How to make an event registration page that tells you how many are actually coming
An event registration page publishes the date, time, and place, and collects everyone who signs up into a list. To know how many chairs to set out, use the confirmed count, which you move yourself, not the number of people registered.
Matilde runs a bookshop in Pátzcuaro, a block from the plaza, and until this year she’d never had an event registration page: she’d post the flyer on Facebook and count the “Interested” clicks. In March she hosted a book launch for a novel by a Michoacán author. Ninety-six people clicked “Interested,” she rented sixty chairs, and seventeen showed up.
In June she did the opposite. She didn’t rent anything, pulled out the shop’s twelve stools, and forty-three people showed up. Half of them listened to the reading standing, from the sidewalk.
Both times she was missing the same thing: a number before Thursday. An “Interested” click doesn’t leave a name or a phone number, so there’s no one to ask whether they’re actually coming.
What is an event registration page?
It’s a page with an event’s date, time, and location, plus a sign-up button that adds each person’s name and contact info to a list. It doesn’t sell tickets or hold seats: it turns a loose “see you there” into a list you can count and write to.
On a site built with Proyecta, that lives in the Events section of your dashboard. Each event has a title, a start (day and time), an end if it applies, a location, a description with the program, the cost and what to bring, and photos, with the flyer first.
And it has a toggle: Registration required. Off, the event is just announced. On, a sign-up button appears.
An event is a specific date: Thursday’s book launch, a bike shop’s group ride, a pottery studio’s open class. Something that repeats every week, like a Tuesday book club, is a recurring schedule, not an event.
What information do you ask registrants for?
Four fields to start, and only two are required: full name and email. Phone/WhatsApp and comments are optional.
That’s deliberately short. A name is enough to count chairs, and an email is enough to let people know if the time changes. Age, occupation, or how they heard about it don’t change how many chairs you set out.
The event’s name is already filled into the comments field, so you know which event someone signed up for without having to ask. People can add their own notes there too: “there are three of us,” “I’ll be a bit late.”
Matilde leaves WhatsApp optional, but asks for it in the description: “leave us your WhatsApp and we’ll let you know if the time changes.” At her September launch, 52 people signed up and 44 of them included it.
What happens when someone registers?
Three things happen, and none of them depend on you being online to see it. The person sees on screen that they’re registered, they get a confirmation email with their reference number, and you get a separate email with their details. From that moment on, they appear in your dashboard, under Attendees.
One thing to watch for: that email confirms the registration, but it doesn’t repeat the address or the time. That’s why the event page itself has to say it all, and the reminder the day before is on you to send. You already have their contact info — that’s exactly why you asked for it.
How do you know how many people are actually coming?
With the confirmed count, not the registered count. The attendee list has three tabs — To confirm, Confirmed, and Canceled — and a counter at the top that only adds up the confirmed ones.
Every registration starts out in “To confirm.” From there, you move it yourself with a button: Confirm or Cancel. If someone cancelled and then decides to come after all, you reopen them and they go back to “To confirm.”
Here’s how Matilde uses it. On Tuesday, two days ahead, she messages everyone still in “To confirm”: “are you still joining us Thursday at 7?”
Whoever says yes, she confirms. Whoever says no, she cancels. Whoever doesn’t answer stays in “To confirm” — and that’s the person she doesn’t set a chair out for.
In September, 52 people registered and 31 confirmed. She rented forty chairs: 31 for the confirmed guests plus nine more for walk-ins who show up without warning. Thirty-four people came. Six chairs were left over, and nobody had to stand.
Does the page close registration once it’s full?
No. The counter counts, it doesn’t hold seats — and your own dashboard says so: “Informational count: it doesn’t reserve spots or enforce a capacity limit.” If your space fits forty, the forty-first registration still goes through.
You’re the one who closes it, with a single move: turn off Registration required on the event. The button disappears and the event stays published, with its date and place intact.
That’s why it’s worth stating capacity in the description from day one, and switching it to “sold out” once you turn off registration. That way, anyone arriving late understands why there’s no button anymore.
What doesn’t the page do for you?
Three things, worth knowing before you announce anything:
- It doesn’t charge money. The events section announces and registers. If your workshop has a cost, put the price and how to pay in the description.
- It doesn’t separate two events. The attendee list and its counter are shared across everything. In August Matilde opened registration for a reading and a bookbinding workshop the same week: the counter said 38 and didn’t say which event they belonged to. Which event each person signed up for only shows in their comments, under the Requests section. The practical move is to keep only one registration open at a time.
- It doesn’t distinguish “read” from “confirmed.” Registrations also show up under Requests, and if you mark one as read there, it counts as confirmed under Attendees. Always confirm and cancel from Attendees.
What it does handle on its own is sorting. In your dashboard, events show up in a calendar (day, week, or month) or in the agenda view, split into Upcoming and Past. The September launch moved to Past on its own, without Matilde having to delete it.
Before you announce your next event, do this math
Take your last event and write down three numbers: how many said they were coming, how many spots you prepared, and how many actually showed up. If you can’t fill in the first one with an exact number, that’s exactly what an event registration page gives you.
Then describe it to Proyecta just like that: “a page for my bookshop in Pátzcuaro with an events section: a book launch on Thursday, November 12th at 7 pm, free admission, capacity for 40 people, and registration asking for name, email, and WhatsApp.”
Once it’s published, go to Events in your dashboard, check the date and time, upload the flyer, and turn on “Registration required”; if a sample event is still sitting there, delete it. Then register yourself: check that the email arrives, that you show up under Attendees, and that Requests shows which event you signed up for. Then cancel that test registration.
Two days before, ask. On Thursday, set out the chairs the counter says — not the number you’re picturing in your head. Get started at proyecta.dev.