When you’re setting up a WordPress event site, most articles will recommend the usual suspects—security, caching, SEO, forms, multilingual, and content plugins. And while those are essential, they often overlook backend tools that can make or break your site’s performance, especially if you’re running a WooCommerce store and using FooEvents to sell tickets. In this post, we’ll dive into five backend plugins for WordPress event sites that we use and highly recommend.
1. Monitor Ticket Delivery with Check & Log Email
Check & Log Email is a must-have plugin for a WordPress event site that sends out tickets via email. This plugin allows you to test whether your WordPress site is successfully sending emails and keeps a log of every email sent from your site. This is crucial for troubleshooting when attendees report they haven’t received their tickets. With this plugin, you can verify if the email was sent and even see if it bounced back, giving you peace of mind that your ticketing process is reliable.
💡 Key benefits: Ensures email deliverability for e-tickets, helps diagnose issues before they affect attendees, and logs all outgoing emails for troubleshooting and record-keeping.
2. Enhance Your WordPress Event Site Search with Relevanssi
Relevanssi supercharges the default WordPress search functionality, which is often lacking, especially on a WordPress event site with lots of content. Relevanssi provides more accurate and relevant search results, which can significantly improve the user experience on your site. For WooCommerce stores selling tickets, it makes it easier for users to find events, products, or specific content, ensuring they don’t miss out on what they’re looking for.
One of my favorite Relevanssi features is the user search history. It keeps a log of user searches and separates them into Successful searches and Unsuccessful searches. This will help you analyze what your audience is searching for on your WordPress event site and help you fill in any content gaps.
💡 Key benefits: Improves search relevance, offers advanced filtering options for event-heavy sites, and enhances the overall user experience by making site navigation smoother.
3. Keep Track of Site Changes With Simple History
It can be challenging keeping track of changes on your site, especially if you work in a team. Simple History keeps a log of the activities happening on your site like content changes (posts, taxonomies, attachments, etc.), plugin updates, user logins, and more. It’s an excellent tool for tracking who made changes to event details, ticket settings, or other critical site functions. In the event something goes wrong, you can easily backtrack to see what changes were made and by whom.
💡 Key benefits: Provides a comprehensive log of site activities, tracks changes to event details or WooCommerce settings, and quickly identifies potential issues to ensure smooth site operations.
4. Troubleshoot Site Issues with Query Monitor
Query Monitor is your best friend when it comes to debugging and optimizing your site. This plugin gives you detailed reports on database queries, PHP errors, hooks, and more. If your WordPress site is experiencing slow load times or other performance issues, Query Monitor can help you pinpoint the problem. WooCommerce stores can be more involved than your average WordPress site, so it’s particularly useful for tracking down slow queries or plugins that might be causing bottlenecks during peak sales periods. This plugin is a developer tool, and you will need a basic understanding of your site’s underlying technologies to use it.
💡 Key benefits: Helps diagnose performance issues, provides detailed data on database queries and PHP errors, and ensures your site stays fast and responsive, even during peak traffic times.
5. Send Emails Using an SMTP Plugin
Sending emails directly from your WordPress event site can sometimes lead to issues with deliverability, especially when sending important emails like tickets for events. Installing an SMTP plugin will help ensure your emails are authenticated and less likely to be flagged as spam. I recently wrote an article that dives deep into how to send ticket emails using SMTP and why it is important. This guide will help you choose an SMTP plugin for your WordPress event site, ensuring your ticket emails reach your attendees’ inboxes reliably.
💡 Key benefits: Using an SMTP plugin ensures that your event tickets are reliably delivered, reduces the risk of emails being flagged as spam, and enhances security through proper authentication.
Conclusion
These are some of the plugins for WordPress event site that we use and highly recommend. They might not be the most glamorous, but they are the unsung heroes of a successful WordPress site. By ensuring your site and operations run smoothly, you’re setting your event up for success, minimizing downtime, and making sure your attendees have the best possible experience. Whether you’re running a single event or a whole series of them, these tools will help keep everything running smoothly, so you can focus on what really matters—delivering a great event.
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