Showing Clan Event Times Across Time Zones in WordPress

A client of mine runs a raid group with members in London, Warsaw, Toronto and Manila. Every autumn the same thing happens. For one week, about a third of the group turns up an hour early or an hour late, someone posts an angry message in Discord, and the officer who wrote the schedule insists the website says the right time. The website does say the right time. It just says it for one city, and nobody else lives there.

If your clan, guild or tournament site lists event times, this is the most predictable bug you will ever have, and it lands twice a year on schedule. The fix is not complicated, but it means changing how you store and display times in WordPress rather than typing "8pm UK" into a post and hoping.

Why the autumn week breaks everything

Europe and North America do not change their clocks on the same day. In 2026, most of Europe falls back on Sunday 25 October. The United States and Canada fall back a week later, on Sunday 1 November. For those seven days the gap between London and Toronto is four hours instead of the usual five.

Say your raid is fixed at 20:00 London time every Saturday. Here is what a member in Toronto sees on their own clock across three weekends:

Three Saturdays, the same raid, and the Toronto player's start time goes 3pm, 4pm, 3pm. Manila does not use daylight saving at all, so those members simply get bumped an hour later and stay there until spring. Anyone who memorised "it's 3pm for me" shows up an hour early on the 31st. The spring version has a gap of nearly three weeks, from 8 March in North America to 29 March in Europe.

Start with the WordPress setting most sites get wrong

Go to Settings, then General, and look at the Timezone dropdown. A surprising number of sites I audit have it set to a fixed offset like "UTC+0" or "UTC+1". Those offsets never move for daylight saving, so your post dates and any scheduled posts drift by an hour for half the year. Choose a city instead, such as London or Warsaw, and WordPress will follow that city's clock changes for you. WordPress itself hints at this in the help text under the field, but it is easy to scroll past.

This setting controls the site's own idea of local time. It does not, by itself, show visitors anything in their time. For that you need one of the approaches below.

Three ways to show the right time to every member

Write the time once in UTC, convert in the browser

This is what I set up for that raid group. Each event post stores its start as a UTC date and time in a custom field. The theme outputs it inside an HTML time element with a machine readable datetime attribute, and about fifteen lines of JavaScript use the browser's built in Intl.DateTimeFormat to rewrite the visible text into the visitor's local time, with their time zone name next to it. If JavaScript fails, the visitor still sees the UTC time, clearly labelled. No plugin, nothing to update, and it has survived four clock changes so far without a single complaint.

Use an events plugin that understands zones

If you already run The Events Calendar or a similar plugin, check its settings for time zone handling. The Events Calendar lets each event carry its own zone, which helps when one tournament is hosted from Europe and another from the US. What these plugins do less well, in my testing, is converting to the visitor's own zone on the front end; most show the event's zone and leave the maths to the reader. Pair it with the browser conversion trick above if your members are spread wide.

Lean on Discord for the announcement

Most gaming groups announce events in Discord anyway, and Discord has a feature many officers never use: timestamp tags. You write the event time as a Unix timestamp inside a short tag, and every member sees it rendered in their own local time. For 20:00 UTC on Saturday 31 October 2026, the timestamp is 1793476800, and the tag is written as <t:1793476800:F>. Free generator sites will convert any date for you. Put the same timestamp in your WordPress custom field and the site and the Discord post will always agree.

"Just add a world clock widget" is the wrong fix

The usual suggestion I see in clan forums is a sidebar widget with clocks for four or five cities. It looks helpful, and I have installed a few at clients' request. In practice it moves the problem onto the reader. A member in Manila has to find the event time, find London on the widget, work out the difference, and remember whether this is the odd week. Some people will do that. Many will not, and those are exactly the ones who miss the raid. On a mobile screen the widget is usually pushed below the content anyway, where nobody sees it.

A schedule is only correct if each member can read it without doing arithmetic.

Small details that save arguments

• Show the day name next to the date. Crossing midnight changes the day for half your members, and "Sunday 04:00" prevents a lot of confusion that "04:00" alone creates.
• Offer an .ics calendar file for each event, with the time written in UTC. Phone calendars convert it correctly on import.
• Put a short line at the top of the schedule page during the two odd weeks each year. A plain sentence is enough.
• Do not write times inside images. A banner that says "8PM GMT" cannot be converted, translated or corrected when someone spots that GMT was wrong in summer.

If your site also hosts guides or patch notes, the same habit of writing one source of truth applies, and we cover that in what patch notes teach about website updates. Busy event days can also bring traffic spikes, which tournament sites have learned to handle.

Before 25 October

Open your site's Settings, General page today and confirm the timezone is a city, not an offset. Then look at your next three scheduled events and check how they read for a member in a different country during the week of 25 October to 1 November. If any of them would show the wrong hour, add a one line notice now and plan the UTC field for next season. More WordPress setup notes are in our WordPress section.