How to Let Clients Book Appointments Through WordPress (via Appointment Calendar)

Want to let your visitors book appointments through WordPress? Sure, you could do it manually through your contact form, but why not set up an automated system to save yourself some time? With an appointment booking calendar, visitors can easily check availability and schedule an appointment all by themselves.In this post, Ill give you a detailed step-by-step guide how to allow your website visitors to book an appointment through WordPress using a free plugin called Easy Appointments.Our tool for the job: Easy AppointmentsWhile there are several different plugins that can help you let your visitors book appointments through WordPress, I chose Easy Appointments for this tutorial because its, first off, free.Who doesnt like free?But beyond its price tag, I also like Easy Appointments because its flexible in terms of the types of bookings that it can accept. You can use it for different things like:Scheduling personal appointmentsHandling appointments across multiple locations.Allowing people to book appointments for different service providers.And youll be able to easily see all of your scheduled appointments directly inside your WordPress dashboard.And best of all, its regularly updated and has good reviews.How to let people book appointments through WordPressOkay, now Ill show you everything you need to do to get it set up and allow your visitors or clients to book appointments through WordPress.Step 1: Install and activate Easy AppointmentsGet started by installing and activating Easy Appointments. Its free and listed at WordPress.org, so you can install it directly from your WordPress dashboard (heres how in case you need help). Easy Appointments Author(s): Nikola LoncarCurrent Version: 2.6.0Last Updated: October 1, 2019easy-appointments.2.6.0.zip 90%Ratings 341,801Downloads WP 3.7+Requires Make sure you install the right plugin because there are a few different plugins with similar names:Step 2: Add your locationsOnce you activate Easy Appointments, you should see a new Easy Appointments tab in your dashboard sidebar.Head there and go to the Settings link. The first thing to set up is your locations. To add one, click on + Add New Location:Just enter a Name, Address, and Location. You dont need to include all of the fields so if youre booking appointments for, say, digital meetings, you dont need to add a business address or location.You can add as many locations as needed. So if you want to accept bookings at different physical locations, add each location separately.Step 3: Choose what services people can bookOn the Services tab, you can click + Add New Service to spell out which different services people can book as well as how long those services last for.Again, you dont need to enter all the fields, so you can leave Price blank if you dont want to specify a price. For example, to set up a service for a free one-hour consult, you would enter something like this (notice the blank price field):Step 4: Choose how many workers you haveNext up, head to Workers and enter the name and contact information for each worker you want to allow visitors to book.If youre the only one accepting appointments, all you need to do is add an entry for yourself. Otherwise, you can include each available worker in a separate entry:Step 5: Set your connectionsThe Connections tab is where you actually link up your locations, services, and workers. For example, you can specify that:Worker A offers Service B at Location C on X days of the week.If youre the only one accepting appointments, its pretty trivial to set up. If you have multiple workers / locations / services, youll need to be careful when configuring everything, though.To help you grasp how everything connects, heres an example of a connection where I, Colin Newcomer, offer one-hour consults at a digital location from 9 am to 5 pm on Monday to Friday:Step 6: Configure emails and formsLast configuration step! On the Customize tab, you can configure the emails and for ms used for your booking system.You can specify emails for Pending, Reservation Info, Canceled,Confirmed and Admin. Set each email text in its corresponding tab. And make sure to utilize the tags at the top of the email editor box. They allow you to insert dynamic content into your emails.For example, #worker_name# will be automatically replaced by the actual name of the worker:Also, make sure to configure the emails subjects and from emails at the bottom of the email editor box.A bit further down the page, you can add Custom form fields if needed. You can also delete fields and choose whether or not each field is required:And finally, at the end of the Customize tab, you can choose a different currency for your appointment prices or, if you dont want to set prices, completely turn off the price feature:Step 7: Display your appointment booking form on the front-endOkay, now your appointment booking form is totally configured. But you still need to add it your site so people can actu ally use it!To do that, you can use a simple shortcode in any post or page where you want your booking form to appear.Ill give you two shortcodes:For a basic one-column form, just use: [ea_bootstrap]To create a two-column form, which I think looks much better, use: [ea_bootstrap width="800px" scroll_off="true" layout_cols="2"]For example, to add a two-column form on a page called Book an Appointment, youd create a new page with that name and add the shortcode to the WordPress Editor:Then, once you publish the page, you should see a booking form like this:Note how the weekends are greyed out (unavailable) and your visitor gets a nice Booking overview to review the information before submitting their booking.How can you tell when someone books an appointment?Whenever you get a new appointment, three things will happen. Ill start with the two that dont require any action on your part:Youll get a notification email.The appointment will be added to the specified workers time table, which is accessible by going to Reports → Time table. This gives a broad overview of availability:The third thing is something you will need to take action on. In the Appointments option, youll see all your bookings for the specified time period.By default, all new bookings are only saved as Pending. To make them permanent, you need to click on the appointment, click Edit, and change its status to Confirmed. The person who booked the appointment will then get an email telling them their appointment is confirmed:And thats all you need to do! Now, your visitors can easily book appointments through WordPress without any back-and-forth about timeslots and availability.