No matter what type of WordPress site you run, you may sometimes need to share conference events related to your site’s content, or events organized by you or your company, with your audience and followers.
Sharing events through your WordPress site may seem difficult for you, but you can use the right plugin that helps you easily create events and enable users to follow along.
Create a conference or event website on WordPress
A conference or event website can be created on WordPress by using one of the templates that supports it, or by using specialized plugins.
While templates that support events will not cause you any compatibility issues because they are designed specifically for that. Therefore, using a template that supports events is appropriate if you want to create a new WordPress website from scratch .
On the contrary, you can use plugins to organize events on your site of any type, at any time, easily, and without having to change anything on your site.
Therefore, in this article, we will talk about the most important additions in this field.
Additional features required for a conference website
Before moving on to listing the most important plugins that will help you create events on your site, you must know how to choose the appropriate plugin for your site from among the plugins that we will mention. Each addition has its own features, characteristics, and method of operation that differ from others.
Choosing the most appropriate add-on for your site depends on your site’s needs, so the appropriate add-on for you may differ from any other site based on what it offers.
But there are basic features that almost every site needs that you should look for while making your choice, which are:
- Multiple views (not just calendar format) to suit all users.
- Easily add, delete and modify events from the control panel.
- Built-in booking features for event attendees.
- It is constantly updated, bugs resolved and features added.
- It works well on smartphone screens.
Best Event Website Creation Plugins
There are two types of WordPress plugins that you can use to create an event website on WordPress: either free or paid. If you just want to display the dates, details, and information of upcoming events on your site in a simple calendar view; You will only need free add-ons.
If you want to add features such as purchasing tickets, reservations, integration with WooCommerce , and other advanced features; You will need to purchase the paid version of one of the add-ons.
Whether you intend to save your money or spend it, in the following list we will provide you with a mixture of the best of both types of add-ons:
1 – The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar plugin is the most popular plugin for creating an events website on WordPress. It has been downloaded 800,000 times, and has high ratings from tens of hundreds of users.
The add-on is easy to use and only takes a few minutes after installing and activating it in order to create and publish the first event on your site. It also provides you with the ability to customize the calendar design to match the design of your site.
The Events Calendar add-on integrates with Google Calendar and Google Maps to provide a better user experience, and its developers issue continuous updates to it to improve it and fix any errors in it.
2 – Events Manager
The Events Manager add-on is no less than its predecessor in terms of the features it offers for creating an events website. Through this addition, you can organize recurring and daily events, and display a summary of the activities that will occur during those events. It can also be used for free.
You can add a registration form so that anyone who wants to attend can register using their email, and thus you will have a list containing the email addresses of customers who can be targeted through email marketing campaigns .
The Events Manager plugin provides a set of templates for creating events, and shortcuts to facilitate the creation of events, which, by the way, are completely integrated with WordPress Multisite .
3 – Modern Events Calendar
The Modern Events Calendar add-on is a paid add-on suitable for anyone who wants his site to be entirely dedicated to events, because it is capable of creating all types of events.
The Modern Events Calendar add-on provides templates that provide modern designs for the calendar that you will place on your site. It also allows you to modify the design of any template you want to suit your taste and the general character of your site. All available templates are compatible with small mobile screens.
4 – Events Schedule
Another paid plugin dedicated to creating an event website on WordPress. It provides complete control over the events on your site, and even provides a reservations system for the event you organize.
The strength of the Events Schedule add-on is that it provides 12 different ways to display events on your site in addition to the traditional calendar view. Among these distinctive views, we mention: Blog Post method, which is usually used on educational sites to display a picture of the lecture, the name of the teacher, and the timing.
The Events Schedule plugin makes it easy to create events by providing a simple visual builder that makes it suitable for anyone, without the need for any programming background.
The paid version provides customer support to solve any problems that users of the add-on may encounter. The price to purchase the paid version starts from 39 US dollars.
Use The Events Calendar add-on
As the most popular plugin for creating a free WordPress event site, we will explain how to use it to create events on your WordPress site.
The first step, of course, is to install and activate the The Events Calendar plugin on your WordPress site by following one of the methods mentioned in our guide: How to install and activate any plugin correctly .
Also, in order to add the feature of booking customers and users for events that you organize through your site, we advise you to download the Event Tickets add-on , which complements the The Events Calendar add-on and is produced by the company itself.
After activating the Events Calendar add-on, a new item will appear in the control panel called (Events). click on it. Then click on the Add New button and the page for building the event that you will organize will appear in front of you.
First, you must choose the name of the event in the (Add Title) field, and then write a description of the event in the Description field.
By scrolling the page down, additional options related to the event will appear, the first of which is the ability to add the reservation feature to attend this event (Tickets), either by purchasing tickets for a fee (but the WooCommerce add-on and payment gateway must be activated for that), or by pre-booking via email registration. (RSVP).
We also note the presence of a ( Settings ) button that allows you to choose an image for booking.
Let us choose the method of booking to attend the event by registering using email (RSVP), and then the reservation options will appear before us, which include:
- Type or name of the reservation.
- Description of the reservation.
- Start Time of Booking
- End of booking time
- Attendance capacity or the highest possible number of attendees (Capacity).
- Activate the Can’t Go option.
If you do not specify a Start Time, the reservation will be available to users directly when the event is published. Likewise, if you do not specify an end time for your reservation, your reservation will remain open until the start time of the event.
Then do not forget to press the Save RSVP button .
Then you must choose the time and date (TIME & DATE). Where you can specify the start and end time and date of the event. There is also the possibility of activating the (All Day Event) option if the event will last the whole day, and thus you will be able to specify the date of the event without specifying the time.
Then, you can enter complete and detailed event location information so visitors can know the exact location. There are also two options related to adding a window from Google Maps that shows the location of the event on the map, and the possibility of clicking on the map link to open it in a new window and view it more broadly and know the location of the event with greater accuracy.
Then you can add event organizer information if you want. If there is more than one organizer, you can add them by clicking on the ( Add another organizer ) button.
You can also specify a cost for attendance, as you can specify the type of currency in which the cost will be displayed by entering the currency symbol (US dollars $, Euros €, British pounds £… etc.). Then you can enter the price of the attendance ticket.
In the side menu to the left of the screen there are additional options related to the event in the (Event Option) field, including:
- ( Hide From Event Listings ): Hide the event from the event list.
- ( Sticky in Month View ): Make the event appear first before other events.
- ( Feature Even ): Make the event appear on other pages of the site.
Through the Events Status field, you can also choose the status of the event, either Scheduled , Canceled , or Postponed .
You can specify a prominent image dedicated to the event to represent it if you wish.
Finally, you can choose to either save the event as a draft, schedule it to be published, or publish it directly.
After publishing the event, the event link will appear below the title.
When you click on the link, you will be taken to the events page, where all the events on your site appear as follows.
We notice that there are two buttons that have appeared automatically that allow the user to add the event to his calendar on his account in Google Calendar or Apple Calendar (iCalendar).
As for booking to attend the event, when clicking on the ( Going ) button, the user will be asked to enter his name, email, and the number of people who will attend the event, and then press the ( FINISH ) button.
Note : You may need to translate the extension using Loco translate .
Controlling events on the site
You can control the events you added by adding The Events Calendar to your site by going to (Events). You can either edit the event and modify its information as we explained previously, or you can delete the event if it ends, for example.
When editing a previously published event, details of those who have registered to attend it can be seen by clicking on the (View Attendees) button within the (Tickets) section.
A list of attendees will appear, and you can confirm their attendance at the event by pressing the (Check In) button, transfer them to another booking type or another event by clicking the (Move) button, or cancel their attendance from the event by pressing the (Delete) button.
You can also select multiple attendees and perform any command on them collectively with the click of a button.
Add-on settings
Through the add-on settings, you can modify some things that may interest you, such as allowing comments on the event, modifying the link to the events page, and modifying the degree of zoom in the map that will display the location of the event on your site.
Thus, we have reached the end of our article in which we explained how to create and include any type of event on your site so that it reaches your audience at the place and time you always want.
