How to Create an Online Booking System using WordPress Plugins? – A Beginner’s Guide
An online booking system is simply a calendar in which the availability can be viewed and an appointment can be booked directly. Many businesses like dentists, doctors, vehicles and real estate, beauty salon, consultants (actually any business that requires appointments and reservations) can take advantage of it. Having a booking system is beneficial for both the customers and the business owner. And obviously, online booking system is much more appealing than a busy tone or the answering machine. Who would not like to have an online appointment calendar that manages “by itself” and is, even more, customer friendly?
Here are some of the advantages of an online booking system:
- Save time and costs
- Increase in Sales
- Usable 24/7, Simple Cancellations
- Direct payment options
- Automatic entry in the appointment calendar
While there are different ways to create an online booking system. As a WordPress user what can be better solutions than WordPress Plugins right??
In this article, we would like to introduce some of the Free and Premium WordPress plugins to create an online booking system. These plugins allow you to extend your manage events, appointments, and bookings, sell tickets for concerts and plays, organize parties with friends, and more. With these plugins, you have the opportunity to easily integrate your personal booking system into your WordPress website. Specifically, your customers can book conveniently online! Therefore makes your website more engaging, attractive and increases your chances of getting more revenue.
So let’s take a few really good online booking WordPress plugins and check out how we can create one for your WordPress website.
Best Online Booking WordPress Plugins
1. Amelia
Amelia is a next-generation WordPress plugin that allows you to create a reservation system for your website. This plugin has been created with the latest technologies by award-winning team in WordPress. We can say it is good as an automated reservation specialist whose work is done 24/7 to ensure that your clients can make an appointment while they sleep.
Key Features:
- Very easy to use dashboard
- Multiple payment gateway payment support
- Multiple worker configuration with customizable hours and days
- Presence of charts and graphs for key performance indicators
3. WP Simple Booking Calendar
The WP Simple Booking Calendar Plugin is perfect for WordPress appointments if you have a real estate rental service, such as: a holiday home, a room, an office or equipment for rental to businesses. This booking calendar shows availability in terms of scheduling and services.
The free version of WP Simple Booking Calendar includes basic features to display the booking system widget on one page and accept multi-language bookings. Unfortunately, it does not include a feature to accept online payments.
Key Features:
- Fully customizable
- Sync your WordPress booking calendar with third-party providers like Airbnb, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, and others. (Premium version only)
- Multi-Language Bookings
3. BirchPress
BirchPress is a multi-functional WordPress plugin for appointment booking and online scheduling. This plugin is particularly suitable for companies such as yoga and fitness studios or photographers who offer an online appointment booking.
With BirchPress, a booking form can be easily embedded via shortcode on a page or in a post. Customers can now easily use your services and see the date of availability, select a valid time for them and book the appointment completely on your website. You can also accept payments with this plugin.
Key Features:
- Sends appointment reminders
- Supports multiple sites, people, and services
- Automatic sync with online calendars like Google Calendar
- Automated and customizable emails are sent to customers when they book, cancel, or postpone an appointment
- Multi-Language Supported
Creating an Online Booking System using Booking Calendar Plugin
For our tutorial process, we’ll be using Booking Calendar plugin. With over 50,000+ active installations this plugin is downloaded over 1,000,000 times since 2009. This plugin is free and also comes with a premium version. So, to continue with the demonstration, we’ll be required to install Booking Calendar plugin onto your website. If you want to learn how to do so, consider reading this blog.
Once the plugin has been installed and activated, go ahead and open its UI page through the Admin dashboard. To do this, simply click on the Booking on your WordPress admin sidebar.
Then create a new page or post and insert the shortcode. This will create a new page for reservation calendar. Once the reservation page is created you can edit the reservation page through settings. You can adjust the settings according to your preference. Afterward, save the changes.
Once the reservation is made you can simply view the booking list and approve the reservations in just a single click. Simple as that!!
Concluding
Thus, by using Booking Calendar plugin you can easily create your online booking system. If you use the plugin go ahead and comment us about your experience. Moreover, if you find confusion in any of the above steps, you can comment about your question, and we will help you to the best of our abilities.
Remember to keep your online booking system user-friendly. The point is to allow users to easily make online booking as soon as possible with the least hassle.
Furthermore, if you want to learn more about making your WordPress website clean and easy to use, you can check out some of our articles such as:
- Essential WordPress Security Plugins
- Best WordPress Plugins – Essential Plugins for Your First WordPress Site
- How to Reduce WordPress Page Load Time?
