How to Add a Live Cricket Score Widget to WordPress in 2026

I first wrote this guide in 2016, when a cricket plugin and a shortcode were all you needed. That advice has aged badly.

When I came back to update it, the plugin almost every guide still recommends had been discontinued by its own author. So I stopped trusting lists, including my old one.

This time I set up a fresh WordPress site, pasted every free cricket score widget I could find into a real post, and measured what each one actually loaded. Here is what still works, what to avoid, and exactly how to add it.

Why do most cricket score plugins no longer work?

Let me start with the uncomfortable part, because it changes everything below.

Open the cricket tag in the WordPress plugin directory and the first result is Cricket Live Score by wpscore. Its own listing now reads: "This plugin is discontinued as of 01.06.2026. We recommend deleting it from your WordPress installation."

I dug into where that plugin got its scores. It loaded an iframe from fscore.in, and fscore.in now redirects to Soccerway, a football site. So even the sites still running it are showing nothing useful.

The rest of the list is no better:

• Live Cricket Score by Pramod Jodhani was last tested on WordPress 3.9 and read a Cricbuzz RSS feed that no longer resolves.
• Ultimate Live Cricket Lite (ULCWP) was closed on WordPress.org on 3 December 2025 for a guideline violation, and ulcwp.com does not even resolve any more.
• Roanuz's WordPress plugin on GitHub was last updated in March 2019 and calls a v2 API that Roanuz has since replaced with v5.

WordPress itself is on 7.1 now. Not one plugin in the directory shows live international scores and is still maintained. That is why every method in this guide is a widget or an API, and why I would not install a cricket plugin on a client site today.

Which live cricket score widget should you use?

Pick by what your site needs, not by what the provider's homepage promises.

For nine sites out of ten, the answer is the first row. Start with a free widget, and move to an API only when the widget's look or limits genuinely hold you back.

Which widget should you avoid?

Cricwaves still ranks on Google for "cricket widgets", and its site loads fine. But the widget I embedded was still showing India vs Afghanistan from 20 June 2026, while every other feed showed late-September matches.

It also escaped the content column in the block theme and sat against the left edge of the page.

A score widget with old scores is worse than no widget at all. Readers notice, and they stop trusting the rest of the page.

The free cricket score widgets that still work

These three worked on a real WordPress post in my test, plus two specialist options for money and for club cricket.

Pick 2

02

CricketData.org widget

Best for: Sites that want the widest match coverage and a clean upgrade path to an API later.

CricketData.org is a proper cricket data company. It sells the API I cover further down, and it gives away three widgets with, in its own words, "NO LIMIT… You don't need an API key for this."

Its coverage went deepest in my test. It was the only widget showing English County Championship games, from Lord's and New Road.

But this is where measuring paid off. The scrolling card re-downloads its whole 35 KB score file every 7 to 8 seconds. That was 628 KB in two minutes, and still rising when I stopped.

If a reader leaves the tab open for an hour, that is roughly 16 MB of their mobile data. It is not your bandwidth, but it is your reader's.

The other catches:

• It sends your page's URL to cricketdata.org with every refresh.
• It refuses to run on localhost, so test it on a real domain or a staging site with a proper hostname.
• In my test, the "match list" layout only ever showed the CricketData logo.

No API keyFreeon cricketdata.org

Get the CricketData widget

Pick 3

03

CricTimes widget

Best for: Sites that want a tabbed Recent / Live / Upcoming box with custom colours.

CricTimes gives you a plain iframe with Recent, Live and Upcoming tabs. It loaded 40 KB in my test, much of it a Google Font. There is a colour builder on the page if you want it to match your brand.

It showed Asian Games quarter-finals when I tested, so the feed is clearly current.

One thing tripped me up, though. Pasted as-is, the iframe ignored the theme's content width and stuck out to the left of the page.

The fix is to wrap it, not edit it. CricTimes asks you not to change its widget code, so leave the iframe alone and put a simple <div> around it:

html

<div style="max-width:640px;margin:0 auto">
  <!-- paste the CricTimes iframe here, unchanged -->
</div>

The catch: it is an iframe, so it loads a whole separate page inside yours, and the "CRICTIMES EMBED" branding stays.

No accountFreeon crictimes.org

Get the CricTimes widget

How do you add a cricket score widget to WordPress?

This takes about five minutes. Here is how to do it on the block editor, which is what every current WordPress site uses.

1. Copy the snippet from the provider's widget page. It will be a <script> tag or an <iframe>.
2. Open your post or page and click the + where you want the scores.
3. Search for "Custom HTML" and add that block.
4. Click "Edit code" on the block toolbar. In WordPress 7.1 this opens a larger editor with HTML, CSS and JavaScript tabs.
5. Paste the snippet into the HTML tab, then click Update.
6. Wrap iframes in a <div> as shown in the CricTimes section, so they sit in the content column.
7. Publish, then open the live post in a private window to check it.

Do not panic if the preview in that dialog never finishes loading. The editor previews your code in a locked-down frame, and most widgets will not run there. Always judge the widget on the published page, not in the editor.

For a sidebar or footer, the steps are the same. Go to Appearance → Editor on a block theme (or Appearance → Widgets on a classic one) and add a Custom HTML block to that area instead.

Why is my cricket score widget not showing?

If you followed the steps and see a blank space, it is almost always one of these. I hit the first one myself while testing.

1. WordPress stripped the script. On a single site, only Administrators and Editors have the unfiltered_html capability. Authors and Contributors do not, and on Multisite only Super Admins do. For everyone else, WordPress silently removes the <script> tag when the post is saved (roles and capabilities). Ask an admin to add the block.

2. Your caching plugin is delaying it. Features like "Delay JavaScript execution" in WP Rocket hold scripts back until the visitor scrolls or taps. Add the widget's script URL to the plugin's exclusion list. If you are still choosing a cache plugin, my WordPress caching plugins guide covers where these settings live.

3. You are testing on localhost. CricketData's widget showed only its logo on my local test page, then worked on a real hostname. Test on the live site or a proper staging domain.

4. The feed is stale, not broken. If the widget loads but shows old matches, as Cricwaves did, no setting will fix it. Switch provider.

How do you add a live cricket score widget to Blogger?

The same snippets work on Blogger, because they are plain HTML. You have two places to put them.

For the sidebar (every page):

1. In your Blogger dashboard, open Layout.
2. Click Add a Gadget in the sidebar section.
3. Choose HTML/JavaScript, paste the widget snippet, and click Save.

For one post: open the post, switch the editor from Compose view to HTML view, and paste the snippet where you want the scores.

Keep the widget's fixed width and height as the provider gives it. Blogger's mobile themes are narrow, and a widget with no reserved height makes the text jump as it loads. On a static site, the snippet goes straight into your HTML in the same way.

Is there still a WordPress plugin for live cricket scores?

For live international scores, no. Here is the state of the directory when I last checked:

Running a club or league site? Then there is a good plugin. SportsPress has a cricket preset, 10,000+ active installs, and was updated in July 2026. It builds fixtures, results, league tables and player stats as real WordPress pages.

The honest limit is that you enter every score yourself. It is a league manager, not a live feed. Its separate cricket add-on has not been updated since 2020, so test it on a staging site first. WP Club Manager with its cricket extension is a smaller alternative that is updated more often.

You will also find paid "live cricket" scripts on CodeCanyon.

Most of them are mobile apps or betting templates, not WordPress plugins. If you buy one, check the last update date and the vendor's support replies first. ULCWP was a paid plugin too, and its website has vanished.

Which cricket score API should you use?

An API is the route when you want the scoreboard to look like the rest of your site, or you are building a proper cricket section. You get raw match data, and your theme decides how it looks.

Here are the providers that sell real API access, with prices from their own pages when I last checked:

Sportradar sits above all of these, with enterprise contracts through its sales team. That is for broadcasters and betting companies, not a blog.

Is there a free cricket score API?

Yes, one that is genuinely usable: CricketData.org's free plan gives you 100 calls a day, with no end date.

Here is the maths that makes it work. 100 calls a day is one call every 14.4 minutes. Cache the result for 15 minutes and you stay inside the free plan all day, every day.

That is fine for a "today's matches" box. It is not ball-by-ball. For near-live updates, CricketData's $5.99 plan gives 2,000 calls a day, which is one call roughly every 43 seconds.

Does Cricbuzz or ESPNcricinfo have a public API?

No. People search for a "Cricbuzz API" all the time, but Cricbuzz has no developer programme, no API keys and no widget. Its terms of use limit the site to personal, non-commercial use.

The "Cricbuzz" APIs on RapidAPI are run by third parties, not Cricbuzz. The popular GitHub projects are scrapers, and one openly calls itself an "unofficial API that retrieves data by scraping publicly available content from Cricbuzz."

I read a Reddit thread from a developer running a score site who tried exactly this. Scraping Cricbuzz and ESPNcricinfo once a minute got them blocked within a day, and the layout kept changing under them. Build on a provider that sells access, or be ready to rebuild every few weeks.

How do you show API scores in WordPress?

This is the part most tutorials get wrong. Never call the API on every page view. You will burn through a free plan before lunch and slow every page down.

Fetch the data, store it in a transient, and serve everyone from that cache. Put your key in wp-config.php as define( 'CRICKETDATA_KEY', 'your-key' );, then add this with a snippets plugin like WPCode rather than your theme's functions.php:

add_shortcode( 'live_cricket', function () {
    $matches = get_transient( 'live_cricket_matches' );

    if ( false === $matches ) {
        $response = wp_remote_get(
            'https://api.cricapi.com/v1/currentMatches?offset=0&apikey=' . CRICKETDATA_KEY,
            array( 'timeout' => 8 )
        );

        if ( is_wp_error( $response ) || 200 !== wp_remote_retrieve_response_code( $response ) ) {
            return '<p>Live scores are taking a short break. Check back in a minute.</p>';
        }

        $body    = json_decode( wp_remote_retrieve_body( $response ), true );
        $matches = $body['data'] ?? array();
        // 15 minutes keeps you inside the free plan's 100 calls a day.
        set_transient( 'live_cricket_matches', $matches, 15 * MINUTE_IN_SECONDS );
    }

    $html = '<div class="live-cricket">';
    foreach ( array_slice( $matches, 0, 5 ) as $match ) {
        $html .= '<div class="live-cricket__match"><strong>' . esc_html( $match['name'] ) . '</strong>';
        foreach ( $match['score'] ?? array() as $innings ) {
            $html .= sprintf(
                '<div>%s: %d/%d (%s ov)</div>',
                esc_html( $innings['inning'] ),
                (int) $innings['r'],
                (int) $innings['w'],
                esc_html( $innings['o'] )
            );
        }
        $html .= '<em>' . esc_html( $match['status'] ) . '</em></div>';
    }

    return $html . '</div>';
} );

Then drop [live_cricket] into any post or page.

Two details matter here. Errors are never cached, so one failed call does not blank your scoreboard for 15 minutes. And every value is escaped before it reaches the page.

One trap with page caching: if your site caches full pages, the scoreboard only changes when that page's cache clears. Exclude the scores page from the page cache, or keep its cache lifetime as short as the transient.

Will a cricket score widget slow down your site?

Less than people fear, going by my own numbers. But it depends heavily on which widget you pick, and site speed is an engineering problem, not a guessing game.

Here is what I found:

• Layout shift was close to zero. The widgets set fixed heights, so on my plain test page the text below barely moved. IPL.com's loader caused the only shift, 0.03, well inside Google's 0.1 "good" line for CLS.
• Page weight varied 30 times over. IPL.com loaded 20 KB in two minutes, while CricketData's scroller loaded 628 KB and kept going.
• Every widget brings extra servers. Each one talked to two to four outside hosts: CDNs, Google Fonts, an analytics tracker and Cloudflare's beacon.

So my rules are simple. Put the widget only on the pages that need scores, never site-wide in the footer. For iframes you are allowed to edit, add loading="lazy" so they only load when scrolled near. And check your Core Web Vitals before and after.

If a widget pushes your numbers the wrong way, treat it as a technical SEO problem to fix at the source, not a cosmetic one to live with.

Final take

The cricket plugin era is over. The best-known one is discontinued, the premium one has vanished, and the directory has nothing maintained for live international scores.

For most sites, paste the IPL.com widget into a Custom HTML block and you are done in five minutes. Want wider coverage? Use CricketData's widget, knowing it is heavier. Want your own design? Use CricketData's free API with a 15-minute cache.

Whatever you pick, check it on the published page, and check it again when the next series starts. Free widgets come and go, and the only way to know one still works is to look.