Glimmerwake

Seasonal cursor trails for WordPress. Thirteen effects, from Fairy Dust to New Year Confetti, that switch off on the date you choose.

Download free
Move your mouse or tap anywhere. That’s the plugin.
01
Playground

Try every effect

Pick an effect and tune it. The trail follows your pointer across this whole page, exactly as it would on your site.

Year-round

Seasonal

Move your pointer anywhere on this page.

In your dashboard, Settings › Glimmerwake has the same controls, plus opacity, trail length, end dates and display rules.

02
Features

Seasonal

Ends on the date you choose.

Give Snowflakes, Halloween or any other seasonal effect an end date. It stops after that day, in your site’s time zone, then switches to a year-round effect or turns off.

Cached pages?

The end date is checked again in the visitor’s browser, so a cached page never keeps showing an effect that has ended.

Live preview

See it before you save.

The settings screen previews your unsaved changes as you make them.

Make it yours

Adjust the colors, size, density, speed, opacity and trail length until it fits your brand.

Display rules

Everywhere, or only where you want it.

Show the effect on every page, only on the front page, or on the pages and posts you pick. Exclude any page or post, and hide it from administrators if you like.

Phones and tablets

Touch screens show a short sparkle where a finger taps, or nothing at all.

03
Why Glimmerwake

Built to behave

Accessible by default

Visitors whose device asks to reduce motion never see any animation, and the effect stops if they switch that setting on while the page is open. The trail is drawn on one transparent layer that ignores the mouse and touch, so links, buttons, forms, scrolling and the keyboard work exactly as before.
  • Respects reduced motion
  • Never blocks a click
  • Keyboard works as before
  • Hidden from screen readers

Light on your pages

When the effect is off, and on pages where it does not show, nothing is loaded. When it runs, it draws at most 190 particles, pauses in background tabs and stops completely when there is nothing left to draw, so an idle page uses no CPU.
  • No jQuery or libraries
  • No images or web fonts
  • Deferred, in the footer
  • Idle pages use no CPU

Private by design

Glimmerwake does not collect, store or send any personal data. It sets no cookies, makes no requests to other servers and keeps its settings in a single option in your database.
  • No personal data
  • No cookies
  • No external requests
  • One database option

Works with your stack

It stays out of the Elementor, Divi, Bricks, Beaver Builder and Oxygen editors and the Customizer, so it never gets in your way while you design. Every visitor receives the same HTML, so caching plugins are safe, and developers get a filter and a CSS variable to fine-tune it.
  • Page builders
  • Caching plugins
  • Multisite networks
  • Developer filter
04
Download

Get Glimmerwake

Free and open source under the GPLv2 license. Requires WordPress 6.3 or later and PHP 7.4 or later. Install it from Plugins › Add New Plugin by searching for “Glimmerwake”, then go to Settings › Glimmerwake and turn it on.

Want a custom effect, or help fitting it to your site? Let’s talk.

Download from WordPress.org