Appointment booking plugins are in demand today more than ever. In the wake of a devastating global pandemic, businesses are shifting to touchless solutions whenever possible to preserve human touch. Social distancing has suddenly become a staple in most transactions.
Customers are also migrating their activities more and more on the web. The majority are on a self-service frenzy on the internet, shifting from face-to-face interactions to virtual, and swapping brick-and-mortar store suppliers with online ones. For instance, when evaluating a new service provider, 94 percent of consumers say they are more likely to choose one with online booking options than a provider that doesn’t.
Around 36 percent of people said that waiting on hold too long when booking over the phone was their most significant pain point for scheduling appointments and 20 percent of people said the most annoying inconvenience was having to wait to call during office hours to book.
By adding a booking plugin to your WordPress site, you will eliminate more than half of the biggest pain points for consumers while simultaneously providing them with their most preferred booking option.
Table of Contents
WordPress Appointment Booking Plugin Must-Haves
Here are some of the features an excellent appointment booking plugin must have:
- Mobile-responsive or mobile version
- Mobile-friendly UI (user interface)
- Payment options available for paid appointments or reservations
- Cancel payment options
- Filterable and searchable
- Customizable fields and drop-down menus
- A customizable calendar both for you and your customers
- Saves appointments in your WordPress database or a calendar app like Google Calendar.
- Sends automatic email notification and reminders for both admins and users
- Business or enterprise-level the features like multiple-user access
10 WordPress Appointment Booking Plugins for WordPress
Using the best WordPress appointment booking plugin could be the best bet for you. Take a look at the details of each plugins and boost up your performance right away.
1. StartBooking
StartBooking is a complete WordPress appointment booking plugin for integrating appointment booking forms directly on your website. It is user-friendly and has a quick set up system so you can easily plug it into your site.
It has a no-fuss customizable system of adding workdays, hours, available time slots, facilities and users, staff, and the like. Data points of the calendar can quickly be modified to adapt to your booking needs.
With StartBooking, your customers have a smooth booking experience. Your customers can see a bookable service on your booking page. After selecting a service, they will be asked to choose the time. The checkout flow will then collect all the customer’s essential information and safely store it within StartBooking.
StartBooking is the best plugin that allows your customers to book an appointment with you on your website around the clock. If you are still using Google Calendar, you can incorporate your booking system.
2. Simply Schedule Appointments
Simply Schedule Appointments is all that you need is an appointment booking plugin for WordPress. It helps you reduce the time for manual scheduling, emailing, and checking your customers, so you can give more time to increase your customer base and grow your business.
You can easily manage your time and display availability with advanced scheduling options. It lets you display availability by day, time, and appointment type, which is more efficient for your business to make the most of your schedule.
Customers can also blackout dates like work holidays, birthdays, and the like that needs a blackout of you and your team’s availability.
The Simply Schedule Appointments plugin can automatically be synced with Google Calendar to confirm true availability and avoid scheduling overlapping meetings.
Serving more than 7,000 customers, Simple Schedule Appointments’ client base includes small businesses, consultants, coaches, lawyers, yoga instructors, and more.
The calendar is completely customizable to match your website. You can set it to send notifications and reminders via email and text, accept payments for appointments via PayPal & Stripe, among other features.
It also has a variety of integrations to choose from. You can integrate the app with tools like Gravity Forms, Twilio, and Mailchimp. It has a drag-and-drop system and takes five minutes to install through the help of their setup wizard.
But what sets this plugin apart is its unrivaled customer support. They provide same-day support and are available for live Zoom calls for a virtual walkthrough of resolving problems or concerns. As a result, Simply Schedule Appointments earned a perfect five-star review average amongst its WordPress plugin directory.
3. WooCommerce Booking
WooCommerce plugin dominates in the WordPress eCommerce niche. The core version is free of charge, but users have access to several useful extensions. You can set it to accept multiple payment options.
The WooCommerce Bookings extension enables WordPress users to sell reservations according to times or dates. Bookings can still be approved free of charge. However, the plugin’s payment processing feature is enabled for your clients who want to monitor their booking and reserve desired time slots.
It is an extension that can be used conveniently by both beginner web developers and professionals, who can easily change the default layout with CSS. For added flexibility, you can integrate with other WooCommerce extensions.
Feedback is also included, which is crucial because visitors typically search for reviews before scheduling an appointment or service online.
The expanded WooCommerce Bookings also offers tools to build fixed time slots, control bookings, and create promos that can be handled from the dashboard.
4. Bookly
Bookly is an excellent WordPress appointment booking plugin that can be availed for free and in a paid version. The free plugin is a fundamental booking tool, but you need to upgrade to a premium version to avail online payment support and unlimited users.
Bookly has a sleek, modern design on both backend and frontend. Users can customize many areas of the booking form, even if they have little to no coding expertise. Beginners and advanced users alike will feel at home with the plugin’s capabilities and style.
With Bookly, you can grow your WordPress traffic exponentially, and it is an excellent tool for small businesses that may not have the resources to hire a custom developer.
You can include numerous service providers and employees in the booking schedule. This way, your employees can charge different rates and show other times.
You can automate email notifications and SMS systems, add paid add-ons for extra services.
5. BirchPress
Appointment Booking Calendar by BirchPress or BirchPress Scheduler is an extensive WordPress scheduling plugin that enables users to add a professional online booking management system to your WordPress site.
Your users can book appointments and make reservations from your website and pay via their PayPal account or credit card.
BirchPress synchronizes your calendar with calendars like Google Calendar, iCal, Android, and Outlook. It has a personalized email notification and reminder system to keep you and your customers up-to-date.
Until you switch to a paid tier, you cannot accept prepayments. You can upgrade to Business or Business+ for more features, each good for one website. You can upgrade to more advanced features like different staff colors for each staff, post-booking page redirection, and iCal calendar sync.
BirchPress makes appointment booking a breeze.
6. Booking Calendar
Booking Calendar Booking Calendar is one of the market’s best free WordPress booking plugins. It is simple, user-friendly, and well-documented. It comes with a calendar view for both you and your visitors. Easily add your reservations and appointments form to any WordPress post or page.
While it is simple enough for beginners, it is convenient and includes an array of choices that can be customized from the plugin’s Settings page. It comes with built-in captcha for spam prevention, email notifications, jQuery effects, to name a few. You can personalize your booking form with your custom fields.
7. Booked
Booked is a plugin by CodeCanyon that allows several kinds of appointment bookings like paid bookings, registered bookings, and guest bookings.
You can view appointments via calendar view, and translation to non-English languages is available. Users can assign calendars to certain people in the team to create and personalize their profiles to attract more customers.
Booked’s frontend interface is sleek and elegant, and users can integrate other add-ons like Payments with WooCommerce, Calendar Feeds, and Front-end Agents.
8. Easy Appointments
Easy Appointments is a customizable, free WordPress booking plugin. You can easily add several sites, facilities, and employees and create customizable connections with granular calendar control. You may also customize the booking form by adding custom form fields.
Use the shortcode to add an appointment booking form to any page or post. You can also tailor plugin notification emails to consumers, staff, and website administrators.
9. Amelia
The Amelia plugin is an easy but efficient automated booking plugin that operates 24/7 to ensure your customers can make appointments and pay online or offline. This plugin is free, perfect for small businesses.
It also comes with a paid version with a lifetime license. If you want all your staff, utilities, extra services, and optimized payment methods in one place, Amelia Pro is excellent for you.
Amelia has numerous built-in features for fixed lifetime rates. It offers SMS alerts for immediate contact with the clients and staff and Google Calendar Synchronization.
It has a clean, modern look on both backend front-end. Its design can be tailored to fit your website design as an integral component, incorporated with a simple shortcode.
10. EDD Bookings
When selling services and non-tangible products, the best plugin is Easy Digital Download (EDD Bookings) plugin. It is an easy way to start selling your digital goods via a WordPress platform. These products are not things like physical goods, but stuff like eBooks, music tracks, PDFs, and videos. The customer buys the item and receives an email to download the digital file.
EDD Bookings has several extensions to make your digital eCommerce store work differently. EDD supports the entire eCommerce side of your business and is one of WordPress’s most accessible online store plugins.
You can enable the frontend calendar and list views and control all your dashboard bookings. EDD Bookings particularly makes sense for businesses already using Easy Digital Downloads for eCommerce sales.
EDD Bookings pricing is affordable, with a full year of support and product updates. Remember, however, that opting not to renew means you will lose customer service and updates.
You can upgrade to a business plan to unlock more features, such as recurring bookings and employee locations. It also comes with a business level tier for just $300 a year and uses EDD Bookings on unlimited websites.
Conclusion
If you do not allow online booking, you are leaving money on the table. You need online booking options on your website. Now that you are aware of this feature’s value, it is time to find a plugin that matches your needs.
So you need to allow appointments directly from your WordPress site if you want your business to thrive in 2020 and towards the new normal. Appointment booking forms enable customers to book an appointment or make reservations online easily.
An appointment booking system also removes the hassle on the customer’s part to locate your product or service, your contact information, and to get in touch with you. It rolls all those routine activities when booking appointments manually, into one convenient form.
If you value giving your customers meaningful experiences that increase their satisfaction, then integrate an appointment booking system to optimize customer service. It improves your efficiency and gives you a competitive edge among competitors.
Author Byline:
MayleenMeñez worked for seven years in TV and Radio production, and also as a Graphic Artist/Editor. Writing has always been a hobby and pursuit, and she recently added content writing with Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand up her sleeve, while preparing for her next adventure in the nations.