If you need to display a weather widget on your WordPress website then you are in the right place. WordPress weather plugins can be used for displaying weather updates on your website. The Location weather plugin blows away any other weather plugin by a huge margin. There are a number of problems with other weather plugins that Location Weather solves. You will find all the detailed features, pros and cons about this plugin, in this article.
Why You Need a Weather Widget
Weather updates are suitable for websites that need to display weather forecasts. This can be especially useful for businesses such as wedding venues, golf courses or restaurants with out door sittings and hotels and resorts with seasonal attractions such as snow fall. Weather widgets can also be useful for websites that deliver news.
Features, Pros and Cons
Generally the Location Weather plugin is well built as an amazing and reliable weather widget plugin. It is easy to use and mobile responsive. There are many design customization options that allow you to change the background and borders. The plugin has the ability to detect a user’s location and display the weather based on the location. You can also pre-configure which cities weather you want to display. It supports shortcodes and has a number of weather details such as forecasts, humidity, wind speed and other weather details.
The plugin is available in a free and a pro version. The pro version has additional features such as the ability to display the temperature in °C or °F, Location auto detection, Show / Hide Wind, humidity and date, show wind speeds in mph and priority customer support. The pro version starts at $15 for a single site, $49 for a 5 site license and $149 for an unlimited site license. This is a one of charge and not a yearly subscription.
Pros:
- Lightweight – It is important to use plugins that do not slow down your website.
- Easy to use – The plugin is easy to install and displaying the weather widget is also easy using a shortcode or the sidebar
- Mobile responsive – The plugin displays beautifully on any device be it desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile
- Highly customizable design – When adding any content to your WordPress website you should ensure it matches with the overall look and feel of the website. The plugin gives you the flexibility to customize the design and integrate it perfectly with your overall design.
- Real time weather forecast – Unlike a few other plugins on the market, Location weather displays real time weather forecasts. This allows your visitors to plan better in case you are using this for a venue based business
- Location based weather information – A neatly implemented feature in this plugin. It auto detects the location of a visitor and displays the weather in their current location.
- Supports short codes – This gives you the flexibility to add the weather widget almost anywhere on your website
- Widget ready – Widgets and sidebars are a great place to display the weather
- Compatible with all themes – The plugin has been tested with a good number of WordPress themes and is compatible with all of them. Hence you do not need to worry about compatibility with your current theme.
Cons:
- Free version has limited features – It would be great is some simple features such as ability to display the weather in °C or °F would be available in the free version.
- The plugin is not multi-lingual supported and currently only available in English.
- Incompatible with older versions internet explorer, although not many people use this
As you can see from the lists above the pros are many while the cons are few and we hope the cons can be fixed in future releases.
The weather data is provided by Open Weather Map and you will need to get an api key for the plugin to work.
Majority of the reviews are positive and the plugin has a 4.5 star rating on its wordpress.org page at the time of writing this.
Wrapping up
Many other weather plugins have limited features such as not being able to display weather for website visitors outside the US since they are unable to correctly identify the address. A number of plugins also have some limitations on the number of visitors that the weather can be displayed to. Exceeding the bandwidth limit then starts displaying errors. Other plugins display cached data instead of real time forecasts. Location weather solves this and a number of other problems, hence we said at the start of the article, Location weather beats the competition by some margin.
If you had trouble finding a good weather widget plugin, we hope we have been able to help you by doing this review. Do give the plugin a try on your website and let us know in the comments section what you think about it.
You may also want to see our picks for the best Google map widget plugins to integrate your business location to your site