Whether you own a dental clinic or run a food business, you want your customers to have the best experience with your services. And what better way than using tools to simplify chief tasks? One such job is making reservations or bookings. Customers want their bookings to be free of calling and noting down time and date. Hence, you can add WordPress plugins for booking to your site.
Booking plugins can aid in your business’s growth. By finding the right tool, you can get hold of new customers and seamlessly manage every appointment. Moreover, your customers will enter the details independently, including the date and time. This article discusses booking plugin benefits, how to find the right option, some popular plugins, and a guide on installing and using them to their full potential.
The Benefits of Using WordPress Booking Plugins
The online platform offers multiple opportunities for businesses to grow. Online booking is an excellent solution for companies that deal with reservations or bookings. To learn more about how these booking plugins can aid your business, here are all their benefits.
Enhance Working Efficiency
Making reservations via email or phone can be time-consuming and costly. With a plugin, you do not have to worry about attending calls or sending emails to make appointments. Moreover, since online booking is available round the clock, customers can make bookings even after business hours. As a result, you are improving your operational efficiency.
Improve Customer Experience
Traditionally, customers had to dial a number to make an appointment. Sometimes due to busy lines, they had to stay on hold. However, they no longer need to do this with the option of online booking. You can add one of the free WordPress booking plugins to your website to allow your clients to make their appointment by choosing an appropriate day and time.
Reduce Workload
Noting bookings manually can take up a lot of your staff’s time. Using booking plugins, your customers will do most of the work by filling in relevant details and choosing a suitable time on a particular day.
Gain Competitive Edge
Busy phone lines can block customers from contacting you to make an appointment. As a result, they may turn to your competitors. This is terrible news for businesses and can obstruct their growth and authority. Hence, by using a booking plugin, you can impress your customers and improve their booking experience.
Lower Chances of Human Error
Individuals can cause slip-ups when the phone call is unclear because of network problems. Or when the writing is indecipherable. Sometimes, bookings do not make it into the system. These errors can be detrimental to your business. Hence, using booking plugins comes in handy.
Multipurpose
Multiple businesses can benefit from these plugins, including restaurants, dentists, hotels, events, professional or personal services, consultants, and rentals. Tutors, coaching, accommodations, and ticket bookings can also use these tools. However, if you want to build an entire booking system, booking WordPress themes can be beneficial for you.
Top WordPress Booking Plugins
The huge WordPress plugins library is a maze in which you can easily get lost. With everyone calling their tool the best solution you will ever need, choosing the best plugin for your business is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So, to deal with this worry, we bring you a list of the top ten plugins, their features, and more.
1. Bookly
With a 4.5-star rating and over 60,000 active installations, Bookly is feature-rich and one of the popularly knownfree WordPress booking plugins. It aims to help online businesses to automate their reservation system by providing scheduling and booking functionality.
Multiple businesses, including restaurants, salons, dental clinics, transportation, and other service providers, can utilize this plugin to grow their sales.
Key Features:
- Stunning booking Forms
- WooCommerce and Google Calendar integration
- User-friendly forms for quick online appointments
- Easy to manage customer list
- All-inclusive intuitive admin area
Price: Bookly is a free option, but if you search for more features, the Pro version requires a one-time payment of USD 89 with updates and support for 6 months. For 12 months of support, you can pay an additional fee of USD 31.50.
2. Booknetic
Another feature-packed plugin you can add to your WordPress site for scheduling appointments is Booknetic. With the help of one dashboard, you can manage all your services, customers, staff, and locations. Businesses can use this tool to conduct offline or online meetings or appointments for individuals or groups.
It has a 5-star rating from its customers. You can customize its design and functions based on your requirements. It will automate your bookings with the help of webhook notifications, modules for workflow, and integration with payment options.
Key Features:
- Zoom and Google Calendar integrations
- Sync calendar to prevent double bookings
- Place booking widget anywhere
- Multi-booking functionality for one session
- Multiple payment options include PayPal, Mollie, Square, Stripe, and more.
Price: One-time fee of USD 79 to get a lifetime license and support for 6 months.
3. Booking Calendar
A booking plugin that you cannot skip is Booking Calendar. It is the first plugin for booking and has over 60,000 active installations. This tool is intuitive and showcases an availability calendar. You can receive multiple bookings and easily manage them using the simple and up-to-date admin panel.
Key Features:
- Sync with Google Calendar, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, etc.
- User-friendly and advanced interface
- Completely responsive for mobile devices
- Multi-lingual support
- Prearranged calendar themes
Price: Apart from being a free option, it offers five premium plans. These start from USD 47.40 up to USD 539.50.
4. Amelia
Amelia features a minimalistic and smooth-running admin panel. It is the easiest to work with out of the topfree booking plugins for WordPress website. Its admin panel will give detailed analytics showcasing appointments, conversions, retention rate, revenue, and customer acquisition. Over 50,000 businesses employ this booking plugin with a 4.5-star rating.
Key Features
- PayPal, WooCommerce, and Stripe for online payment
- Search options to look for services depending on the desirable date.
- Real-time appointment reminders via SMS
- Several Business locations
- Time limit functionality to accept appointments
Price: The premium version can cost you from USD 59 to USD 249 annually. The higher version allows usage for numerous websites.
5. Appointment Hour Booking
If you offer personal training, classes, medical services, etc., you can use Appointment Hour Booking. This plugin has a 5-star rating and allows you to create forms for booking appointments with a starting time and a definite duration. You can add multiple services to different calendars with different rates and durations. With over 30,000 active installations, this plugin is handy.
Key Features:
- You can notify working days, holidays, special dates, etc.
- Easily configure schedules and calendar information
- Automatically manage available times to prevent double booking
- Define open hours for all dates
- Supports various date formats
Price: You can use free options or employ the commercial version from USD 5.99 monthly.
6. BookingPress
You can use one of the top premium WordPress themes for booking or the BookingPress plugin. It is an all-in-one solution and enables businesses to create a full-fledged booking system effortlessly. It is for health and wellness, medical clinics, salons, education, etc., and has a 4.5 rating with over 5,000 active installations.
Key Features:
- Excellent UX and UI
- Over 17 in-built online payment options
- Translation ready
- Support for Gutenberg and Elementor
- Engaging booking wizard
Price: You can purchase its premium version for USD 99.
7. eaSYNC
With a 4.5 customer rating, eaSYNC offers numerous modules for restaurants, hotels, car rentals, etc. It requires a merchant account for PayPal to receive a client ID. eaSYNC has more than 300 active installations.
Key Features:
- Elegant user interface
- Completely mobile-friendly forms
- Booking confirmation email
- Supports PayPal
- Easy Installation
Price: It is a free WordPress plugin for booking.
8. Booking Activities
If you provide services for tourism, cultural activities, exhibitions, etc., then Booking Activities is a great plugin. It’s user-friendly and allows drag-and-drop functionality. With over 5,000 businesses employing it, it has 5-star ratings.
Key Features:
- Supports WYSIWYG editor with customizable forms
- Offers one-click appointment booking
- Completely responsive
- WooCommerce for payments
- Admin and clients will receive automatic emails
Price: You can start using the free plugins for bookingoption for booking your appointments. Once your business grows, you can shift from the free to the premium version starting from USD 142.52.
9. WooCommerce Easy Booking
4.5 star rated WooCommerce Easy Booking is one of the most robust and user-friendly WordPress free Booking pluginsfor WooCommerce stores. It is flexible and offers day or night modes, time limits, durations, price calculations, etc. This helpful tool allows you to manage the bookings from the WordPress dashboard. Additionally, it has over 6,000 active installations.
Key Features:
- Compatibility for WooCommerce Product Add-Ons
- Two date selection and price calculation
- Mobile-friendly
- Translation ready
- Filter bookings based on date, product, and status
Price: You can use its free version. However, it also offers an annual plan for its Pro version is available at USD 87.28.
10. Easy Appointments
With Easy Appointments plugin, you can join over 20,000 businesses to create a booking system for your website. This 4.5-star rated plugin is easy to use and streamlines the process of managing your bookings for multiple services and locations.
Key Features:
- Numerous locations, workers, and services.
- Integration with PayPal, Google Calendar, WooCommerce, and PayPal
- Adaptable timetable
- Emails notifications
- Translation support
Price: It is available free of charge.
How to Choose the Right WordPress Booking Plugin
With multiple features, all these plugins seem like fantastic options. However, you must only choose what best suits you. Therefore, here is a range of factors to consider when selecting a booking plugin:
Easy to use dashboard: best tools are simple to understand and use, especially for beginners. Therefore, look for an intuitive and navigable plugin dashboard.
Website Compatibility: Check if it works well with your website. Specific plugins can lead to website errors. Therefore, check before you choose one.
Customization Possibilities: Look for plugins with multiple tools to alter the customer’s booking experience and modify the system to your liking.
Customer Support: For assistance, look for customer service with the plugin. Some also prefer changelogs to show ongoing developments.
Step-by-Step Guide to Installing and Using a WordPress Booking Plugin
Once you have the right booking plugin, it is time to install it on your WordPress site. Follow the given steps to do so
- Visit the WordPress dashboard and select Plugins > Add New
- Enter your plugin’s name in the search box and Install > Activate
- Go to navigation to find your plugin and go its Settings
- Now, you can start configuring important details
- You can add company details
- Add working hours and off days If available, you can add break times for lunch, etc.
- Next, you can add your Service type.
- Add your employees to different services along with their services, working hours, etc.
- Finally, you can add a booking form to your site.
Tips for Maximizing the Benefits of a WordPress Booking Plugin
Booking plugins offer you immense functionality. However, ensuring you utilize it to its full potential is also essential. Therefore, to guarantee it is successful and gain the most benefits, here are a few tips to follow:
Encourage Active Listening
To ensure effective communication, active listening is essential to ensure the staff and customers have a good connection. Therefore, to promote this, listen to your customer with complete focus and ask them detailed questions. Next, finish your conversation with a summary to ensure you understand what they want.
Convey Your Company’s Expertise
Building your online presence is essential to ensure your customers trust your expertise. You can indulge in SEO and engage on social platforms. You can also integrate your booking plugin with your social account. Also, have complete knowledge of your booking system’s features.
Increase Customer Experience
First and foremost, employ positive language to ensure your customers have the best experience with making bookings through your business site. Ensure your booking processes are speedy. Furthermore, decrease admin time to improve response time for customer services. You can inform your customers about their appointment’s progress.
Conclusion
Any business offering services that require customers to make an appointment or booking can streamline such processes by investing in a top booking plugin. By employing such tools, you can enjoy multiple benefits. Besides increasing your working efficiency, it helps boost your customer experience.
Additionally, you can decrease the workload on your staff members and encourage them to work on other tasks. It will help prevent manual errors. It also ensures you are ahead of your competitors and not losing your potential customers. In this article, we have given a list of popularly known booking plugins along with their features and pricing. You can choose and install the most suitable option. These plugins are feature rich and help streamline the booking process for your customers and staff.
