Providing quality content is a great way to grow your website’s rankings, but that’s not the only thing you need. You also have to have a system in place for getting visitors on your site and turning them into leads or customers.
When you have an offline business, it’s important to convey your product through marketing material, including making appointments and connecting with potential clients. Your website should provide a way for customers to book the services or sales team. Therefore, your site visitors will increase their chances of booking the service or reaching out to the sales team by providing this easy way.
The key to optimized appointment scheduling is streamlining both the front and back end of your business. The right booking system will make it easier for you to generate qualified leads, customer loyalty, and revenue. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use WordPress plugin for automated appointments booking, there are a number of options available to you.
In this article, we’ll go over 7 of the best WordPress plugins for creating the ideal booking system for your business. Before we do that, let’s go over some of the key features you should be looking for when evaluating different appointment plugins for your business.
Features Required For An Appointment WordPress Plugin
To determine if an appointment plugin meets good criteria, a few things should be taken into account. These include:
- A customizable appointment booking system where you record your availability or the availability of your staff in order to make more time for what’s important to you.
- As a consultant, you have a wide range of clients to serve. You can set your availability to fit their needs or offer them the convenience of booking online when they need services with no hassles.
- Integrations with calendar tools
- Automatic meeting notifications.
- Lead generation tools help you capture client information and create a database for future communication. These tools also enable you to directly contact leads with pre-designed templates instead of having to manually craft messages.
- Because we love helping our friends and clients succeed, we develop integrations with a wide variety of payment providers. We’ve developed strategic partnerships with all major banks to add best-in-class payment plugins for Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net.
- Professional and friendly customer service
- Time zones and a time format that you can adjust to fit your life.
- Any WordPress post or page is eligible for this feature.
Let’s take a look at the collection of WordPress plugins below, and discuss their features and functionality in-depth.
1. Booking Calendar
With Booking Calendar, your audience can browse the calendar’s available time slots and make reservations. They can also search for availability on specific dates and time. Once activated, you create an integration with a popular payment gateway to accept online bookings.
At Booking Calendar, it’s easy and convenient to manage your office appointments. By allowing you to easily approve or decline them and set up email notifications for newer ones, plus filtering and sorting and more, our system has been around for 9 years now.
2. Hotel Booking Lite
WordPress has made it easy for businesses of all sizes to connect with customers online. All you need is a web presence and some familiarity with WordPress. The free WordPress plugin Hotel Booking Lite can help take your business to the next level by helping you list details on your accommodations and services, accept online reservations, and more.
With one click, you can create a dedicated search form that has custom fields for location, accommodation types, price range, and number of guests. You’ll also see your highest-performing keywords in real time, which is helpful for optimizing your marketing efforts.
3. PinPoint Booking System
From time to time, it can be hard to maintain the same pricing for all your appointments. PinPoint is flexible enough to switch between different currencies, users, and languages. It can also be embedded in any widget area of your site and edited via CSS editor.
Customize your overall events experience with WooCommerce. Set up specific calendars, update your availability, and include locations in your event listings. Integrating with PayPal is easy because of the add-on integration.
4. Calendarize it!
With this plugin, you can easily create a professional website with appointment booking right out of the box. You’ll be able to use our built-in Gutenberg editor or any other third-party theme, like WPBakery Page Builder (formerly known as Visual Composer), to customize your calendar the way that’s best for your site and business.
Once an appointment has been created, Calendarize it! will automatically create client profiles and allow them to leave reviews. You can also include social sharing buttons, share your maps with events and more in your Calendarize.
With its built-in functionality, plugins like the Ultimate Calendar come with many cool add-ons! For example, CSS Editor is a free add-on that can help you tweak your calendar’s font and colors.
5. WPForms
WPForms is one of the best WordPress form builder plugins to use. With these drag-and-drop features, you can easily create and customize booking forms. It also has an anti-spam checkbox that allows you to protect your contact form from spam. For added security, you can choose from three types of confirmation for your clients’ forms.
There are many places you can add your appointment booking form so that nearly any page on your site can be booked while keeping your users engaged.
6. WooCommerce Bookings
If you are selling products online and focusing on WordPress as your platform, WooCommerce is the best eCommerce plugin for you. It’s free, available on the core version and provides tons of extensions to help improve your experience. One extension like Bookings is for taking reservations for appointments.
Most companies already use the WooCommerce plugin, but if you’re not one of them and decide to try it out, WooCommerce Bookings is a fantastic choice.
7. Bookly
There are two types of Bookly plugins: free and premium. Free version is a basic booking tool with no support for online payments, while premium is what you’ll need if you offer paid reservations. The free plugin has a monthly limit on staff users and the biggest difference between the versions is your choice to upgrade.
Bookly’s plugin has the slickest design of any on this list. It does everything you’d expect from a modern plugin, and is customizable in so many ways. Beginners will feel right at home with its capabilities, while more advanced users will have fun customizing it to their own tastes.
