How to Create a WordPress Event Registration Page
Allowing people to sign up for your events and purchase tickets directly on your website by creating a WordPress event registration page is a great strategy that can not only boost your website’s conversion rate, but also help your business grow. But before you make a neat-looking and user-friendly event registration page, you have to generate an event registration form first.
Luckily, creating and customizing your own event registration form in WordPress is pretty easy to do if you use one of the many available event registration plugins. But before we show you how to do it, let’s take a quick look at why adding an event registration page in WordPress is beneficial for you and your business.
Why Create a WordPress Event Registration Page
Though there are plenty of third-party event registration tools available online, many of them require you to pay a certain fee for using their services and may even condition you to promote their brand or services. On the other hand, using WordPress to create your own event registration page – or more precisely, using a WordPress plugin – is easy and can also allow you to collect information (such as the contact data of your attendees) or payments directly on your website.
In a nutshell, an event registration plugin lets you create and customize your form in any way you prefer. Furthermore, this option is cost-effective in general because it doesn’t come with additional costs. Some plugins can even be used for free and only upgraded if you prefer to have some extra options when building your user registration forms.
Today, we’ll show you how you can create an event registration page in WordPress with the help of the WP Fluent Forms plugin. You create this particular page the same as you would any other WordPress page. You can create a brand new page that will be used solely for the event registration purposes (which is recommended) and simply add an event registration form with a plugin, or you can insert your form into one of the existing pages.
Here’s what you need to know:
Once you install a plugin and activate it, you will be able to find it in the Fluent Forms tab in your WordPress dashboard.
To create a new event registration form, access Fluent Forms > New Form.
A new window will open, displaying various form templates that can be created with this plugin. These templates are sorted by different categories and adjusted for different purposes, such as Basic (that includes a Contact Form, Newsletter, Support, Polling and a blank form) Marketing, Product, Education, and more.
You can either click on the Blank Form to create your form fields from scratch or type in the “Event Registration Form” in the search bar to make this type of template appear.
Once you hover over the template, you should click the Create Form button.
This will open an editor with a screen that contains two parts. On the left side of the screen, you will find the premade fields that are usually included in the standard event registration form, such as First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone, and so on.
Of course, you have the options to delete, copy, or edit any of the preexisting fields by simply hovering on them (the hover will make these options appear on the screen):
If you click on the individual field’s plus (+) button, you will be able to add a field block right underneath the selected field, choose the field type, and also change the number of columns present in one container (you can choose from one to six columns).
Finally, if you click on the Submit Form button, on the right side of the screen you will be able to customize the way this button will appear to the users. Aside from the form of your submit button (you get to choose from a default form or your own image), you can also set the submit button text, select a button style, choose its size, alignment, and so on.
Also, every time you select a specific field on the left, an Input Customization tab will get activated on the right. This tab will allow you to customize your field in more detail. For example, you will get to change the element label, choose a label placement, change the Placeholder text (that users will see while their input field is still empty), and more.
If you select the Input Fields tab on the right side of the screen, you will be able to see all the different fields that you can drag and drop to the left and add them to your form. This list includes General Fields such as Name, Address, Simple Text (in case you need some additional specific information from your users), etc.
Advanced Fields are here to make your forms more user-friendly and professional in general (like Section Break, reCaptcha, Password Field, Terms and Conditions, and so on).
There is also the Container dropdown that allows you to choose the number of columns you can place in one row.
The final section that can be found in the Input Fields tab is the Payment Fields section that only becomes available if you buy the Pro version of the plugin. This upgrade will allow you to activate Stripe and/or PayPal addons in order to set up and collect online payments directly on your webpage.
Of course, during the entire form creation process, you can preview the way your form will look to your website’s visitors. All you need to do is click on the Preview & Design button located in the top right corner.
This action will redirect you to a preview screen.
Don’t forget to click the Save Form button when you’re done with generating your event registration form.
WP Fluent Forms comes with many useful options that will let you personalize your event registration forms down to the smallest detail. In the Settings & Integrations screen (located in the Form Settings tab), you will get to set where the page will redirect your users after they click the Submit button, customize a message that will appear on the confirmation page, and set the form layout.
Also, the Scheduling and Restrictions option lets you determine the maximum number of entries allowed for this form, and you can even restrict the desired number of entries per day, week, month, year, and even per user.
Additionally, you get to schedule a period of the form’s activity, the message that will appear when the form starts and/or ends, and more.
The Email Notifications screen contains another useful option that will let you determine if you want to receive an email every time someone registers for an event. You need to enable this setting first and then add your email address by clicking the Add Notification button.
Also, if you add shortcodes, you will be able to receive some additional data about users that register for your events, such as their address, company, website, and so on.
Last but not least, WP Fluent Forms comes with the option to add and manage different integration modules. You will be able to access these modules by going to the Marketing & CRM Integrations screen and hitting the Configure Modules button.
Aside from the above-mentioned Stripe and PayPal modules, here you can activate a MailChimp module, Slack, WebHooks, and more than 20 other modules. Once again, most of these modules require you to upgrade the WP Fluent Forms plugin to the pro version.
Adding your form to an already existing page (by accessing Pages > All Pages and then going to the edit of the page in question) or creating a new one (Pages > Add New) is quite simple. All you need to do is copy the shortcode of your event registration form. This can be done in two ways:
After pasting the shortcode to your page (by adding the shortcode block in the Gutenberg editor and pasting your shortcode wherever you want on your page), you can go and preview your form.
Finally, don’t forget to hit the Update/Publish button for the changes to take effect.
Conclusion
As you can see, creating a WordPress event registration page with the help of a plugin is quite simple. While there are plenty of other third-party tools on the market, we’ve found WP Fluent Forms super useful. Simply put, the plugin is easy to use and comes with plenty of customization options and different modules that provide more room for expansion and allow you to build fully functional event registration forms.
