We no longer use or recommend The Events Calendar. We keep this page with our retired tools so you can see what it does well and why we moved on.
The Events Calendar was the WordPress plugin I relied on for over 10 years to manage events on my website and client sites. It’s flexible and developer-friendly, with a long list of options and features.
We used it to create recurring events, sell tickets, and build submission forms for community-submitted events.
What it did well
- Multiple calendar views including list, month, week, and map displays
- Complete ticketing system with RSVP collection and custom registration fields
- Community event submissions with revenue sharing capabilities
- Event aggregator imports from Meetup, Eventbrite, iCal, and Google Calendar
- Advanced filtering and event-specific email marketing tools
Why we moved on
WordPress now builds whole sites with blocks, and The Events Calendar hasn’t caught up. Its single event page still runs on an older template, so changes made in the Site Editor don’t show up, and restyling it means fighting the plugin’s own CSS. On our clients’ sites that turned simple design changes into long workarounds.
It also stores events in its own way. Standard WordPress tools don’t see them, and features like cross-posting events between sites only work while the plugin (and its paid add-ons) stays installed. That’s more lock-in than we want for our clients’ content.
Who owns a tool matters
The bigger reason is trust. Liquid Web bought The Events Calendar during its 2020–2021 buying spree, and a private equity firm has owned Liquid Web’s parent company since 2023. In May 2026 it shut down the StellarWP brand, sent theeventscalendar.com to a Liquid Web landing page, and pushed a “Liquid Web” menu into the dashboard of every site running the plugin, free version included, labelled “unlicensed.” One agency owner said her clients thought their sites had been hacked. The menu was later made opt-in, but the damage was done. The Repository covered the rollout and the backlash.
That’s not how I want the tools under my clients’ websites to be run. I pick tools from teams that talk straight with their customers and treat the product as the point, not as recurring revenue to squeeze. It’s the same reason we’re moving our sites off Kadence, which Liquid Web also owns, and why we no longer recommend LearnDash, another Liquid Web product.
We now build events as a plain WordPress post type with custom fields, and add a calendar display on top when a site needs one. The events belong to the site, not to a plugin. For registration, we use Luma.