Are you looking for a way to boost event attendance? Adding an events calendar to your WordPress site is a great way to attract new registrations for your upcoming events.
Ideally, you want to display all details related to your upcoming event on your WordPress site. This makes it easy for prospective attendees to discover events and register for them.
Displaying an events calendar is one of the best ways to promote upcoming events for your business and enhance the user experience on your event website. In this article, we’ll show you how to add an events calendar to your WordPress page using Event Espresso.
Article Outline
Why You Might Want to Display an Events Calendar in WordPress
Before we jump into adding an events calendar in WordPress, let’s take a step back to see what it is and why you might want to add it to your WordPress page.
An events calendar in WordPress displays all scheduled events in an easy-to-read calendar. This way, site visitors can easily find information about your upcoming events.
Displaying an events calendar in WordPress is also a great marketing tool. You can gather valuable ticketing data and insights on customer behavior and interests. As a result, you can create successful marketing campaigns. For instance, you can include an I’m Interested opt-in form for your upcoming events next to your events calendar to generate qualified leads for your business.
Enhancing SEO is one of the best ways to attract new event registrations and increase organic traffic on your event website.
Adding an events calendar to your event page can help improve the overall SEO of your site and rank your web pages higher in search engine results. This is because more content on your site can help search engines rank your web pages better and make them appear higher in search engine results.
Displaying an events calendar is also a great way to enhance the user experience on your event website. It offers site visitors or your audience an easy way to digest information and discover your business’s upcoming events.
Next, we’ll show you how to add an events calendar to your WordPress page.
How to Add an Events Calendar to WordPress using Event Espresso
WordPress by default doesn’t offer functionality that lets you add an events calendar to your web pages. However, you can use a powerful event registration and ticketing plugin for WordPress such as Event Espresso to add an events calendar to your site’s pages.
Event Espresso offers a complete solution for creating and managing your events. You can manage attendees’ registrations and ticketing for your event, create custom event registration forms, and offer attendees group registrations, all from a central place. This makes it easy to create and run successful events, without having to worry about using multiple plugins.
Event Espresso also offers an easy way to add an events calendar to your WordPress pages using the Events Calendar Add-on. The add-on lets you showcase your upcoming events and categories of events in an attractive graphical calendar. You can let attendees add the event dates to their own calendar so they never miss out on your upcoming events.
Check out this article on Choosing the Right WordPress Event Calendar For Your Website for more information.
Here, we’ll show you how to add an events calendar to WordPress using Event Espresso in three simple steps.
Step #1. Install and activate the Event Espresso plugin and the Event Calendar add-on
The first thing you will need to do is join Event Espresso. We recommend the Everything support license so you get access to Event Espresso, the Event Calendar add-on, and 30+ more add-ons. Once you’ve purchased the support license, then you’ll automatically be logged into your new account page. Scroll down to the lower right to reach your downloads area.
Click on these links to download the software that you need as zip files:
– Event Espresso 4 Core Regular
– Events Calendar
Next, it is time to upload each of the files above from your computer to your WordPress site. From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Plugins → Add New from the WordPress admin panel and upload the Event Espresso zip file (event-espresso-core-reg.zip) file.
Click on the Activate Now button to activate Event Espresso on your WordPress site.
Next, repeat the steps above to upload the Event Calendar zip file (ee4-events-calendar.zip).
Step #2. Create an Events Calendar page
Now that the Event Espresso plugin is installed on your WordPress site, you can set up a page to show your events on a calendar. Navigate to Pages → Add New to create a new WordPress page.
Give your event calendar page a catchy title. This is useful for grabbing the attention of site visitors at first glance and letting them know right away what the web page is about. Similarly, you can add a brief description to make it easier for visitors to use the events calendar. You can also customize different font options and format the text however you like, using the default WordPress interface. Press the Save Draft button to continue when you’re done.
Step #3. Display an Events calendar with the [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR] shortcode
Event Espresso lets you display an events calendar on any page of your WordPress site.
All you need to do is add the [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR] shortcode to your page to display the events calendar. You can access all the shortcodes by navigating to Event Espresso → Calendar under the Settings tab.
Here, you can set some of the basic settings of how the event calendar looks on the front-end of your WordPress site. You can customize the time and date settings, page settings, and theme settings of your event calendar. This way, your event calendar will match your brand.
Click on the Calendar Usage tab to view all the different shortcodes you can use to display your events calendar. Copy the shortcode for the event calendar you want to display and paste it into the description of your newly created events page.
Click on the Publish button to continue. The [ESPRESSO_CALENDAR] will display all active upcoming events available on your event website in an easy-to-read calendar. Attendees can browse through all events and start registration by clicking on the Register Now button.
Conclusion
Adding an events calendar to your event page is a great way to attract more people to your site and increase attendance at your upcoming events.
Using a robust event registration and ticketing plugin such as Event Espresso makes it much more simple to create and promote upcoming events. The powerful ticketing system lets you offer your audience an easy way to register for your events, which is essential in boosting event attendance.
We showed you how to add an events calendar to WordPress and, hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take the next steps.
Ready to start adding an events calendar to your WordPress site? Try the Event Espresso demo today!