How to Make a Calendar in WordPress to Display Events Easily

I used to think adding a calendar to my WordPress site would be way too technical. I figured I’d need to mess with code, tweak a bunch of settings, or hire someone to do it for me.

But after trying a few plugins, I found Sugar Calendar, and it completely changed the game. Within minutes, I had a clean, easy-to-use calendar on my site that showed off upcoming webinars, promotions, and events without slowing anything down.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to make a calendar in WordPress using Sugar Calendar. Whether you’re running online classes or in-person events, this simple calendar will help you stay organized and make it easier for your visitors to plan ahead.

Quick Summary: How to Make a Calendar in WordPress

Why Add a Calendar to Your WordPress Site?

If you’re running giveaways to grow your audience, adding a calendar is one of the best ways to keep people engaged between promotions.

I started using a calendar on my site after running a few contests with RafflePress. What I noticed was that people didn’t just want to enter once. They wanted to know what else was coming up. When I added a calendar to highlight launch dates, live streams, and upcoming giveaways, I saw more return visits and repeat entries.

Here’s why it helps:

• It builds momentum. A giveaway can bring someone to your site once, but a calendar gives them a reason to come back.
• You can promote future contests. Listing your next giveaway in advance lets people plan ahead instead of missing out.
• It keeps your site up to date. Even if you only run events once a month, a calendar makes your site look active and fresh.
• It connects your events and promotions. Hosting a product launch, webinar, or sale? Add a related giveaway to boost traffic and participation.
• It saves time. You don’t have to remind everyone manually. Just keep your calendar updated and link to it from your emails or social posts.

When you combine RafflePress with a simple calendar plugin like Sugar Calendar, you can manage both giveaways and events in one place. It’s a great way to stay organized and grow your site without adding more to your to-do list.

The user interface is easy to navigate, allowing you to create, edit, and manage your calendars with minimal fuss. It lets you make weekly, monthly, and daily calendars for various events, such as live streams, online courses, webinars, church sermons, film screenings, and more.

Sugar Calendar also includes the following functionality:

• Event filtering by category
• Customizable color-coded calendars
• Advanced event details like start and end times, location, and more
• Multi-day or single-day events
• Recurring events
• Custom event time zones
• Add videos and images to upcoming events
• SEO-friendly settings
• And more.

You can integrate Sugar Calendar with 3rd-party services like Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal to synchronize events with your WordPress calendar. It also works seamlessly with the best WordPress plugins, such as WPForms for event registration forms and SeedProd for custom event landing pages.

Even better, the Event Ticketing add-on allows you to sell event tickets from your WordPress site via the Stripe payment gateway and WooCommerce. With the Event Ticketing add-on, you can turn your calendar into a full event booking calendar for WordPress.

Here are some other add-ons for Sugar Calendar you may find helpful:

• Front-End Event Submissions
• Gravity Forms Form Embed
• WP All Import

You can also integrate with Zapier to connect with thousands of 3rd party tools and services.

Now that you know more about Sugar Calendar, let’s dive into the tutorial.

How to Make a Calendar in WordPress (Step-by-Step)

Follow the easy steps below to learn how to make a calendar in WordPress. We promise the steps are easy to follow, and it won’t take long to get up and running.

Step 1. Install the Sugar Calendar Plugin

The first step is to install the Sugar Calendar plugin, so go to the Sugar Calendar website and click Let’s Get Started. From there, you can choose your pricing plan and follow the checkout steps to buy the plugin.

Sugar Calendar is a lightweight WordPress event calendar plugin perfect for beginners. It offers a free version of its calendar plugin via the WordPress.org plugin repository. However, for this guide, we’ll use the premium version, which has more advanced features than the free plugin.

Next, you’ll need to install and activate the Sugar Calendar plugin on your WordPress website. If you need help with this, you can follow this handy tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to the Calendar » Settings page from your WordPress dashboard. In this area, you can enter your license key, which you can find on the Sugar Calendar website in your account area.

Now go ahead and click the Verify button to save your license details. You’re now ready to make your first calendar.

Step 2. Create a New Calendar

To create your first calendar, click on the Calendar icon in your WordPress admin sidebar and click the Calendar heading. On the next screen, you’ll have the option to click either the Events or Calendar tabs.

Click on the Calendar tab, then select the Add Calendar button to make a new calendar.

Now you’ll see a popup where you can add your calendar details. For instance, you can enter a name, a slug (the URL-friendly version of the name), and a calendar description.

You can also click the dropdown menu to choose a parent calendar. Since this is our first calendar, you can ignore that setting for now.

If you scroll further down, you can choose a custom calendar color. It’s a helpful way to color-code your calendars if you plan to have multiple calendars on your site.

After choosing a color, click the Add New Calendar button to save the details.

Once you’ve made a calendar, you can start adding events for website visitors. This makes it easy to display upcoming events in WordPress without any extra setup.

Step 3. Add Events to the Calendar

To add events to your new calendar, click the Events tab and the Add Events button.

On the next screen, you’ll see the event editor, where you can enter the details for individual events.

Start by entering an event name at the top of the screen.

After that, you can select the event date, single or multiple days, and choose the start and end times. Additionally, you can enable the All-day checkbox for all-day events such as recurring holidays.

If you’d like the event to repeat weekly or monthly, click the Recurrence tab. From there, you can choose how often the event should repeat (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly) and choose an end date.

You can also leave the end repeat date as Never.

In the Location tab, you can enter information about your event’s location. For example, you can add the address of the event venue for in-person events or add a webinar invite or zoom link for virtual events.

Next, scroll to the Details section and enter more information about your event. This is the perfect place to get people excited about your event and encourage them to attend.

For example, you can talk about some of the following event details:

• Organizers: the people behind organizing your event.
• Speakers: who is hosting or speaking at the event?
• Directions: how can people get to your event? Embed Google Maps to offer easy directions.
• Refreshments: if it’s in-person, what food and drink are you offering?
• Special offers: can people get exclusive discounts for attending?
• Giveaways: you can give participants a chance to win free event tickets.

You can also add photos, videos, and a featured image to make your event page more appealing.

Once you’ve finished adding your event details, you can choose a calendar to add the event to on the right side of the screen.

Then, you can click the Publish button to add the event to your calendar. Repeat this step to add as many events as you’d like.

Now you’re ready to add the calendar to your WordPress posts or pages.

Step 4. Publish the Calendar on Your WordPress Site

With Sugar Calendar, you can add your calendar to a WordPress page, posts, custom post types, or a sidebar widget, using the built-in shortcode.

For this guide, we’ll show you how to add the calendar to a new WordPress page.

First, navigate to Pages » Add New and enter a page title. Then click the plus icon to add a new WordPress block and add the Shortcode block to the page.

Next, copy this shortcode: [sc_events_calendar] and paste it into the Shortcode block.

After clicking Publish, you can preview the page and see your events calendar in action.

Sugar Calendar will automatically adjust the calendar styling to match your current WordPress theme. That means your calendar will always look consistent with the rest of your website.

Website visitors can easily select a calendar view and the date and month from the dropdown menus.

Additionally, they can click individual events to see the event details.

As you can see from the event details in this example, I used RafflePress to promote the event with a giveaway.

To do that, you can click the Add Giveaway button inside the event editor screen.

Congratulations, your event management calendar is now live on your WordPress website!

FAQs About Adding a Calendar to WordPress

I hope you found this tutorial on how to make a calendar in WordPress helpful.

You might also like the following guides and tips:

• How to add Google Analytics to WordPress
• The top eCommerce promotion ideas
• Free email marketing tools for small businesses

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