Is The Events Calendar Safe? What It Costs to Keep Events on WordPress
The Events Calendar powers events on hundreds of thousands of sites — and adds real weight, real attack surface, and real lock-in. How to keep your events without it.
If your business runs classes, live music, workshops, or services with a schedule, there’s a decent chance The Events Calendar is doing that job on your site. It’s one of the most widely used plugins in WordPress — a real product, actively maintained.
It’s also one of the heaviest things you can bolt onto a small-business site, and its popularity puts it permanently on the list every bot checks.
What it actually adds to your site
An events plugin isn’t a widget — it’s an application. It brings its own database tables, its own admin screens, its own scripts and styles that load on your pages, and often a paid tier renewing yearly for features like recurring events. All of it runs on your server, on every visit, whether anyone’s looking at events or not.
And like every popular plugin, it has had security holes over the years that were found, published, patched — and exploited on the sites that didn’t update in time. Hundreds of thousands of installs means every scanner on the internet carries a check for it.
The quiet lock-in
Here’s the part owners feel but can’t name: your events live inside the plugin. Its formats, its tables, its shortcodes. The longer you use it, the more your schedule — a core part of your business — is stored in a shape only that plugin understands. Leaving feels impossible, so you stay, and the treadmill continues.
How Shmove handles events
We built our events system specifically to break that lock-in, in two steps:
Your history comes with you. During conversion, we import your existing events automatically — titles, dates, times, venues, descriptions — through the plugin’s own public data. No passwords, nothing installed, nothing lost.
Your future lives in Google Calendar. From then on, you manage events where scheduling actually belongs — the calendar you may already use, on your phone, in your pocket. Your site reads your calendar and displays upcoming events in your site’s own design (not a Google embed), with the structured data that makes events eligible for Google’s event listings.
Add an event in Google Calendar; it appears on your site. Cancel it; it disappears. No plugin to update, no database to back up, no renewal invoice, and nothing on your site for a bot to probe.
Your schedule keeps working. The application pretending to be a calendar goes away.
Quick answers
Is The Events Calendar a bad plugin?
No — it's a capable, widely used plugin. But it's big, it runs on every visit, and its popularity makes it a standing item on every bot's checklist. Capable and costly can both be true.
Do I lose my events if I leave WordPress?
No. Shmove imports your existing events automatically during conversion — titles, dates, venues, descriptions — through the plugin's own public data, no passwords needed.
How do I add new events without the plugin?
In Google Calendar, which you may already use. Your site reads your calendar and displays upcoming events in your site's own design. Add an event on your phone; your site follows.
Will my events still show up on Google?
Better than before, usually. Shmove sites publish each event with the structured data Google's event listings read — done correctly, automatically, on every event.
Sixty seconds. Zero jargon.
See what's actually wrong with your site — speed, plugins, and every way in.
Check my site free