Embed a Countdown Timer on Your Website

What this embed is for

You want a working countdown, Pomodoro, or event timer inside someone else's page — your blog, your venue site, your Shopify product page, your Notion doc, your OBS scene. Hard to do with native HTML alone (no <timer>element exists). Easy to do with an iframe pointed at GoTimer's embed URL. That's what this page builds.

How the embed URL works

Every embed lives at https://gotimer.org/e/<timer-type>?…params…. The timer type is one of countdown, interval (Pomodoro), chess-clock, round-timer, stopwatch, or the others listed at /docs/embed. URL parameters customise everything: duration=300 sets 5 minutes; theme=dark switches to dark mode; accent=%23ff3b3b changes the ring color (URL-encoded hex); autostart=1 starts immediately on load.

The iframe URL is the "source of truth" — anything you can configure in the builder above is also expressible as URL parameters, so people who already know the syntax can skip the builder and just type the URL.

Why iframe and not a script tag?

An iframe sandbox guarantees the embed can't read or modify the parent page's DOM or cookies — important for sites embedding third-party widgets. Script-tag embeds give the widget full access to your page; iframes don't. The trade-off is that iframes can't auto-resize to fit content. GoTimer embeds work around this by posting a { source: 'gotimer', type: 'resize', height } message to the parent window — if your page listens for it, you can resize the iframe dynamically. See /docs/embed for the resizer snippet.

Customisation options

• Theme — auto(matches visitor's OS), light, dark, or special modes like classroom (oversized for projectors) and streaming (transparent background for OBS).
• Accent color — any hex value, e.g. accent=%23d4af37 (gold for weddings) or accent=%23ff3b3b (red for sale urgency).
• Font — any Google Font name, e.g. font=Orbitron for a streaming overlay, font=Playfair+Display for a wedding page.
• Background — bg=transparent (OBS) or any hex like bg=%23112233.
• Messages — message=Doors+open while running and expired_message=Show+starting when the timer hits zero.
• Controls — controls=full (default), controls=minimal (start/pause only), or controls=none(display-only, useful for a wedding date you don't want visitors to mess with).

Where to put the "Powered by GoTimer" attribution

It's automatic — every free embed shows a small attribution link in the corner. It opens GoTimer in a new tab when clicked. You don't add anything; it's baked into the iframe render. If you want it removed entirely, that will land as a paid tier in the future. Today, the attribution is the price.

Site builders this is tested with

WordPress (Block Editor, Classic Editor, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Gutenberg), Shopify (Custom Liquid section, app-block themes, product page templates), Notion (Embed block), Squarespace (Code Block, page-level injection), Wix (HTML Embed widget), Webflow (Embed component), Ghost (HTML card), Google Sites (Embed → Embed code), Confluence, Jira, Slack canvases, plain HTML pages. If your editor has a "custom HTML" option, this works.

Why GoTimer offers free embeds at all

The attribution link is a backlink to GoTimer, and backlinks are how new sites get found on Google. Every embed across the internet is one more pointer back. It's a fair trade — you get a free, working timer with no signup; we get a small, opt-in piece of distribution. If your use case needs the attribution gone (a wedding site, a paid event landing), the paid tier is coming. In the meantime, the free version is genuinely free.