Shamor — Shabbat & Holiday Site Blocker
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