Does your company book appointments online? Looking for the best WordPress booking plugins to help you streamline your workflow and increase customer satisfaction?
An effective booking supplement can be an essential part of your business puzzle. Once you find the right one, you eliminate the possibility of losing customers due to faulty or less-than-ideal plugins that don't work well.
In this guide, I share some of the best WordPress booking plugins to help you manage all your appointments with ease. Once you've read my top picks, you can make the best decision for your unique business needs. Let us begin.
#1 Bookly Pro : The Best For Use With Staff Members
A plugin like Bookly Pro is the best option if you work with staff members and need a lot of attributable backend booking functionality. The pro version of Bookly has been downloaded over 34,000 times by companies who want to master their reservation workflow.
With Bookly Pro, you can inform your staff of upcoming appointments through push notifications and notify them when they have marked a purchase. Bookly allows you to connect each of your employees and their Google calendars to any number of services available for booking.
This allows you to manage your team and multiple reservations without the possible confusion that may arise. This is the feature that makes Bookly an extremely effective booking add-on if you are managing a growing team.
Although Bookly offers a free version of the plugin, if you want access to advanced booking features and support, you'd better make your one-time payment to have full access to everything they offer.
Some of its best features:
- Great booking forms and future-oriented design
- Fully responsive reservation features that work across all screen sizes
- Integration with Google calendars and WooCommerce
- Accept payments through a variety of payment gateways, including Stripe and PayPal
- Integrated analytics with numerous booking statistics
- Offers the ability to connect to various third-party systems using Zapier
Bookly Pro costs $ 89, a one-time payment that includes future updates and six months of support. You can also pay an additional $ 31.50 to extend support for up to 12 months.
#2 Booking Calendar : The Best Free Booking Plugin
Booking Calendar is a powerful free plugin if you don't want to shell out extra money for booking features. As a free option, Booking Calendar is a dynamic plugin that helps you manage your booking needs directly from your WordPress dashboard.
The Booking Calendar is a solid booking option if you are in the hospitality industry, event planning, equipment rental, and any other service-based business that uses reservations.
You can block specific dates as unavailable, set a specific front calendar view, and even customize the title of your calendar to make sure your clients know the current reservation and availability for each date. One of its best features as a free booking plugin is that you can import feeds that use .ics like Airbnb, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, or Booking.com, to name a few.
Some of its best booking features:
- You and your client receive email notifications to approve or change reservations
- Easily select the dates and times you want to reserve
- Show reservations in calendar or list views for easier navigation
- Easily add booking forms to any of your pages with Gutenberg's calendar blocks
- Responsive booking interface that adapts to any screen size
- You have the option to import dates and events from Google Calendar
The Booking Calendar has been downloaded more than 1.75 million times since 2009 and is available for free here.
#3 StartBooking : The Best For Service Appointment Scheduling
StartBooking offers a powerful WordPress booking plugin that you can easily download and install to handle all of your service appointment needs.
They offer a clean client interface that allows them to choose from a pre-defined list of services with available times and dates. Once they're ready to schedule an appointment, StartBooking efficiently captures all of their information, so they're ready to go. This makes StartBooking an exceptional choice for WordPress users in the service industry who want to provide their customers with a clean and professional online booking experience that they can trust.
If you want to capture payments online when your clients book their appointments, StartBooking integrates with Stripe to facilitate payment processing.
Some of its best booking features:
- Offers a fully customizable booking plugin so you can set it up to schedule appointments exactly the way you want
- Easily integrates with Google Calendar
- Manage how customers view your booking and service options from your WordPress dashboard
- Book and manage an unlimited number of appointments
- Access crucial booking analytics so you always know how you are doing month after month
- Assign different staff members to different appointment offers
- Set booking times so you don't have to overlap with appointments
- The ability to manage class and group bookings.
The price levels include:
- Individual: $ 12 per month for unlimited dating and sites
- Business: $ 28 per month for unlimited dating and sites
Both levels offer custom fields, blackout dates, and customizable emails. The business plan is best for a team with multiple deadlines and comes with advanced and priority support. Try StartBooking free here for 14 days.
#4 BirchPress : The Best For Easily Capturing Payments
BirchPress is a reliable WordPress booking plugin that works great if you want to capture credit card and PayPal payments seamlessly. This makes it easier to process payments without looking for a third-party payment gateway that will complicate your life.
If you prefer not to use PayPal as a payment gateway, you can capture payments through other available gateways with the WooCommerce integration.
Especially if you work in the health, fitness, automotive, salon and beauty industries, or the health and wellness industry, BirchPress makes it easy to schedule and track appointments right from your dashboard. WordPress.
Even if you are constantly making appointments and collecting payments, you will not always be available. With BirchPress's vacation lockout feature, you choose dates that are not available to book year-round.
The simple features that BirchPress offers, along with its ability to sync with more than one payment option, make it a top-notch booking plugin for online appointment management.
Some useful features of BirchPress include:
- You can integrate booking features on any page or post with your shortcodes
- Integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook, iPhone or Android to import and export appointment dates
- Easily send reminders and emails when someone schedules, changes, or cancels an appointment
- Customize your appointments according to your needs by configuring the registration forms accordingly
- Developer friendly plugin with advanced customization features
Once you've made the one-time payment at the level that suits your business budget, you can quickly start managing your booking needs. Here is the breakdown of the price levels:
- Personal - $ 99
- Business - $ 199
- Business + - $ 249
All plans come with one year of support and updates, automatic email notifications, and vacation lockdown. The Business + package is the only one that supports WooCommerce integration. Get started with BirchPress today or take a live demo here.
#5 Booking & Appointment Plugin For WooCommerce : The Best For Use With WooCommerce
The Booking & Appointment plugin for WooCommerce really does its best to book almost anything online once you integrate it and use it with WooCommerce (a solid WordPress ecommerce store plugin).
With it, you can manage hotel reservations, fitness appointments, party rentals, apartment rentals, and more once you set it up with your WooCommerce store.
The Booking & Appointment plugin for WooCommerce allows you to set up one-day or multi-day reservations for equipment rental or hotel reservations with just a few clicks. If you already have a WooCommerce store set up via WordPress, adding the booking and appointment plugin can completely transform your shopping experience with an easy-to-use booking and appointment interface in both the backend and frontend views.
Some of the best features of the Booking & Appointment plugin:
- Synchronizes with Google Calendar for admin users and clients
- Easily set and automate SMS reminders
- Activate the time bands configured according to the customer's local time zones
- Multilingual display capability in more than 60 languages
- See all your written appointments in calendar or list views
- You can set up booking for multiple products on multiple dates
To obtain a license, you will pay an annual subscription fee. The levels are:
- Admission - $ 119 for one store
- Business - $ 199 for five stores
- Business: $ 249 for an unlimited number of stores
All three licenses come with all the basic features, including flexible labels, blackout dates, custom booking calendar, multilingual features, and time zone conversions. Get started with the WooCommerce Booking and Appointment Plugin here.
#6 WP Simple Booking Calendar : The Best For Calendar Views
Do you need a full calendar view to make sure customers know what dates are available and when to book? WP Simple Booking Calendar takes care of that completely for you with its feature-rich plugin.
Due to the way this booking plugin is built with its calendar display feature as the core, this is a great plugin for the hospitality industry, restaurants and services.
The intuitive plugin allows you to sync with iCalendar to ensure you are always up to date with reservations, cancellations, and changes. With its bulk edit feature, you can select date ranges to add or edit statuses with just a few clicks. The plugin offers multiple calendar views on the backend, so you can easily plan and organize each week and month in advance.
You can also create a custom legend with custom colors and symbols for easy sorting and organization as you scroll through each date.
Some of the best booking features of WP Simple Booking Calendar:
- Easily view date availability with calendar views for clients
- Display a legend so your customers always know what each date is
- Save your calendar data so you don't lose your appointment information
- Allows customers to search for available dates
- Intuitive and easy-to-use interface with an elegant design
- Offers customer support capable of responding to tickets in just a few hours
- Allows you to create and configure unlimited calendars
To use the plugin and all the features it offers, you can sign up for one of its subscription levels that renews automatically every year:
- Personal: $ 39 per year for a website
- Business: $ 69 per year for up to five websites
- Developer: $ 169 per year for unlimited websites
Get started now with WP Simple Booking Calendar here. The plugin comes with a 14 day money back guarantee. If you want a larger version with more features like booking forms and payment options, the same company also offers WP Booking System a little more per year.
What I searched for to find the best WordPress booking plugins
Booking plugins come with many different features that can improve the way you handle your business appointments. Any booking plugin worth your time will provide a great user experience, integrate well with your WordPress site, and streamline the process of accepting and scheduling appointments. Still, you'll want to go a step further and look at a few key criteria so that you can choose the best plugin that provides what you need.
To choose a plugin that's right for you, make sure you define your business goals well so you know exactly what you need. Do you book sales calls online with potential customers? Do you book local appointments in person? Will you need to enter payment information when booking? Do you make appointments or reservations?
Some plugins come with robust features like drop-down menus for multiple schedules, the ability to review and reschedule appointments, a dashboard that lets you easily view and manage your calendar, or even appointment reminders.
Here are some other things I took into account when researching and choosing the best WordPress booking plugins. Use these factors when doing your research and select the best one for you.
Online payments
Some plugins are designed to accept online payment solutions without having to use a third-party payment gateway. It can be useful to you, as a business owner, if you need a payment when booking.
Being able to capture payments in your reservation plugin can save you time. This way, you don't need to insert additional plugins on your site that could slow it down.
Calendar views
Would it be easier to make appointments on your site if your plugin offered a calendar view for you and your clients? Using a plugin with calendar views can be a great option if you offer time appointments or your business is service-based.
Compatible with mobile devices
Your booking plugin won't do you much good if you can't easily capture appointments from a mobile device. A large amount of online traffic is generated through mobile devices, as opposed to the standard desktop view.
You'll always be better off with updated booking plugins that offer mobile-friendly views. Using booking plugins that have not been recently revised or updated to be compatible with the latest version of WordPress can work against you if you are not careful.
Summary
It could have been a lot of information to digest in one go. I've gone through a list of the best booking plugins for WordPress that you can start using right now that go beyond the basics.
To help you choose the best WordPress booking plugin and make your job easier, here is a quick rundown of the plugins I recommend:
- Bookly Pro - best for use with staff members
- Booking Calendar - Best Free Booking Plugin
- StartBooking: Best for making service appointments
- BirchPress - Best for Capturing Payments Easily
- Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce - Best to use with WooCommerce
- WP Booking Calendar - Best for Calendar Views
What about you? Is there a booking plugin that works better for you than others? Let us know in the comments below.
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