Ditch the booking apps: easy ways to book via WordPress

You want to take online bookings. They're popular, they're convenient, and your clients love them. Whether you're a restaurant or a salon, a B&B or a tattoo parlour, a pub or a physiotherapy clinic, online bookings just make sense.

But there are so many apps. Do you go with Booksy? Treatwell? Meetup? OpenTable? Fresha? Eventbrite? Book in Beautiful? The Fork? SimplyBook? Hotels.com? A combination of these? How much are you losing in fees? Is the app talking to your calendar? Are you getting double bookings?

Skip all the hassle of finding an online app and just use WordPress. You're already using it to build your site, and with the right plugin, you can have online booking set up in a snap, with everything in one place. No hidden fees, no missed appointments and no trapping your customers in a walled garden that lists all the competition ahead of you.

What booking plugins are out there?

Amelia

Amelia gives you everything you need for basic bookings. Set up individual products for your customers to book, add team members and take payments with Square or in person. You can also send email confirmations, and if you sign up and pay for individual messages, SMS appointment notifications too.

The Standard version starts at £99/year, and includes more payment processors, including PayPal and Stripe, calendar integrations such as Google, Apple and Zoom, and more flexibility overall.

Bookly

Another solid all-rounder, Bookly lets you set up specific dates and times, and allows up to 5 bookable services for periods from 5 minutes to 7 days. The free version is good for in-person payments, but doesn't support payment processor integration.

Bookly Pro is around £25 per year, with additional add-ons starting at around £7 per year. It allows you to set up online appointments, unlimited services, Google calendar integration, and a lot more. The additional add-ons are only available for Bookly Pro customers, but unlock features such as Stripe, multiple locations, PayPal and coupons. There's also Bookly Cloud for advanced options, like SMS or WhatsApp messaging, gift cards and Zapier integration. Each of these features cost extra.

Simply Schedule Appointments

A clean, lightweight and very cute appointments system, Simply Schedule Appointments does your customer appointment basics — set available time blocks, collect customer details and send email confirmations. Multilingual support is available via Translating WordPress. The free version doesn't do online payments, meetings, or integrate with other apps, but if you just want something that will do the job, this is a nicely designed plugin.

The Plus Edition (£95/year), adds online meetings, group events and calendar integration. The Professional Edition (around £185/year) includes online payments, SMS notifications and automations to make your bookings even easier.

Events Manager

If you're running events or group bookings rather than one-on-one appointments, Events Manager is ideal. The free version is filled with features, with support for recurring events, Zoom integration, Google Maps and customisable email notifications. Set up a recurring event, tag it within your system and calendar, assign a capacity limit, set it up within Zoom, and your event is ready to go!

The Pro version (starting around £73/year) adds PayPal and Stripe integration, PDF and QR code ticketing, coupons and much more. Pro Plus goes even further, with support for SMS, Telegram and WhatsApp notifications, as well as syncing with platforms like Google Calendar and Facebook Events.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce, aside from being excellent for physical products, also has the ability to create bookings and events. Ideal if you want to link products with services (e.g. classes with materials, consultations with books, appointments with skincare products).

The WooCommerce Bookings extension (£207/year) gives you absolutely everything you'll need to arrange bookings, from individual or group appointments, calendar integration, reminders, and so much more. Other add-ons are available, some free (like WooPayments, which is WooCommerce's primary payment solution, and Accommodation Bookings, which is perfect for hotels, bed and breakfasts, and anywhere else that has long-term bookings), and others paid (e.g. AutomateWoo for £132 and Deposits for £182).

WPForms

WPForms also has several online booking form templates for creating customer appointments. It integrates with Stripe and Square, but the free tier is a bit limited when it comes to integrations and form field options.

WPForms Pro (from around £75/year) unlocks more integrations (Mailchimp, Slack, HubSpot), more fields and extra tools to build more powerful forms.

What else do I need to set up a booking system on my WordPress site?

Once you've chosen the appointment booking plugin that works best for you, you need to set up a few more things on your WordPress site to ensure everything works as well as possible.

Configuring WordPress to send out emails

Often, hosts require you to use SMTP to send out emails, which helps cut down on spam being sent out. Unfortunately, WordPress, by default, uses PHP's mail() function, which is easy to abuse.

But there's a plugin to help you with this.

WP Mail SMTP will make WordPress use SMTP instead of PHP, meaning your emails go to their intended recipient.

If you're with Krystal on one of our cPanel hosting packages, you can set WP Mail SMTP to use your cPanel mail account. Or if you're using one of our Managed WordPress packages, you can use a dedicated email service, such as SendGrid, Brevo, or Zoho.

This helps ensure confirmations, reminders and updates reach your clients reliably without getting lost in spam folders.

You need an email address and a calendar

It might seem obvious, but you really will need an email address to send and receive the booking notifications, and a calendar to arrange not only your online bookings, but any offline bookings you receive as well.

Think about the full experience: what will customers see in the email subject line? Does the calendar reflect your availability accurately? Are you entering phone bookings manually? Is your system user-friendly, for both you and your customers?

Take some time now to think about how you want your booking process to work, and once it's launched, you'll find it smooth sailing from here on out.

Once everything's configured, your WordPress booking system should run quietly in the background, keeping customers happy and your calendar full. Keep your plugins up to date, check your inbox regularly, and let the automation do the rest.