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8 Best WordPress Weather Plugins for 2024 [Free & Paid]

Last Updated on December 26th, 2023

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As you probably already know, plugins are an excellent way of adding masses of extra functionality to your website. They can turn a boring blog into something sensational, and one of the coolest things you can add to pretty much any site is a WordPress weather plugin.

You are probably wondering why anyone would want a weather plugin on anything other than a travel or news site. The thing is, people need to know the weather forecast for a whole host of reasons: sailors, motorists, pilots, farmers, event planners, tourists, and plenty of others regularly use forecasts to know what’s in store over the coming days or even weeks. So, adding a WordPress weather widget should be something you think about adding whatever kind of site you have.

In this article, we’ll look at the 10 best weather plugins for WordPress that are available in 2023.

What Can a Weather Plugin Do?

Well, as the name suggests, in their simplest form, a weather plugin will tell you what the weather is doing at the moment. But depending on the plugin, you can extend that to show forecasts for the coming days, plus you can show what is happening in other locations, as well as air quality, UV index, and much more. Best of all, many of the plugins have fantastic visual interfaces that will really make your site pop.

Top WordPress Weather Plugins

Surprisingly, few weather widgets are available, and many of the ones promoted on other “top ten” type blogs have not been updated for months, years even. In contrast, all of the ones in our list have been updated within the last two months and will work with WordPress versions up to 5.7.2 (except for Simple Weather Plugin, which is currently okay up to 4.9).

WP-Forecast

WP-Forecast WordPress weather plugin

Kicking off with one of the most popular plugins, WP-Forecast is active on over ten thousand websites, and users have rated it a very respectable 4.4/5.0 stars.

Wp Forecast enables you to display weather data from AccuWeather or WeatherBug on your site’s pages, posts, or sidebar. Despite being completely free, you still get the following functionality:

  • Customize which information you wish to display
  • Display OpenUV.io data
  • Choice of location
  • Configurable refresh time
  • Choice of English or German (other languages planned)
  • Select between Celsius or Fahrenheit
  • Windspeed
  • Configurable forecast
  • ‘Pull-down’ window option to keep the screen uncluttered
  • Multi wp-forecast widget support
  • CSS support
  • API

So, if you are toying with adding a weather forecast plugin to your WordPress site, WP-Forecast would be an ideal, risk-free starting point

Get wp-forecast

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Weather Station

Weather Station

Weather Station gives you the ability to display meteorological data from weather stations you have access to. This could be from one of the many free and paid weather services, or you can interface with your own personal weather station.

Numerous cool display formats are available, so getting it to match the look and feel of your site should present no problems. Other features include:

  • Simple setup: install the plugin and insert shortcodes wherever you want the weather to appear
  • Supports many free and paid weather services
  • Interfaces with many makes and models of weather station
  • Ability to display current weather, indoor comfort, pollution, fire weather, solar monitoring, storm tracking, and more
  • Configurable trends and alarms

That’s excellent functionality for a completely free plugin. According to the WordPress plugin directory, over 4,000 active downloads are in operation, and its 4.7/5.0 rating is a big thumbs up from users.

Get Weather Station

Weather Effect

Weather Effect

Unlike the other plugins in this list, Weather Effect does not actually give you the weather; instead, it adds weather (and other) effects to your site. So, for example, in winter, you can have snowflakes falling down the screen or some colorful leaves in the fall. It’s nothing more than a bit of fun, but often that’s what people want in their lives.

The free version of the plugin will give you:

  • Three weather effects
  • Christmas, new year, and winter effects
  • Settings panel where you can configure the number of falling objects, speed, etc.
  • Live preview

There is also a premium version costing $15 to $99, depending on whether you want one or up to fifteen site licenses. Those prices are for a lifetime subscription and include:

  • Considerably more effects for weather and occasions, including Halloween, Valentine’s, New Year, and Thanksgiving
  • Effects for all four seasons
  • Additional configuration settings, e.g., omit specific pages or posts

The developer also offers a subscription costing $149. That gives you access to their full range of over twenty plugins, including the premium version of Weather Effect. All paid subscriptions come with a 15-day guarantee, although there are restrictions on that, so please read the developer’s terms of use before purchasing.

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Weather Effect has attracted a user rating of 3.9/5.0 stars and has been downloaded over 3,000 times from the WordPress plugin directory.

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Location Weather

Location Weather allows you to bring weather data and forecasts to your website in the most attractive way. It is highly customizable, particularly given it is developer-friendly. Key features of this impressive plugin include:

  • Choice of backgrounds, including video
  • Wide range of customization
  • Automatically display weather based on visitor location
  • Forecasts up to 16 days ahead
  • Multiple weather instances on the same page possible
  • Show or hide various weather data types
  • Compatible with all themes and major browsers
  • Multiple languages supported (45)
  • Custom CSS
  • Mobile responsive
  • Multisite compatible
  • Works with page builders and block editors like Gutenberg, Elementor, etc.

The plugin gets weather data from Open Weather Map, although the developer suggests you obtain a free Open Weather Map API Key to improve performance. This is pretty much the case, however, with all other weather plugins.

Location Weather will set you back between $25 and $199 per year, depending on how many sites you need to license. Lifetime subscriptions are also available, which cost $99 to $399.

All subscriptions come with a 14-day ‘no questions asked’ refund policy. Additionally, a free but still very usable version is available for you to try out, and there is a live demo of that available via the WordPress plugin directory. Therefore, trying out Location Weather is risk-free.

According to WordPress, over 6,000 active downloads of the free version are active. Users have rated it at 3.7/5.0 stars. All negative comments seem to relate to things not working, such as location, but those usually are due to incorrect setup rather than issues with the plugin itself.

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Ventus – Weather Map Widget & Shortcode

Ventus WordPress weather plugin

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Ventus is a super little free plugin that packs in great features. With it, you can quickly and easily add a fascinating live weather map to your WordPress site. It does this by embedding a windy.com widget wherever you want it. Best of all, it is a very lightweight plugin that will not slow your site down.

With this plugin, you get some great features:

  • Select from several overlays, e.g., clouds, radar, lightning, rain, sea temperature, standard temperature, wind, etc.
  • Eight levels of zoom (between 3x and 11x)
  • Customizable map width, height, and border-radius
  • Ability to manually define longitude and latitude
  • Selectable units
  • Display or hide the pressure isobars, map marker, and spot forecast

No premium version of this Ventus is available. It has a full 5.0/5.0 user rating, who have given it comments like “simplistically brilliant” and “Such a super-cool weather app.” This one is definitely worth a look.

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HT Mega – Absolute Addons for Elementor Page Builder

HT Mega WordPress weather plugin

HTMega not a weather plugin per se; instead, it is a bundle of Elementor page builder addons. So, within the bundle of over 80 elements and 360 blocks, you will find three styles of weather elements. That’s pretty cool because, with all those other elements and blocks at your disposal, you will be able to make your site pretty special.

As well as all those elements and blocks, you will also get the following with the free version:

  • Every element is fully customizable and selectable
  • Unlimited options for typography and colors, including Google font support
  • Responsive and mobile-ready, including Retina displays
  • Cross-browser compatible
  • Fifteen categories/template sets and page templates included

The Pro version adds:

  • 39 categories/template sets, and 491 page templates
  • Updates and support
  • Between 3 and 5 premium themes depending on the package purchased

Pro will cost you between $29 and $149 per year, depending on how many licenses you need. Lifetime subscriptions cost between $59 and $349, but all you gain is updates and support for life but no extra functionality. Subscriptions come with a 48 hour ‘with strings’ refund policy which is rather measly, but in the developer’s defense, you can try out the free version first, and there is also a live demo available.

A massive 80,000 active downloads of HT Mega are in operation, which is no surprise given how much it offers. The star rating of 4.1/5.0 shows that users are rather pleased with it too.

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Simple Location

We are somewhat spoiled for choice when it comes to free weather plugins. Simple Location is another one that won’t cost you a single cent. While it is a location plugin, it does allow you to offer weather info directly to your site visitors via features like:

  • Ability to add geo coordinates, text descriptions, and location taxonomy to posts, comments, users, or attachments
  • Add location-based weather data to a post or a widget
  • Choice of map displays
  • Ability to change the displayed time zone on a per-post basis
  • Gutenberg compatible (although not specifically built for it)
  • Data privacy and data notice compliant
  • Weather consists of current conditions and temperature. The developers will be adding further parameters in the futur
  • Ability to use custom weather data sources (using URLs that returns JSON objects)
  • Several primary weather providers supported. It is also possible to write add ons for additional providers

Presently, only around 500 active downloads have been installed from the WordPress plugin directory. However, those using it give it the full five stars, and the reviews contain very favorable comments.

Get Simple Location

Simple Weather

Simple Weather WordPress plugin

Not to be confused with Simple Location above, which is from an entirely different developer, Simple Weather is a premium plugin available through Code Canyon.

As its name suggests, this plugin allows you to create a simple weather display by adding some shortcodes into your posts or pages. As well as today’s weather and location, you can add things like night-time temperature, upcoming forecast for a selected number of days, etc. If you don’t like working with shortcodes, there’s also a widget built into the plugin.

Simple Weather offers the following features:

  • Wide range of customization options: limitless choice of colors, date format, units, etc.
  • Configurable update interval
  • OpenWeatherMap API support
  • Forecasts up to 7 days ahead
  • Display day and night temperatures and location
  • Multi-language support (17 languages currently)
  • Ticketed technical support
  • Weather can be embedded using shortcode or using the widget

Simple Weather costs $18, which includes updates and six months of support from the developer. An extra $4.88 extends the support to a full year. Presently, over 2,200 downloads exist, and customers have rated it 3.92/5.0 on Code Canyon.

Get Simple Weather

Please note that all data such as prices, review scores, etc., we have included in the above list were correct when this article was written. Also, the plugins are not listed in any particular order of preference.

What’s Your Favorite WordPress Weather Plugin?

So, here we conclude the list of the best WordPress weather widgets for 2023. There’s a great choice of free ones which offer excellent functionality, so you can add some cool weather-related features to your website without even opening your wallet. From simple temperature displays to real-time maps, the choice really is yours.

Do you already display the weather on your site? If so, which plugin are you using? Did you try any others before deciding on that one? What do you like and dislike about it? And if you don’t already have a weather plugin, do you plan on adding one soon? If so, have any of the ones we have suggested tickled your fancy? As always, please do drop us a note in the comments section.

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.