Add a live stock or crypto ticker to WordPress without an API key

vunelix — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 08:42:31 +0000

If you run a finance blog, a crypto news site or an investing newsletter on WordPress, sooner or later you want live prices on the page: a scrolling ticker in the header, a Bitcoin price next to an article, a stock screener on its own page.

The usual options are an iframe from a charting site, or a market-data API that needs a key, a server-side cache and some JavaScript you now have to maintain. This post shows a third way: a free plugin that renders the widgets from a shortcode, with no API key and no iframe.

This post is from the Vunelix team, so the plugin is our own. It sticks to the practical steps.

What you get

Vunelix Financial Widgets is a free plugin on WordPress.org with 40+ widget types:

Tickers: scrolling ticker tape, static price cards, a single-symbol card, and an inline "ticker tag" that sits inside a sentence
Screeners: crypto, stocks, forex, commodities, indices, funds, CEX and DEX pairs
Heatmaps: crypto, stock and currency
Charts: symbol overview, mini chart, seasonality
Calendars: economic calendar and dividends calendar
Tools: currency converter, cross rates, gold calculator, technical analysis gauges

Prices update live over WebSocket. Each widget renders inside Shadow DOM, so your theme's CSS cannot break it and it cannot break your theme.

Step 1: Install the plugin

In your WordPress admin go to Plugins → Add New, search for "Vunelix Financial Widgets", then Install Now and Activate.

Step 2: Verify your domain

There is no API key. Widgets are authorized by domain instead, so you sign up for free on the developer portal and add your site's domain. That is the only setup outside WordPress.

Step 3: Build a widget and copy the shortcode

Open Vunelix Widgets in the admin sidebar, pick a widget, set the options (symbols, theme, colors, language) and copy the shortcode it generates.

A scrolling crypto ticker looks like this:

[vunelix widget="ticker-tape" theme="dark" symbols="BINANCE:BTCUSD,BINANCE:ETHUSD,BINANCE:SOLUSD"]

A stock screener with 50 rows for the US market:

[vunelix widget="stock-screener" per_page="50" default_country="US"]

A USD to EUR converter with a chart:

[vunelix widget="currency-converter" from="USD" to="EUR" show_chart="true"]

Technical analysis for Apple:

[vunelix widget="technical-analysis" symbol="NASDAQ:AAPL" default_period="1d"]

Step 4: Paste it where you want it

Block editor (Gutenberg): add a Shortcode block and paste the shortcode.
Classic editor: paste it straight into the content.
Elementor, Divi, WPBakery: use the page builder's shortcode or text element.
Sidebar or footer: use a Shortcode widget in any widget area.

That is it. Widgets are lazy loaded: the JavaScript for a widget runs when it scrolls into view.

A few things worth knowing

Theme and colors. Every widget can follow your site's light or dark mode automatically, or you can force one. Positive, negative, background, text and border colors can be overridden, with separate values for light and dark.

Languages. Widgets are translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, German, French and Japanese, with right-to-left layout for Arabic.

Several widgets on one page. Add as many as you like; each one loads on its own.

Not on WordPress? The same widgets work on any site with a script tag. The docs and a live configurator for each widget are at vunelix.com/widgets.

Where the data comes from

Prices, technical signals and chart data come from FCS API, delivered through the Vunelix backend. The plugin's readme on WordPress.org lists exactly what is sent to which service, and the JavaScript ships un-obfuscated if you want to read it.

If you try it and something does not work with your theme or page builder, the support forum on WordPress.org is the fastest way to reach us.

DEV Community: vunelix