Five mistakes congress organisers make with their website

We've spent months looking at congress websites of every size, and there are mistakes that keep repeating — most of them easy to avoid once you know they exist.

1. The site doesn't work well on mobile

Most of your visitors will arrive from their phone, often from a link shared on social media or WhatsApp. If they have to zoom in to read the agenda, you've already lost part of the conversion before they've decided anything.

2. Date information goes out of date

A room change, a speaker cancelling, a time slot moving by half an hour... and the site still says what it said a month ago, because the only person who can touch the code is on holiday. If depending on a developer for every change feels like too much hassle, you probably end up not updating anything at all.

3. No one else on the team can edit anything

When all the content management goes through one single person, that person becomes the bottleneck for the whole organising team — right in the week they have the least time.

4. Publishing without seeing how it looks first

Changing a colour, uploading a photo or reordering a section without being able to see it before it goes live is playing blind. A real preview, before publishing, avoids most last-minute scares.

5. Everything lives scattered across three or four different places

The agenda in a PDF, tickets on one platform, news on Instagram, and contact in a loose email. The attendee has to piece the information together themselves — and many simply don't bother.

None of these five mistakes is hard to avoid once you've spotted them. Most of them solve themselves as soon as your congress has a single, well thought-out landing page, with access for your whole team and a preview before you publish.