Best WordPress Calendar Plugins
Calendar plugins can be a very useful addition to your WordPress site. You can help to showcase your live events, manage bookings, and a lot more.
Some plugins are better suited for managing your events, while others offer complex booking and scheduling options. Luckily, running WordPress means you have a ton of options at your disposal, both free and paid.
But, since calendar plugins are so popular, it can be difficult to find the right plugin for your needs. Below we highlight five of the most popular WordPress calendar plugins, so you can easily find and use the right plugin for your needs.
1. The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar is a very popular free plugin. It’s clean, simple, intuitive, and easy to use, and is one of the most downloaded WordPress calendar plugins.
With this plugin, you can easily add events to your site, along with different venues and organizers. You can even integrate Google Maps to make it easy for your viewers to find your event.
There’s also a premium version of the plugin which adds support through WooCommerce, and gives you additional features like selling tickets through your site, creating recurring events, and a lot more. The premium version currently costs $65.
2. My Calendar
My Calendar is a free and feature-rich event management plugin. It offers you a ton of different options, so you can decide exactly how you want your events to display.
You can integrate multiple calendars, create calendars for specific categories, add locations, create events groups, and a lot more. With the short code generator, you can display your events wherever you’d like, in your posts, sidebars, or even on its own page.
When creating an event you’ll be able to adjust options like the event description, add images, set the event host, add the time, and more.
Finally, you’ll also have the ability to customize the look of your events and your event calendar from within the plugin’s settings.
If you’re looking for more, there are various premium extensions, which will allow you to easily sell tickets for your events.
3. Events Manager
Events Manager is another very popular WordPress events plugin. It offers a ton of different features like the ability to integrate with Google Maps and Google Calendar, multiple display options, and a lot more.
This plugins also lets your users register for events, and you can easily create recurring events as well.
If you want to add a social element to your events you can integrate the plugin with BuddyPress to add discussion feeds, user feeds, and a lot more.
There’s also a premium version of the plugin available if you require even more feature and functionality. When you upgrade the plugin you’ll get access to additional features that allow you to accept payments, offer coupons, and create custom booking forms.
4. Simple Calendar
Simple Calendar is another plugin that integrates with Google Calendar. This plugin is similar to the Google Calendar plugin above, except it offers even more customization options.
With this plugin installed all you need is your Google Calendar feed URL. Then you can import your upcoming events and start customizing.
With this plugin, you have a shortcode that you can use to display anywhere across your site. If you know any CSS, you can customize the look of your events calendar with custom stylesheets. The plugin is even fully responsive, so your events will look good no matter the screen size they’re viewed upon.
There are also premium add-ons available, which unlock additional features like color-coding events, adding more events details, and getting more attendance and registration options.
5. All in One Event Calendar
All in One Events Calendar packs a ton of useful features into an easy to use interface. Right out of the box you have three different themes to display your calendars.
Some of the features include adding events, adding category sorting, adding theme venues via Google Maps, adding event descriptions and a lot more.
Plus, you can sync your events with any app that supports iCal format, like the Google Calendar.
There are a variety of add-ons available that will give you access to additional features like a front-end submission form, being able to embed your calendars into other platforms like Facebook, and the ability to sell tickets from your site.
Hopefully, you find one of the plugins above useful in integrating an awesome calendar with your WordPress site.
Kevin Wood writes about technology and human potential. You can find him at his virtual homes Wooden Writing and Counter Culturist.