5 WordPress Calendar Plugins That Will Help Your Organization
WordPress calendar plugins are an incredibly useful asset for any business website, especially those that organize events of any kind. Bars, restaurants, clubs, concert halls, theaters, cultural centers, hotels, conference halls, arenas…pretty much any establishment in the hospitality and entertainment industry can benefit greatly from a good calendar on their site.
Event calendars are vital for this sort of businesses because they provide immediate and essential information to site visitors, who, hopefully, end up becoming your business’ clients.
For instance, if you’re organizing a concert, you want to have as many attendees as possible. People need to know who’s playing, where and when, and calendars are perfect for providing this sort of info.
If you’re a relative novice when it comes to WordPress, you’re probably wondering how in the world you’re supposed to make a calendar for your site. And that’s where WordPress calendar plugins come into play.
WordPress calendar plugins represent a quick, easy solution for your event management needs. Thanks to them, you can add, edit and customize beautiful, functional calendars on your website and reach more customers.
There are many calendar plugins for WordPress around. However, the plugins below represent an ideal combo of features, functionalities and useability and therefore qualify as the very best:
My Calendar plugin is a powerful event management tool and one of the most popular WordPress calendar plugins around. Moreover, it’s a free plugin that anyone can install on their site hassle-free.
My Calendar allows you to add single, multiple or recurring events, to add categories for easier orientation around the timetable, and to customize the appearance of the calendar itself.
With this plugin, you can arrange your events in a list or a grid, whatever you prefer, and you can also set a daily, weekly or monthly view. If it fits your style, you can even use a compact or mini calendar, as a widget or a shortcode.
Speaking of shortcodes, you can place the My Calendar shortcode anywhere on your site – no limitations here.
Widgets include upcoming events, event search, today’s events and more. Location management, posting to Twitter and rich permissions with plenty of settings are just some of the features that you get with this robust little plugin.
Also, My Calendar is multi-site friendly, which makes it perfect for administrators running several business websites.
This plugin comes in a premium version as well, called My Calendar Pro. For $49 per year (or $199 for a permanent license), you get advanced search features, responsive mode, and event import. You can also allow your site visitors and/or logged-in users to add or edit events on your site from the front-end.
However, if you’re on a budget and can’t really afford a premium plugin, don’t worry, you most likely don’t even need it. The free version of My Calendar is perfectly functional, feature-rich and highly customizable.
If you’re looking for an extensible, highly customizable event management solution that’s ready to use right out of the box, then you should check out the Events Calendar. Built “the WordPress way,” this calendar plugin was developed with a lot of attention to detail and functionality.
The Events Calendar is ideal for all kinds of users. WordPress newbies can use it as a “plug and play” solution that’s ready to use as it is, and developers can have a ball hacking and customizing the plugin to the tiniest detail.
This plugin, being highly versatile, can support any sort of business organizing events, whether it’s a community of thousands of users, a venue with hundreds of events per year or a tiny business that just wants to promote its own classes, services or shows.
As for the features, their number is quite impressive. The Events Calendar, in addition to helping you create events extra-quickly, also allows you to save venues and organizers so you can use them again and save some time. You can pick the preferred view for your calendar – Event List, Day view, Calendar Month view with tooltips, and so on.
Event taxonomies allow for easier orientation among your events, and event search is a great addition that your visitors will appreciate. Plus, there are Google maps so your guests can easily find your venue.
Microformats is thrown in for your SEO efforts and the entire plugin has been internationalized and translated.
There are many more features in this WordPress calendar plugin, including those that the developers would appreciate, but the list is too long for this article.
The All-in-One Event Calendar is one of those tools that manage to combine ease of use with a powerful set of features. Add modern, clean design and you got yourself a near-perfect plugin and certainly one of the best WordPress calendar plugins ever.
One of the biggest advantages of this plugin for event management is that it makes it extremely easy to import and export iCalendar files (.ics). What this means basically is that you can create events in one website and they will automatically appear on the other site’s calendar.
In addition, you can send events from a specific taxonomy or a combination of taxonomies.
All-in-One Event Calendar features recurring events, including the ones with complex patterns. This makes this plugin ideal for venues and businesses that often host the same kind of event, but on different dates, obviously.
You can filter the events in your calendar based on the category or the tag, and events are also color-coded based on category. This feature makes the calendar very clear and easy to get around in.
In addition to the standard daily, weekly and monthly views, this calendar plugin for WordPress also offers Agenda and Posterboard views, in case you want to add a little flavor to your calendar.
Plus, the calendar itself is very customizable. You have your theme options here, as well as an inline Calendar Theme editor. Just like everything else, it’s very easy to use, even for newbies.
Finally, each event is SEO-optimized. This is extremely important since you definitely want your website, as well as your events, to rank high, be visible and ultimately lead to an increase in the number of your customers.
The developer of this plugin also offers addons you can use to extend your plugin’s functionalities, from Extended Views, Frontend Submission Form and Super Widget to Venues and Twitter integration.
If you’re looking for a quick, secure and reliable solution for adding Google Calendar events to your WordPress site, then check out Simple Calendar. This calendar plugin for WordPress helps you display events from any public Calendar. All it takes is a Google Calendar feed URL which you insert using Simple Calendar, and that’s it.
In addition, it allows you to keep managing your events in your Google Calendar, if that’s what you prefer. You don’t need to create them separately for your WordPress site. Instead, just use the plugin to import the events.
Available designs guarantee your calendar will match your WordPress theme style. Customization options are decent, if not excellent. The event content display can be customized using simple tags, and you don’t even need to know how to code to do this. The entire plugin is very intuitive.
Monthly grid and list views you can create with this plugin are fully responsive and look great on any screen size.
Another great feature of this WordPress calendar plugin is that you can combine multiple calendars into one single calendar, explicitly or with categories.
Simple Calendar is free, but if you feel you need additional features and functionalities you can purchase a premium addon – Fullcalendar and/or Google Calendar Pro, which are available separately, or as a bundle.
Again, this plugin is ideal for those who already use Google Calendar and want to keep using it. As such, it’s not the perfect solution for users who don’t have any calendars but need one on their site.
Calendarize it! is a premium WordPress calendar plugin that has been getting excellent ratings ever since it was launched. As such, it remains one of the best-sellers among plugins of this kind.
This plugin is extremely feature-rich and robust so it might seem a little scary at first. However, if you decide to use it, you will soon realize it’s actually quite simple, with an intuitive point-and-click interface for your customization needs.
The choice of color schemes is extensive and you can also add your own custom color. That way your calendar will stand out among others plus you can make it fit your brand style.
One of the cool features we don’t see a lot in the plugins of this kind is the events countdown, a fun way to build the hype among your visitors. However, it should be noted that this feature is not available out of the box – it’s actually a free addon.
Other free addons include Importer, Accordion Upcoming Events, Events Map View and Styles, Events Grid View, Social Sharing Panel, Visual CSS Editor, Member Profile, Ratings and Reviews, Flat UI Calendar, Custom Taxonomy Labels and Social Auto Publish. There’s even the Advent Calendar addon, ideal for the holiday season.
Premium (paid) features are also available and include Community Events, Payment Options, Advertising Options, Event Tickets WooCommerce, Eventbrite Tickets, External Event Sources and so on.
On top of that all, the developers of this plugin made sure it’s optimized for the new Gutenberg Editor and that it supports the WPBakery Page Builder, the best drag & drop builder around.
As you can see, it’s a pretty serious event management plugin. Now, some would say that not having a free version is a serious downside. But, considering what you get with this plugin, it’s definitely worth it.
Bottom Line
These five excellent calendar plugins for WordPress are our definitive pick for this season. You need a simple and intuitive solution for your small venue or budding business with just a few weekly events? Perhaps you want a robust tool that will integrate your events across multiple sites and sustain thousands of events? Either way, your next WordPress calendar plugin is probably on this list.
We also made sure to include solutions for those looking to integrate calendars from other tools, such as Google Calendars and iCal.
Take your pick and may all your events be sold out!
We hope that you found this article to be helpful. If you liked it, please feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
