Runline – Marquee, News Ticker & Announcement Bar

Runline adds scrolling text bars to your site in two minutes: free shipping, sales with a countdown, news, opening hours, a new collection — anything your visitors should not miss.

100% free. Every feature.

Most announcement bar plugins keep the countdown, the e-mail signup, the statistics or the A/B tests for a paid Pro version. Runline does not have one:

• No Pro version, no trial, no license key, no “upgrade” buttons, no ads in your dashboard.
• Every feature on this page is in the free plugin — countdown, signup, recent sales, click stats, A/B tests, display rules, schedule, all 60+ designs.
• Unlimited bars, unlimited messages, on unlimited sites.
• No account with us, nothing sent to our servers.

Pick one of 60+ ready designs — Black Friday, free shipping, Christmas, newsletter, reviews, breaking news, tilted landing-page ribbons and more — or start from scratch. Type your messages, pick colours and watch the live preview change with every key you press — on a computer or phone screen, on a light or dark page. Save without reloading, and the bar is on your site.

Light and fast

• Pure CSS animation, no jQuery. Pages without a bar load no Runline files at all.
• The bar reserves its height at once, so the page does not jump (no layout shift).
• Smooth endless loop without gaps, on any screen width.
• Speed in pixels per second: short and long texts move at the same, readable pace.

Countdown timer

Count down to the end of a sale or the start of an event: “Ends in 2d 14:05:33”. The timer can stand still on the left or the right while the text moves, or sit right inside a message with {countdown}. When the time is over, the bar hides itself or shows your text.

More than text

• Button on the right (“Shop now”) and a coupon code with a Copy button.
• Images and logos in messages — make a scrolling logo strip of your clients or partners.
• Review cards: a photo, the review and the name (“Anna, Kraków”).
• Modes: endless scrolling, one by one (fade, slide up, typewriter), vertical ticker, or still.
• Automatic messages from your latest posts, your WooCommerce products (newest, on sale, featured, best selling, or exactly the products you pick — with prices and your own text like “🔥 {product} — only {price}”) or any RSS feed. Your own messages can run between them.
• Variables in texts: {date}, {site_name}, {coupon}, {countdown}, {free_shipping_left}.
• WPML and Polylang: the texts of the bars are translated with your multilingual plugin.

Grow your list, prove your sales

• E-mail signup right in the bar: a field and a Subscribe button. Addresses are kept on your site (Runline → Subscribers, CSV export) and can also go to Mailchimp, MailerLite or Brevo. Optional consent check box, spam protection, and the bar can hide itself for visitors who subscribed.
• Recent sales (WooCommerce): “A. bought Red balloons 5 minutes ago” — real orders as social proof. By default only the first letter of the name and no city; you choose what to show.
• Click statistics: views, clicks and click rate per day for every bar, with charts. No cookies, no IP addresses, nothing about the visitor.
• A/B test: show a second set of messages to part of the visitors and see which one gets more clicks.

Make it look your way

• Gradients, borders, shadows, rounded corners.
• Tilted and crossed ribbons like on landing pages.
• 20 Google Fonts that are saved on your own site (nothing is loaded from Google when visitors view the page), or the font of your theme.
• An extra CSS class for developers; every bar has its own ID (e.g. #runline-12) for your styles in Additional CSS.

For WooCommerce shops (optional)

Runline works on any WordPress site. When WooCommerce is active, you also get:

• Free shipping progress: “Add 37,00 zł more for free shipping” with a progress line, from the visitor’s cart, updated when products are added.
• Countdown to the end of a product sale — taken from the product itself, nothing to type twice.
• Products as messages, and display rules for the shop, product pages, cart, checkout and cart total.

Show it exactly where you want

• Any number of bars at the same time, each with its own place and priority — two at the top stand one under another, or let only the most important one show.
• Display rules: “Show on…” and “Do not show on…” — home page, chosen pages, posts and products, post types, categories and tags, search, 404, addresses containing a text; WooCommerce shop, product pages, cart, checkout, my account, cart total; logged-in visitors, guests, user roles, site language (WPML, Polylang); visitors who came with a UTM tag or from a certain site; country of the visitor (with Cloudflare or a hosting that tells the country).
• Schedule: from / until a date and time, days of the week, hours of the day — in the time zone of your site.
• Any container: top of the site, bottom of the screen, or any place with the block, the Elementor widget or the shortcode — a column, a sidebar, a small box. The bar takes the width of that place; “limited width”, alignment and rounded corners for more.
• Works with page caching: rules about the visitor and the time are checked in the browser.

Features

• 60+ free ready designs in eight groups: shop, marketing, coupons & signups, reviews & trust, holidays, news, landing pages, minimal and more — all with readable colours (WCAG AA contrast)
• “Change design” takes the look of another design and keeps your texts
• Top of the site, bottom of the screen, or anywhere with the Runline block (Gutenberg), the Runline Elementor widget or the [runline] shortcode
• Up to 50 messages per bar, each with an emoji (quick picker) and an optional link (same or new tab); drag to reorder
• Separator of your choice between messages: • ★ | / or anything else
• Fixed label on the left, e.g. “NEW” or “SALE”
• Colours of the background, text, links and label; font, size, weight, capital letters
• Bar height and space between messages
• Direction, separate speed for phones, pause when the mouse is over the bar, tap to pause on phones
• Keep at the top while scrolling
• Close button: a closed bar stays hidden for that visitor for the number of days you choose, or until you change its texts
• On computers, tablets and phones separately
• Works with page caching (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache): devices are handled in CSS
• Accessible: respects “reduce motion” (one message at a time instead of moving text), stops on keyboard focus, copies of the text are hidden from screen readers
• Modern editor built with the WordPress design system: settings in four tabs, live preview, save with Ctrl+S
• Switch bars on and off, duplicate and delete them right in the list
• Export all bars to a file and import them on another site
• Translated into Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian; ready for more
• Choose the language of Runline by hand (Runline → Settings), independent of the language of WordPress

More from Creonix

• Dayslot — customers choose the delivery or pickup date and time (or the date of an event) right in the WooCommerce checkout.

Source code / Build

Runline ships its readable sources. The admin app and the block are written in modern JavaScript (React) in src/ and built into build/ with the official WordPress tools (@wordpress/scripts):

1. cd wp-content/plugins/runline
2. npm install
3. npm run build (or npm run start while you change the code)

The scripts and styles of the bar on the site (assets/js/*.js, assets/css/runline.css) are plain files; the .min versions next to them are minified copies of the same code.

External services

Runline works without any external service. Two optional features connect to one:

• E-mail services — only when you choose Mailchimp, MailerLite or Brevo in the signup form of a bar and add its API key in Runline → Settings. When a visitor subscribes, their e-mail address is sent from your server to that service to add them to your list. Mailchimp: terms, privacy. MailerLite: terms, privacy. Brevo: terms, privacy.
• Google Fonts — only when you choose a Google font for a bar. Your server downloads the font once from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com and keeps it in your uploads folder; visitors get it from your site, so no visitor data goes to Google. Google Fonts terms, privacy.