Looking to post events and maybe sell some tickets? Whether you want to sell tickets to a dinner, or to a sports game, or even to a concert, you can definitely do that with WordPress. In this article, you’ll learn about the best WordPress events plugins in the community.
What Are WordPress Events Plugins?
WordPress events plugins are a type of plugin designed to allow you to manage any activities for your business. You can announce meetings or sell tickets to concerts, special dinners, and other special events.
What Makes a Good WordPress Events Plugin?
A good WordPress events plugin should include some of the following features, whether they are free or paid:
- Ability to manage events
- Ability to customize the look of the calendar
- Have options to choose between different calendar templates
- Have options for accepting paymentsaccepting payments
- Can integrate with email marketing
- Ability to add images to the event
- Options to use categories and tags in order to organize calendar
Ability to manage events
An event calendar should allow the user to easily manage individual events, and offer enough fields to insert information like location of event, time of event, event description and more.
Ability to customize the look of the calendar
While event calendars don’t seem to be something that should be fancy, you should be able to customize some of the colors or at the very least, the calendar should integrate well with a website’s theme.
Have options to choose between different calendar templates
In offering different event calendar templates, you can pick what fits best with your company’s branding.
Have options for accepting payments
An event calendar should allow the option for different payment types. Sure, it’s okay to offer PayPal, but offering more payment options will encourage customers to purchase a ticket.
Can integrate with email marketing
Your business should be building an email list. When someone buys a ticket, you should encourage them to also subscribe to your email list, so you can tell them about future events.
Ability to add images to the event
An image goes a long way and could help your customers get a feel of what the event is about, aside from reading the event’s description.
Options to use categories and tags in order to organize calendar
You should be able to organize your events by what type they are. Maybe you do festivals, concerts, conferences, workshops, or other types of events. Being able to use categories and tags to organize them, will allow your customers to quickly find the events they are most interested in possibly attending.
WordPress Events Plugins: Top 8
- Event Espresso 4 Decaf
- EventON
- Event Organiser
- Events Manager
- My Calendar
- The Events Calendar
- Timely All-in-One Events Calendar
- WP Event Manager
1. Event Espresso 4 Decaf
Event Espresso 4 Decaf allows you to manage an event calendar that you can use for workshops, classes, and more. Users can register and sign from your WordPress site. The free version includes:
- Payment gateway options like PayPal Express Checkout
- Confirmation emails
- User registration management at the admin and user level
- Ability to export registered users’ data
- Mobile ticketing apps allow you to scan tickets
If you need more payment gateway options, custom registration questions, and more, you can purchase the premium version of Event Espresso for as low as $99.95 per year.
2. EventON
EventON is probably one of the most beautifully developed premium WordPress event plugins. You can customize the colors, and even choose from one of several templates. You can even use filters to display specific events. There’s even room to add extra custom meta to add more event information, Google Maps integration, display feature events, and more!
If you want to sell tickets while integrating the event calendar into WooCommerce, or need more advanced features, you can purchase EventON’s add-ons. One of the coolest add-ons is a Speaker and Schedule add-on, which is great if you want to display information for conferences.
3. Event Organiser
Event Organiser allows you to create one-time or recurring events. This plugin also contains some of the following features:
- Ability to add or remove data to an event
- Add and organize event venues
- Google maps supported
- Calendar widget
- Event list widget
- Archive pages for year, month, and day
- Calendar shortcodes for widgets, subscribe to event feeds, or displaying maps
- Color-coded categories
- User role permissions
- Import and export events capabilities
- Ability to delete singular events
- Events feed
- Option to delete expired events
If you’d like to sell tickets, customize emails, options for different payment gateways, and more, you can purchase Event Organiser Pro for as low as 50 British pounds per year.
4. Events Manager
Events Manager allows you to manage events and display them in a calendar, grid format, and list format. It even has a search page template and booking form template. Some of the Event Manager’s features are:
- Event Registration
- Recurring or multi-day event registration
- Booking Capabilities
- Stats to track registration
- Multisite support
- Ability to select multiple locations
- BuddyPress support
- Guests or members can submit events
- Event categories
- Google maps integration
- Options for custom event attributes
- Widgets for events, locations, and displaying calendars
- iCal feed integration
- RSS feed support
- Compatible with some SEO plugins
- Tools to make sure registration is GDPR compliant
If you wish to sell tickets, you can upgrade to Events Manager Pro for $89 per year.
5. My Calendar
My Calendar can be used in a WordPress multisite environment or regular install. You can display events by category, location, or author. Other features included in My Calendar are:
- Event list view or calendar grid
- Display events by month, week, or day
- Mini-calendar display option
- Widgets for upcoming events or even today's event
- Event search widget
- Ability to customize templates
- CSS styles can be edited
- Recurring events or single-date event support
- Email notifications
- Option to post event to Twitter
- Location management
- Shortcode support
To get access to more advanced event calendar features, you can buy the My Calendar Pro plugin for about $59 per year.
6. The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar is about as robust as the EventON calendar that’s mentioned in this same article. You can display really clean and beautiful events to make your site look super professional. Additionally, this plugin has a lot of features and allows you to easily manage and organize your events. Some of this plugin’s features are:
- Easy when creating events on the fly
- Options for venues and organizers
- Tooltips in Calendar month view
- Google maps support
- Upcoming events list widget
- Categories and tags support events
- Google Calendar and iCal export options
- Responsive in most devices
- Caching support
This is just a short list, so there are a lot more features in this extremely powerful WordPress events plugin. If you need to sell tickets, email marketing integration and other advanced features, you can upgrade to Events Calendar Pro for $99 per year.
7. Timely All-in-One Events Calendar
Timely All-in-One Events Calendar has a free version that allows you to create up to 100 events. This calendar is powered by Time.ly, so if you use this plugin, then you’ll need to create a free account with them. Aside from that, this plugin includes the following features in the free version:
- Responsive calendar
- Support in several languages includes English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Turkish, Swedish, Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese
- Calendar display options for week, month, and agenda views
- Ability set calendar view for mobile or desktop
- Several calendar theme options
- Filtering by category, tags, organizers, and venues
- In-person, virtual, and mixed event support
- Ability to designate an event to be held on a single day, several days, all day, neverending, or even recurring
- Ability to duplicate events
- Flexibility in adding text, images, videos and more to event
- Social share options
- SEO-optimized
- Ability to embed the calendar into WordPress pages
If you’d like to allow people to register and pay to attend events, you’ll need to reach out to Time.ly to see about a custom quote with their Enterprise plan.
8. WP Event Manager
WP Event Manager says it’s lightweight and allows you to easily create events. It also works with most WordPress themes.
- Organize events
- Assign event locations and event group them by location
- Options for custom fields if you need to display more information
- Live preview while creating an event
- Shortcode support
- Event search support
- Event submissions by guests or registered users
- Option to add an email address or website to the event listing
- RSS functionality
- Custom taxonomy support for events
- Cross-browser support for Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera
- Widget support
If you need marketing integration, the ability to sell tickets, and more, WP Event Manager Pro has several packages for you to upgrade to.
In Summary
Hopefully, this list of best WordPress events plugins contains at least one that will work for your website’s needs. Try each of them out to see if it’s for you. Make sure to note that some of the plugins may offer some paid extensions that could prove to be a good investment, especially if you plan to sell tickets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are WordPress plugins free?
WordPress has loads of plugins you can install, some of them are free, but some of them you will need to pay for. You can learn how to use WordPress Plugins on our blog.
Is WordPress free?
All you need to do to use WordPress is to invest in a web hosting plan since the software itself is free.
Is a WordPress blog free?
Anyone can download, use, customize, and edit the WordPress code as long as they release it under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Even though the software is free, you can end up paying for things like premium support and hosting.
How long is WordPress migration?
A WordPress migration process should only take a few hours. This is valid for cases where there aren’t any technical issues that will affect the migration.
Nile Flores is a long time professional blogger, as well as WordPress website designer and developer from the St. Louis Metro East. Nile blogs at NileFlores.com, where she’s passionate about helping website owners, whether they’re small business owners or bloggers. She teaches about Blogging, Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, Website Design, and WordPress. Additionally, Nile loves to speak at WordCamps (WordPress conferences) across the United States. When Nile isn’t knee-deep in coding, she’s a proud mom of a college student, and enjoys oil painting, cigar smoking, nail art design, and practicing traditional Okinawan kempo karate.
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