If you are into events, then it is essential for you to create an event website to get all the benefits of the digital world. Besides enhancing your events exposure online, it also plays a major role in increasing your ticket sales and maintaining a balanced flow of income online.
Creating a dedicated event website brings multiple benefits to your business. It helps:
- Add credibility to your brand.
- Create a loyal customer base online.
- Make it easy for your target audiences to follow and get updates of your events easily.
So if you have not yet utilized the power of the internet or digitization yet, its high time you think about it. Start with creating an event website. For many event planners especially those who do not organize events frequently consider creating an event website to be costly.
However, if you use WordPress and the right WordPress themes and plugins, you can easily create a functionally rich event website without breaking the bank.
In this article, we have shared a step-by-step guide on creating a WordPress event website to help you in this process but before that let us explore the things that your event website should include.
What should an event website include?
Here are some of the most important elements that your WordPress event website must include:
Homepage: Build an impressive homepage to attract maximum target audiences towards it. Make sure the home page of your event website contains the following:
- The list of your upcoming events.
- Details of your upcoming events’ speakers and their schedules.
- Ticket details like the time of their availability, types of tickets and more.
- A dedicated events calendar to showcase event dates and details.
Pro tip: If you want to add your event listing, events calendar,or the details of your events to your WordPress event website, you can turn to an efficient event management plugin like WP Event Manager that has a set of add-ons to take care of your different event management needs including calendar, event listing, speaker & schedule, and more.
Social media links: add social media buttons to your WordPress site to help your event website visitors easily connect with you on popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can include icons or share your links to social media channels.
Pro tip: Make sure you regularly update your social media pages with posts, contests, interactive games and event details.
Ticketing system: Having a ticketing system on your WordPress site is crucial for its success because it is the primary source of income through your event. A good ticketing system streamlines the entire ticket-selling process and also helps you accept payments without any stress.
Pro tip: Consider the Sell Tickets addon from WP Event Manager to add a dedicated ticketing system to your event website.
About us page: The “about us” page on your event website lets your visitors know about the story behind your brand. Don’t forget to add a brief description of the event organizers along with the main objective behind it.
You can also incorporate a contact form to help visitors get in touch with your event organizers.
Pro tip: Use WP Event Manager’s Contact Organizer plugin to add the facility to your WordPress site.
Past event details: This section is extremely important especially if you run recurring events, displaying a glimpse of your past events gives visitors an idea of the event content and also encourages them to purchase tickets for the next one in the series.
Pro tip: If you organize recurring events, try out the Recurring events plugin from the house of WP Event Manager which is designed exclusively for the seamless management of recurring events.
Why WordPress?
WordPress is widely termed as one of the best CMSes (Content Management System) available in the market today. More than 43% of all websites are supported by WordPress.
When it comes to building an event website, several other options are there like Wix, Shopify or Joomla. So the question may arise why WordPress?
Here are some of the reasons that make WordPress superior to other popular CMSes:
- Open-source: WordPress is an open-source platform that allows users to easily install and customize it the way they want.
- User-friendly: It makes the usage simple and straightforward through a user-friendly dashboard.
- Full website control: As a website owner, you get full control over your event website and make changes to its coding structure to shape up your website based on your needs.
- Customizable: WordPress is a great option for beginners as well. Due to its customizability, many third-party companies and communities build WordPress plugins and themes that ultimately give multiple plugin and theme options for you to choose from.
- SEO-friendly: One of the most beneficial parts of WordPress is that it is developed with numerous built-in SEO capabilities that help popular search engines crawl through your website content easily.
- Security: Being one of the most desired CMSes, hackers always keep an eye on WordPress websites and that is why the WordPress team constantly works on this area and releases updates regularly to tighten security.
How to create a WordPress events website?
Now that you know about the essential elements of a WordPress event website, it will be easy for you to gear up to create your own dedicated event website.
Here are the steps you need to take to create a WordPress event website:
1. Find a suitable domain name
You can begin the process of creating a WordPress event website by adding a domain name. It is the identity of your website that makes it easy for your visitors to access it.
The domain name also influences your event website’s SEO ranking. So make sure you choose the best domain name that perfectly reflects your events and business.
2. Choose your host
When it comes to selecting a host or hosting service for your event website, you need to be extra cautious. The hosting server is the place where all your website files will be stored including your plugins and themes.
One of the biggest advantages of WordPress hosting is that it is built to enhance WordPress website performance, take care of its security needs, installation and onboarding process.
You may get confused to pick a hosting service provider as there are a lot of options. You can consider reading one of our previous articles on Shared Vs VPS hosting to understand the concept of hosting and which type of hosting is suitable for you.
We recommend Kinsta for your event website as it is one of the best hosting service providers.
3. Install WordPress
After choosing a suitable hosting service provider, you need to install WordPress on your system.
At first, you need to download WordPress from here. Installing WordPress is easy and quick. Usually most hosting services providers give you the facility of installing WordPress with cPanel. To upload the downloaded files to your preferred hosting server manually, you can use an FTP.
Once you are done with the installation process, you are ready to utilize the benefits of the platform. The platform offers you a plethora of themes and plugins that you can use to enhance the event management functionalities of your WordPress site.
4. Select an impressive WordPress event theme
When it comes to themes, you can either build your own customized theme or you can pick a suitable one from the available themes and customize it according to your event website needs.
While deciding on your WordPress themes, keep the below-mentioned points in mind:
- The themes you build or choose need to be compatible with the plugins you use.
- Building a theme from scratch can be expensive as you need to hire a dedicated team of designers for the same.
Considering the above-mentioned things, we recommend WP Event Manager themes for your WordPress event website. WP Event Manager is one of the most popular WordPress product companies that is known for its feature-rich plugins and themes.
Here are the features that the event themes from WP Event Manager offer:
- Responsive designs.
- WooCommerce compatibility.
- Cross browsing support.
- Amazing designs to suit different event websites.
- SEO friendly.
- Customizable.
Add the best WordPress event plugin to your event website
After building your WordPress website, you need to add event management functionalities to it to make it a dedicated events website.
To empower your WordPress site with event management functionalities, use the WP Event Management plugin that covers everything that you need to create a functionally rich events website.
Key features of the plugin include:
- Easy to use.
- Customizable.
- Offers a frontend event submission form.
- Compatible with multiple page builders.
- Supports WooCommerce.
- Quality support and more.
The core plugin is free and it offers more than 37 premium plugins that are available individually to purchase and in bundles.
Click here to get its pricing details.
Create your WordPress event website now!
We hope that the above mentioned guide will be helpful for you in your journey of creating an event website with WordPress. You just need to ensure that you select the right themes and plugins for it to make it successful.
The post How to Create a WordPress Events Website: Step-by-step Guide appeared first on WP Event Manager.
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