An expo site is dormant for eleven months, takes exhibitor submissions for one, then serves every attendee at once for four days. Each phase wants something different from the host.
Two months of preparation, four days of traffic, and eleven months where the site is essentially a brochure.
The site is scaled for the show week and scaled back afterwards, so you are not paying for four days of peak capacity across the eleven months when nothing is happening.
Each exhibitor gets an account limited to their own listing, logo and documents, which removes the annual bottleneck of your team copying four hundred descriptions out of email threads.
The interactive plan is served as pre-generated tiles rather than one enormous image, because attendees open it standing in a building where everyone is sharing the same congested network.
Exhibitor search by name, stand number and category runs on indexed fields, which matters most on the morning the whole audience looks up where to go first.
Last year's exhibitor list stays online at its own URLs instead of being replaced, so the site accumulates search value across editions rather than resetting itself every year.
The operational risk is concentrated: everything is fine until the week it is not, and by then there is no time left to change anything.
Every attendee opens the exhibitor directory and the floor plan within the same half hour. That half hour is what the whole year gets judged on.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Each follows from a year's worth of traffic arriving inside four days.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Raised for the show window and reduced between editions | Paying for four days of peak sizing twelve months a year is the usual way an annual event overspends on infrastructure. |
| Exhibitor accounts | Scoped to a single listing with no wider site access | Four hundred exhibitors editing their own entries is only safe if not one of them can reach anybody else's. |
| Floor plan assets | Pre-generated tiles rather than a single large image | Attendees open the plan on a phone inside a hall where the network is already saturated by everybody else doing exactly the same thing. |
| Directory search | Indexed on stand number, name and category | The morning of day one is when the entire audience searches at once, and it is the query least likely to have been tested at that volume. |
| Previous editions | Retained at their own URLs rather than replaced | Overwriting last year's exhibitor list discards search value that took a full year to accumulate. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, exhibitor self-service, and capacity that is there for the week you need it.