Bring your own builder
Our landing page editor handles most events. For the rest, build the page in whatever tool your team already knows. Gatsby handles registration on top.
Key Takeaways
- Gatsby's embed block lets you host the registration page anywhere while Gatsby still handles RSVPs, tracking, and personal links
- Use the tool your team is already fastest in (Webflow, Framer, Canva Sites, an AI builder, your agency's stack), not whichever tool the editor supports
- External builders cache aggressively; if a change isn't showing up, open the URL in incognito before assuming the embed is broken
For a dinner, a single-session breakfast, a one-day forum, our landing page editor is the faster call. It’s structured the way these events are structured, the operator can stand it up in twenty minutes, and the result looks like your brand. Most events should keep using it.
This piece is about the other twenty percent.
Multi-day summits with speaker bios and pop-out agendas. Anything with anchor navigation, parallax sections, or a real animation budget. Pages where the page itself is doing work the editor was never designed to do.
Until recently the operator had two options: squeeze the event into the editor anyway, or move the whole thing off Gatsby and lose the registration apparatus. Neither was good.
There’s a third option now.
What you actually build, and what stays with Gatsby
The technique is simple. Use Gatsby’s embed block, the one you’ve probably used for Google Maps? Instead, you can set it to full width and full height, and point it at a public URL. And then, Gatsby registration buttons can float on top.
The embedded page handles presentation. Gatsby handles registration.
That second half is worth being precise about. The external page should never see a guest record. It shouldn’t collect emails. It should have no form, no backend, no database, no security surface.
When a guest clicks an RSVP button, they’re clicking a Gatsby button.
Personal links detect the guest, the form pre-fills, the response lands in the right event, the confirmation goes out from the right sending domain. Check-in, campaigns, seating, post-event surveys all run on the same apparatus as a native page. The thing that changed is the cosmetics; not the system underneath.
Gatsby ships a Portal template in your Global Templates library that handles the embed configuration. When creating a new landing page template, look for “Portal” under Global Templates. Full setup guide.
Use the tool your team is already fast in
If your marketing team lives in Webflow, build the page in Webflow. If your designer is a Framer person, use Framer. If your EA has shipped fifty decks in Canva Sites and can produce a polished page in an afternoon there, that’s the right tool.
If you keep an agency on retainer, hand them the brief and pull the result into the embed.
If an AI builder gets you eighty percent of the way in twenty minutes, use that.
The skill your team already has becomes the tool. Nobody needs to onboard onto our editor.
The pages that don’t fit a landing page editor
The honest case for moving the page out is the work the editor doesn’t do: layered scroll animations, anchor navigation across a long page, pop-out modals for speaker bios, tabbed agendas. Custom interactions that aren’t on the editor’s roadmap (and probably shouldn’t be).
The editor is good because it’s opinionated and constrained.
The argument is that when an event actually needs these things, the operator now has somewhere to go that doesn’t cost them the registration system.
What to try this week
Pick one upcoming event where you were already planning to fight the editor.
Build the page in the tool someone on your team can move fastest in. Pull it into the embed block, float the registration buttons, send wave one.
See whether the page changed who said “yes”. That’s the only test that matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the embed work with personal RSVP links?
Yes. Personal links still detect the guest and pre-fill the form, regardless of where the page is hosted. For public registration, guests enter their details manually on the floating form.
Where does the external page need to be hosted?
Anywhere with a public URL. Webflow, Framer, Canva Sites, Netlify, Vercel, an agency-built static page on your own server. The embed block just needs to be able to load it.
Do I still get tracking, campaigns, and check-in if the page lives outside Gatsby?
Yes. The external page handles presentation only. Registration, tracked invite opens, campaigns, confirmations, check-in, and seating all stay on Gatsby. From the operator's side, nothing about the workflow changes.
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