Learn two ways to integrate your shop events calendar with your website, so customers know what's happening in the store.
Best Integration
- Workstand offers a Google Calendar page type under Website > Page Editor. This allows direct integration with your calendar and allows you to add and modify events from within Admin.
- Click Add Page in Page Editor and select Event Calendar (Google).
- Give the page a title, select a time zone, and select a storage folder, and save changes.
- Click Add New Calendar.
- Open your Google Calendar in a separate tab, click the gear icon in the upper right, and select settings.
- Click on the calendar in the left side bar under "Settings for my calendars."
- Be sure to check "Make available to public."
- Scroll down to "Integrate Calendar" and copy the first URL.
- Authorize Workstand to connect with your Google account.
- Select "Add an existing Google calendar," and paste the URL you copied into the field, and click Submit.
- Once your calendar imports, you should see the first 25 events you have on the calendar.
- Click Add New Event to create additional events on the calendar.
- Click the green pencil to edit any events on the calendar.
- You can add additional calendars by repeating the Add New Calendar process.
- Delete any unused calendars by clicking the trash icon next to any old calendars.
The biggest advantage this integration has is that it's fully search engine optimized. Each event is readable by the crawling robots and can be marked up using Google Search Console.
Good Integration
If you want to display other information besides your calendar on a page, there is a secondary iframe integration that Google provides.
- On an existing event page, add an HTML block wherever you would like the calendar to appear.
- Open your Google Calendar in a separate tab, click the gear icon in the upper right, and select settings.
- Click on the calendar in the left side bar under "Settings for my calendars."
- Be sure to check "Make available to public."
- Scroll down to "Integrate Calendar" and copy the Embed Code.
- Click "+ Create" in your HTML block, name the block, and click into HTML/Text Input and paste the embed code.
- You may find the calendar the wrong size, you can adjust its dimensions in the HTML block by changing the Width and Height measurement.
- This integration is ideal if you have other information beyond the calendar that you would like to display on the page, like event descriptions or photos.
While an iframe may not be as readable by search engines, having other content about the events on this page will increase your searchability significantly.
Tips
Any event you're adding to your Google Calendar should also appear in your Google My Business listing. The two are unfortunately not able to be tied together.