value in Hex format. If you don’t know what that second bit means, don’t worry, just ignore me and drag the colours to ones that you like. There’s a preview option to check you haven’t done something stupid like white numbers on a white background.

If you prefer, you can add a timer in one of the Widgets areas of your site. That’s probably where the limit of one timer per page will come in as the widget area will usually show site-wide.

Combine this plugin with a video on a minimalist page and you’ve almost got your own version of Optimize Press without the hefty price tag.

The only other thing that you might need would be an option to delay showing some of the page – usually the buy button – until someone has spent a certain amount of time on the page.

Which is where my delay WordPress content plugin comes in.

It does just that – delays showing some of your page until a specific time has elapsed. You choose the number of seconds before the remaining content shows up.

Very simple.

The method is used by most of the top Clickbank vendors.

If I was doing that, the only thing I’d personally like is a countdown timer that starts once someone reaches the page – Mission Impossible style – but that’s not something I’ve found at the moment. If you have, drop a message in the comments box below this post.

But the countdown timer is a quick, easy, way to generate urgency on a sales page or elsewhere on your WordPress site.