{"id":39044,"date":"2023-01-24T18:01:49","date_gmt":"2023-01-24T12:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-eventmanager.com\/?p=39044"},"modified":"2025-05-05T13:02:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T07:32:59","slug":"contributed-success-festivals-belgie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp-eventmanager.com\/contributed-success-festivals-belgie\/","title":{"rendered":"Discover how WP Event Manager contributed to the success of Festivals Belgie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Company introduction: <\/strong><\/h2>\n

Festivals Belgie is a Belgium based company that provides a comprehensive list of all the festivals that occur in Belgium through their website Festivalsbelgie.be. While sharing about the journey the founder <\/span>Frederik Boullart<\/a><\/strong> told that it all started at the beginning of the year 2022.  Frederik, as a web designer, was struggling in his career and started working on a project where there was a need for a web designer to create a website to serve local businesses. <\/span><\/p>\n

As he was not sure of how efficiently he could handle the project so he decided to run a test project that has the same requirements. This is where he got the idea of building a website that would have all the Belgium festivals at one place. Surprisingly, his idea worked and within a very short period of time he noticed that his website visitors increased from 40 per day to 1500 per day.<\/span><\/p>\n

He said “This was my test project. After a couple of days, I saw there were already 40 users per day visiting the website (with 0 backlinks and no marketing at all). After a month, it went up to 200 users per day, and in the summer even to 1500 per day. Now, after 1.5 years, the website is at rank 1 in Google when searching for “festival” in Google (depending on where you are located). It has been a big hit and continues to grow in popularity.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Inspiration behind the project: <\/strong><\/h2>\n

Festivalsbelgie.be<\/a><\/strong> is the only website in Belgium where visitors can find the details of all the festivals that are happening in Belgium. Clearly, anyone who is in search of Belgian festivals will come to the website for information. That is why the website is constantly updated and always offers authentic information on festivals. It lets users search for festivals based on its date, area and type making it fast and easy for visitors to identify them. <\/span><\/p>\n

For this reason they wanted a fast and easy-to-use website and this is what was the inspiration behind the project. <\/span><\/p>\n

Issues faced:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Frederik shared that adding each festival on his website became a laborious task for him to manage as he had to manually download the image of the festival, upload it to the website, add title, date, location, style, tags. He also has faced issues related to dates and the website became very slow due to all the experiments and combination of PODs, ACF and more. He also tried various other plugins but did not get satisfaction.<\/span><\/p>\n

He quoted “In version 1.0 I had to do a lot of manual work to add each festival. I had to download the image of the festival, upload it to the website, add title, date, location, style, tags, … Also I had a lot of problems when searching on date (date format in Europe is different the US) and the website was really slow because of all the experimenting, the combination of PODS, ACF, … So I tested a lot of Event plugins.“<\/span><\/p>\n

How did Festivals Belgie find us? <\/strong><\/h2>\n

Frederik was impressed with the plugin features as soon as he came across it and also appreciated its pricing structure which is very affordable. He also told us that the free version features were also very useful and had the ability to fulfill his requirements but he wanted to support our developers by purchasing our premium version. <\/span><\/p>\n

“I was thrilled when I discovered <\/span>WP Event Manager<\/a><\/strong>, as it was intuitive to use and also very reasonably priced. In fact, I could have created everything with the free version, but I wanted to support the plugin developers, so I purchased the paid version. Additionally, I also paid for support on the plugin, so that I could have access to the necessary help and resources for my event management website.”<\/span><\/p>\n

\"festivals<\/a><\/p>\n

The plugins Festival Belgie used in this project and the features they liked:<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Festivals Belgie shared that it faced several problems with the date filter  due to the difference in date format in Belgium and the US and the default filter offered by WP Event Manager was truly helpful in this regard.<\/span><\/p>\n

Besides the core plugin, the plugins it used include the following:<\/span><\/p>\n