8 Tips for Installing a WordPress Event Calendar Plugin

As an event organizer, you want an effective way to share your schedule of upcoming events with prospective attendees. One way to make it easier for attendees to discover events and view event details is by making sure you have a WordPress event calendar on your website.

Having an event calendar is essential for businesses that organize multiple events throughout the year. Savvy event organizers use event calendars to keep visitors up to date about upcoming events and share important information in an effective way.

In this article, we’ll share some useful tips on how you can increase your event’s online visibility and boost event registrations using Event Espresso’s Events Calendar add-on.

Tip #1: Make It Easy for Visitors to Find Your Events

If you’re an event organizer, you need to look for ways to reach out to your audience and increase your ranking in Google search results. A great way to increase event visibility and boost attendance is by adding a WordPress event calendar to your business website.

Your WordPress event calendar will serve as a sitemap for your events. Google will crawl this page regularly for new events to add to their search results. This way, you can increase your event’s online visibility and help potential attendees easily find the events you organize. The Event Espresso Events Calendar add-on helps you list upcoming events in a way that allows attendees to easily view upcoming events and add them to their own calendars.

In addition to showing your events on your event website, you’ll be able to create separate landing pages for each event and display important event details such as event name, event date and time, and event venue. This also makes it easier to promote individual events.

When visitors discover your events organically and land on your event pages, they’ll be able to quickly find the event they wish to attend by browsing your WordPress event calendar. As a result, you’ll increase event visibility and improve your event’s search engine ranking at the same time.

Tip #2: Display Upcoming Events in an Engaging Way

As soon as visitors land on your website, they should be able to find upcoming events and view event details. For this, you’ll need to display multiple events in a familiar calendar-style format so visitors can quickly learn more about the different events you’re organizing.

The Event Espresso Events Calendar add-on lets you add a WordPress event calendar to your web pages (including posts, pages, sales pages, and landing pages) using calendar shortcodes. The add-on also works with page builders like Elementor. By default, it displays all events by month and removes expired events automatically.

Another great way to improve the visibility on your site is by displaying events in custom colors based on event categories. The Events Calendar add-on allows you to color code different categories. For example, you can color-code all tech events blue and all training seminars red. Users can filter events by categories and locations (i.e. the event venue). This way, they can easily find events related to a specific topic or find events taking place at a certain location.

Tip #3: Let Attendees Add Events to Their Personal Calendars

Allowing attendees to add events to their calendars is important if you want to increase event attendance. When prospective attendees import events to their personal calendars, they’ll get a reminder for upcoming events on their smartphone or via email making them more likely to attend the event.

Using Event Espresso’s Events Calendar add-on, you can connect your event website with iCal-compatible calendars such as Apple iCal, Google Calendar, and Microsoft Outlook. You’ll be able to display iCal download links on your event listings page, event information page, and registration confirmation messages. This way, visitors can click the iCal download button and quickly add the event details to their personal calendar.

In addition to this, you can add iCal download buttons to emails and messages simply by adding iCal shortcodes to them. This allows event registrants to synchronize their devices with upcoming events.

Tip #4: Create Multiple Events Calendars

If you organize lots of events throughout the year, you should make it easy for site visitors to find your events. You can achieve this by adding multiple event calendars to your website.

Event Espresso’s Events Calendar extension helps you do just that. Here are some different ways to create and display multiple calendars on your site pages using shortcodes:

#1: With all of your events. Display all events in one calendar view which allows attendees to discover new types of events.

Shortcode: [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR]

#2: Events from a specific category. Display all events from a specific category in one calendar view enabling visitors to quickly find the type of event they’re interested in attending.

Shortcode: [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR event_category_id=your_category_id]

#3: Events from a specific venue. Display all events from a specific venue in one calendar view so attendees can quickly find all events you’re hosting in a specific venue.

Shortcode: [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR event_venue_id=your_venue_id]

#4: Events by month/week/day. Display all events by month, week, or day in one calendar view which lets attendees easily find all events on a particular day, week, or month. This is especially useful for holidays and summer vacations.

Shortcodes:

• [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR cal_view=basicDay]
• [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR cal_view=basicWeek]
• [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR cal_view=month]

Tip #5: Customize the WordPress Event Calendar to Match Your Event Branding

If you want to deliver a seamless, branded experience to visitors, you should customize the event calendar to match your event branding. This way, you’ll be able to enhance the user experience and make your event website look more professional.

The Event Espresso’s Events Calendar add-on lets you personalize your event calendar’s branding. Here are some of the customization options available to you:

• Use color pickers. This option lets you change the default event text color and background color.
• Event background color and text color. This is a color picker option for the event background and event text.
• Customize tooltips. Tooltips are a short description of an event. They appear when a user hovers over a calendar event. You can use this option to enable or disable them.
• Enable images. This lets you display feature images in the calendar.
• Enable filters. You can enable this option to allow attendees to view a certain group of events by filtering them based on event category or event venue.
• Show category legend. A category legend allows registrants to quickly browse a category of events on the calendar.

Tip #6: Add a Register Now Button to the WordPress Event Calendar

Making it easy for your visitors to easily find your events and view event details isn’t enough. You also need to get them to register for your events i.e. act on your conversion goal.

One way you can do this is by adding a Register Now button to your event calendar which allows potential attendees to quickly reach the registration page. For this, you’ll need to configure the registration link to redirect attendees to a post or registration page from the [italics]Page Settings[/italics] screen.

Tip #7: Add Important Event Details

By adding event details to your event calendar, you can make it easy for visitors to learn important event details such as the event date, time, venue, and description. This way, they’ll be in a better position to make an informed decision.

Event Espresso’s Events Calendar add-on lets you display various event details next to each event entry on your WordPress event calendar. These include the event name, event description, featured image, event date and time, event venue, available registration slots and spaces, and registration button.

Tip #8: Embed Your Event Calendar on Other Websites to Promote Your Events

Event Espresso’s event calendar plugin for WordPress also allows you to embed your event calendar on other websites. If you own multiple websites you can add your event calendar to those sites. You can also contact your partners and ask them if they can share your calendar on their website: 

Navigate to Events > Overview and at the bottom of the page you’ll find a “Embed Events Calendar” button. Click that button to get the iframe code to use on other websites.

Set Up Your WordPress Event Calendar Today

Having a WordPress event calendar gives you an opportunity to display your events in a way that helps you clearly communicate event details to prospective attendees.

In addition to this, adding an events calendar to your website is great for SEO. It improves your event’s online visibility and search engine ranking. You can configure it to make it easy for prospective attendees to discover upcoming events using Event Espresso’sEvents Calendar add-on.

Are you ready to add a WordPress event calendar to your website? Try Event Espresso’s Events Calendar demo today!