Does your Jewish website stay open on Shabbat and Yom Tov?

Shamor automatically closes your WordPress site every Shabbat and Jewish holiday — and reopens it at Havdalah — with zero manual work. No cron jobs, no weekly updates, no remembering to turn it off.

Connect your site to Shamor in under 5 minutes. From that point on, your site displays a beautiful, customizable block screen at candle-lighting time and comes back online automatically when Shabbat ends — week after week, holiday after holiday.

Beyond your website — full community coverage:

Shamor doesn’t stop at your WordPress site. The same account also automatically locks and unlocks your WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and Discord servers every Shabbat and Yom Tov — so you’re fully covered across every community you run. Your website, your chat groups, and your social communities all go quiet at candle-lighting and come back at Havdalah, automatically, with no manual work.

Perfect for:

Jewish businesses and e-commerce stores that want to observe Shabbat online
Synagogues and community organizations managing websites, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord
Torah content sites, Jewish news, and blogs
Any Jewish community leader who wants every platform to reflect their values

How It Works

Start your 7-day trial at shamor.app and add your website
Install this plugin and paste your API key
That’s it — Shamor handles everything automatically from here

Shamor fetches halachic Shabbat and holiday times for your location every week using Hebcal data. Your site closes at candle-lighting and reopens at Havdalah — automatically, every week, for every Jewish holiday on the calendar.

Site Blocking Features

🕯️ Automatic Shabbat & Yom Tov detection — times fetched live, no manual setup
🌍 Halachic blocking modes — block by owner’s time, visitor’s local time, or the stricter of the two
🎨 5 colour themes — Dark Navy, Jerusalem, Midnight, Clean White, Forest — pick in one click
📐 2 layout templates — Full (candles + parasha + zmanim) or Minimal (candles + countdown only)
✨ Beautiful animated block screen — animated candles, zmanim, parasha of the week, and havdalah countdown
⏱️ Candle-lighting countdown — shown to visitors while the site is still open
🔓 Admin bypass — let site admins browse freely during Shabbat
📋 IP whitelist — allow specific IPs to bypass the block
🔀 Redirect mode — send visitors to a custom page instead of the block screen
🎨 Full customization — colors, logo, heading, message, which sections to show
⚡ Ultra-lightweight — 1 server call per week per site; browser reloads at exact transition times with no polling

Shabbat Times Widget

Display candle-lighting and Havdalah times anywhere on your site — no Shamor account required.

🟦 Gutenberg block (shamor/shabbat-times) — drag into any post or page with live editor preview
🧩 Elementor widget — full design controls panel in the Elementor editor
📦 Classic sidebar widget — add via Appearance Widgets
🔡 Shortcode — [shamor_times] works in any theme or page builder
🏙️ 18 city presets — Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, New York, London, Paris, Melbourne and more
⏱️ Live countdown timer — shows “Shabbat starts in HH:MM:SS” and switches to havdalah countdown during Shabbat
🎨 4 display styles — Card, Minimal, Inline, Banner
🌐 Hebrew & English — auto-detects from WordPress site locale
⚙️ Per-widget customisation — background, text, and accent colours; font size; border radius

Halachic Blocking Modes

Set in your Shamor dashboard under Websites Settings:

Owner’s time — site closes based on your location’s Shabbat time (default)
Visitor’s time — site closes based on each visitor’s browser timezone
Stricter — site closes as soon as either the owner or the visitor enters Shabbat

Zmanim Preferences

Choose candle-lighting offset: 10 / 15 / 18 / 20 / 25 / 30 / 40 minutes before sunset
Choose havdalah: tzeit ha-kochavim (3 stars, 7.083°) or fixed 42 / 50 / 72 minutes after sunset

External Services

This plugin connects to the Shamor service (shamor.app). Two separate endpoints are used:

1. Shabbat blocking status (https://shamor.app/api/shabbat-status)
Fetches whether your site should currently be blocked and the weekly schedule of times.
* What is sent: your site key (an opaque token you created in the Shamor dashboard) and, for visitor-timezone modes, the visitor’s IANA timezone string (e.g. America/New_York). No names, emails, or IP addresses are transmitted.
* When: once per week server-side (PHP) to cache the schedule; once per browser session from the visitor’s browser when using Visitor’s Time or Stricter modes.

2. Shabbat times widget (https://shamor.app/api/widget-times)
Fetches candle-lighting and Havdalah times for the selected city. No Shamor account is required for this feature.
* What is sent: the selected city’s latitude, longitude, timezone, candle-lighting offset, and your WordPress site’s home URL (to allow the Shamor admin to see which sites have the widget installed). No visitor data is transmitted — this call is made server-side from your WordPress server.
* When: once per city per week, cached in a WordPress transient until one hour after Havdalah.

Service home: https://shamor.app
Privacy policy: https://shamor.app/privacy
Terms of service: https://shamor.app/terms

Shamor — Shabbat & Holiday Site Blocker