Why the month grid is wrong here

A conference happens on two or three days. A month view is twenty-eight empty squares and three busy ones, and the three busy ones cannot show forty sessions between them.

What you want is a day view: a column per day or per track, sessions in time order, times down the side. That is a timetable, and it is a different view from anything a general calendar plugin ships with by default.

Tracks

If sessions run in parallel, the agenda must show that. An attendee's real question is “what are my options at 14:00”, and a single ordered list of everything cannot answer it — two sessions at the same time appear one after the other, which reads as sequential.

Use categories for tracks and let people filter to one. Then a developer sees the technical track and does not scroll past the sales sessions, which is the difference between an agenda people use and a PDF they download once.

Speakers, rooms and the things a calendar does not have

A session needs a speaker, a room, a track, a level and often a description longer than a calendar's. Most event plugins give you a title, a time and a free-text location.

You can work with that — put the room in the location field and the speaker in the title — but it does not filter and it does not display well. If your conference is large, plan on custom fields or a purpose-built tool. If it is a single-day, single-track affair, a calendar is plenty.

The one feature attendees actually want

To put the agenda in their own calendar. Then the sessions are next to their travel, their meetings and their dinner, with reminders, and they do not need your website or your app on the day.

Two forms: a per-session add-to-calendar link, and a subscription to the whole programme. The second is far more valuable, because a programme will change — a speaker cancels, a room moves — and a subscriber's calendar updates itself while a downloaded file does not.

Almost no conference offers this, and it is close to free once the site publishes a feed.

Timezones for hybrid events

If anyone attends remotely, publish the conference timezone plainly and repeatedly — in the header of the agenda, not in a footnote. “All times CEST” at the top of the page prevents more confusion than any conversion feature, and a remote attendee who has subscribed to the feed gets the conversion from their own calendar anyway, correctly.