Digitizer Shabbat Keeper

Digitizer Shabbat Keeper closes a WordPress site from candle lighting to Havdalah, every Shabbat and every Jewish holiday, without anyone touching it. You pick a city once. From then on the plugin works out the times itself, on your own server, and nothing is sent anywhere.

It is built for sites in Israel. The holidays are the Israeli ones (one day each), the cities are Israeli cities, and every time it shows is Israel time. A site outside Israel is not what it is for – see the FAQ.

While the site is closed, purchases and form submissions are refused. That is the purpose of the plugin, and it is what your visitors will meet on Friday evening. Administrators are never blocked, so you can always get in.

Two ways to close

• Closed – every visitor sees a “closed for Shabbat” page, with your title, your message and the time the site reopens. The page answers with HTTP 503 and a Retry-After header, which search engines read as a temporary outage, not as a missing site.
• Open to read, closed for business – pages stay readable. Purchases and forms are refused, and a banner at the top of every page says when the site reopens.

What is refused in business mode

• WooCommerce purchases – in classic templates, in the cart and checkout blocks, through the Store API, and when a customer tries to pay for an existing order
• Form submissions from Elementor Pro Forms, Contact Form 7, WPForms and Gravity Forms
• Comments
• Optionally, phone and WhatsApp links are hidden

Every refusal happens on the server. Hiding a button is a courtesy; the refusal is what makes it true.

You can switch the WooCommerce and the form refusals off separately in business mode. Closed mode always refuses both: a checkout or a form that was already open at candle lighting cannot be sent while the site says it is closed.

The times

• Candle lighting follows the custom of each city: 40 minutes before sunset in Jerusalem, 30 in Haifa, 22 in Beer Sheva, 18 elsewhere. Fifteen cities are built in, and you can enter coordinates for any other place in Israel.
• Havdalah is 42 minutes after sunset, or 72 (Rabbeinu Tam) if you prefer.
• Shabbat, both days of Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, the first day of Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, the first and seventh days of Pesach, and Shavuot. A holiday next to Shabbat is one closure, not two.