How to Add Recurring Events to a WordPress Site

Adding Recurring Events

Recurring events are a great way to save time and streamline the work of managing your events calendar on WordPress. With recurring events, you can create your event one time and future events are automatically generated for you.

Recurring events can also make it easier for users to browse your calendar in list view by displaying all events in a series on a single page. By using recurring events to your advantage, event creation is easier than ever!

The first step in adding recurring events to your website is to find a plugin that offers this feature. We recommend using our premium Events Calendar Pro plugin to easily create flexible recurring events.

Once you have Events Calendar Pro up and running, here’s what you need to know to start creating recurring events.

Getting started with Events Calendar Pro

There are lots of options when it comes to recurring events in Events Calendar Pro. To begin, go to Add Event and click the event date to expand the options. Click Repeat Event to add a recurrence rule.

Recurring Event Options

A recurring event could occur every week on the same day, for one example. If you’re going on holiday for a week, add an exception to the recurrence. To include an extra day not covered in the regular recurrence, add a single recurrence of the event.

Feel free to get as granular as you’d like with the recurrence rules. Yours may look something like this (in the block editor):

Recurrence Rules

You can view all your upcoming events in one place on the front end. The recurring events icon next to the event time indicates that the event is part of a series.

Recurring events on the front end

Troubleshooting recurring events

What happens if you create your recurring events but something doesn’t seem quite right? Here are a few solutions to common issues.

Issue: You accidentally created an indefinite loop of events that will take hours to delete manually.

Fix: Use our Recurring Events Cleanup Tool to bulk delete extra events.

Issue: You don’t see the recurring events option when you go to add your event.

Fix: Make sure your Events Calendar Pro license is installed and activated under Events Settings > Licenses.

Issue: Only one of your recurring events is showing on the frontend.

Fix: Head to Events Settings > General and make sure that you have the Recurring Event Instances setting unchecked.

Issue: You see an error message like “One event on invalid date,” or you see that only a few recurring events were created.

Fix: Try changing the Date Format settings under Events Settings > Display back to the default. Flush your permalinks by going to Settings > Permalinks and click Save Changes. Check out your Create recurring events in advance for setting to see if event instances were created.

The elephant in the room: Recurring tickets

We know what you’re going to ask: What if I want to create recurring events along with ticket sales? That feature isn’t quite ready yet, but we’re working on it! This project has been a long time coming, and we’ve made significant strides towards introducing recurring tickets—stay tuned in 2022 for more.

Until then, you can use recurring events to quickly populate your calendar with upcoming events. To add tickets, click Break from series at the top admin bar and add tickets individually to each event using Event Tickets or Event Tickets Plus.