How to Easily Add a Booking Form in WordPress (2024)

Last Updated on March 27, 2024 by 1 Comment

Editorial Note: We may earn a commission when you visit links on our website.
How to Easily Add a Booking Form in WordPress (2024)
Blog / WordPress / How to Easily Add a Booking Form in WordPress (2024)
Play Button

Online booking is a fantastic feature to add to your website, mainly if you sell services. Booking forms provide an effortless process for your customers. They can see your availability, select their services and even pay for them beforehand. Having a WordPress booking form on your website helps your business maintain a seamless process for your customers while ensuring that your revenues are supported, as your customer will be able to return and book within your business effortlessly.

What is a WordPress Booking Form?

A WordPress booking form is a form that allows users to book or schedule appointments with you or your business directly from your WordPress website. Simple booking forms typically collect a user’s name, service, and the date and time they want their service. There are multiple applications for booking forms. They can be used to schedule deliveries or to book a service like a nail or hair appointment. They can also be used to reserve physical items like reserving a hotel room or the rental of items. Booking forms can come with various features such as adding addons to their service, text notifications, and self-service capabilities allowing customers to adjust their appointment. Some event calendar plugins will have booking forms as a built-in feature.

Benefits of Using a Booking Form in WordPress

As a busy service provider, having a booking form can make your business’ internal process run smoother. Here are some benefits of using an online booking form in your business:

  • Increased Sales – With booking forms, you can collect customer deposits and payments ahead of time. This allows you to secure revenue for your business. Additionally, you can charge late or cancellation fees through a booking form to ensure your time is respected. Booking forms are also a place where you can upsell your other products and services when your customers go to book their next appointment.
  • No More Playing Phone Tag – With an online booking form, you can enter your availability, and your customers can choose a time that works for them from your calendar. Your customers can now automatically and in real-time know when they can book their sessions with you without having to call or send a thread of emails.
  • Track and Organize Client Information – Booking forms are a great way to build a client relationship database. Through a booking form, you can track how much your customers spend, the services they get, and more data you can use to market to your customers and nurture your relationships with them.
  • Limit No-Shows and Cancellations – Notifications via text and email are a common feature that many booking forms now have. Schedule and send reminders to your customers, ensuring that they arrive at their appointment on time.

In short, adding a booking form to your WordPress site can generate more bookings more efficiently with the power of automation. Now let’s explore how easy it is to add one to your site.

How to Add a Booking Form to Your WordPress Site (Step-by-Step)

For this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to do this using the trusted, popular booking form plugin Amelia. Amelia offers a robust feature set that makes free and premium versions an excellent choice to add a WordPress booking form to your website. Let’s walk through adding this plugin to your website and adding a booking form to your site.

Subscribe To Our Youtube Channel

Install Amelia

From your WordPress website, hover over the Plugins menu item. Next, click Add New and use the search form and enter Amelia. The first option will be the Amelia booking form plugin. Click Install Now to add the plugin to your WordPress website.

Install Amelia

Once your plugin is installed, click the blue Activate button.

Activate Amelia

After Amelia is activated and installed, a new menu item will appear in your WordPress dashboard.

Amelia menu options

Configuring Amelia

Amelia is a full-featured yet easy-to-use booking form plugin. It provides many features to help you create the perfect booking form for your business.

Amelia's settings

While all these features may look complicated, to create your first booking form with Amelia, you’ll only need to create the following:

  • A service
  • An employee service

Once these two items are created, you can do more complex things with your booking form, like adding packages, setting up payments, and more. To begin, let’s create our first service.

Creating A Service

Amelia requires one service and one provider to generate a booking form at its most basic level. To begin, click on the Amelia menu option. Next, click the Services link. Services are organized in categories, and in the premium version of Amelia, you can add multiple services to create packages. Click on the blue Add Category button to create our first category.

Create your first service category

In the category name field, assign your category a name. Then, click the small blue checkmark to save your category. You can create more categories here now if you want to add more.

Name your first category

With our first category created, we can now create our first service. To do this, click the blue Add Service button in the top right corner.

Add your first service in Amelia

The Add Service flyout will open. The first tab, Details, is where you’ll upload a photo of your service and its name, category, and description.

Describe your service

Next, click on the Duration & Pricing tab. Here, you’ll enter the length of time and price for your service.

Set your service duration and price

If you want to add photos to your service, click the Gallery tab. Then, click on the Add Image link. This will open up the default WordPress Media Library for you to upload and add photos to your service. Once you’ve added your images, click the blue Save button at the bottom of the flyout.

Add images to your service's photo gallery

It will appear in your Services dashboard once you’ve added your necessary service details.

View your completed service

After creating your service, you’ll need to create and assign a provider to the service to make your booking form.

Creating An Employee

To create an employee in Amelia, from the Amelia menu, select Settings. Then, under the Provider Details title, select the link View Provider Details Settings.

Adding your first employee in Amelia

This will open up the Provider Details flyout menu. Enter your details, such as name, phone number, and email address. You can add a short bio in the description box if you’d like.

Enter your provider settings

Next, click on the Assigned Services tab. You’ll see a list of your services within their corresponding categories. Select the services that you’d like to assign to this provider.

Select and assign services to your provider

After assigning your services to your provider, click the Work Hours tab. This is where you’ll set the availability for each service and this provider. Using the pencil icon, assign time slots for each day of the week. You can also use the Apply to All Days link to assign the same schedule to each day. Once you have set up your hours of operation, click the blue Save button.

Set work hours

With our first service assigned to our first provider, we can now add a booking form for our customers to book services. But first, let’s customize the form and brand it to our company’s style guide.

Styling Your Booking Form

Amelia has an easy-to-use customization process from which you can change the style and colors of your booking form. To access it, from the Amelia menu, select Customize. Notice that a few options match the different booking form layouts natively with Amelia. We’ll be using the Step-by-Step Booking form layout. So, click the blue Continue button underneath the Step-by-Step Booking Form 2.0 card.

Customize your booking form

This is what the customization screen looks like:

Amelia Customizer

  • Global Settings: Adjust your fonts and colors
  • Sidebar: Design your sidebar
  • Service Selection: Determine how your services will be displayed
  • Date & Time Selection: Setup your calendar view and how customers can choose their date and time
  • Customer Information: Order of fields, labels, and more for your customer’s information
  • Payment Summary: How your payment fields will be displayed
  • Congratulations: Customize your booking confirmation page

Let’s look at some of the settings available under each tab.

Global Settings

The Global Settings tab allows you to assign your fonts and colors.

Global Options for Amelia

You can even upload a custom font.

Global Font Options for Amelia

Sidebar

The Sidebar tab allows you to customize the options and labels within the sidebar of the wizard.

Sidebar Options for Amelia

You can also select the fields you want to show within your company information.

Sidebar Options for Amelia

Service Selection

For Service Selection, you can edit the fields’ labels and the Continue button’s style.

Service Options for Amelia

Date & Time Selection

Assign different label names or change the visibility of specific fields with the Date & Time selection tab.

Date, Time and Calendar Customization for Amelia

Customer Information

Determine your customer information form’s order or toggle the available active fields.

Customize the Customer Information Form for Amelia

Payment Summary

Change the title and labels for your payment form, or style the buttons differently.

Payment table selections for Amelia

Congratulations

Lastly, the Congratulations page acts as an appointment confirmation page for your customers

Congratulations page settings for Amelia

Adding Your WordPress Booking Form to Your Website

To add your booking form to your website, you’ll need to select a page for it to appear on. Hover over the Pages menu item, then click Add New to create a new page for your booking form.

Add a new page to your WordPress website

Give your new page a Title, then click the black plus icon. In the search box, enter Amelia to preview the blocks that come with Amelia. Select the Amelia – Step-by-Step Booking block.

Add Amelia Wizard Block

With the block added to your new booking page, click the blue Publish button at the top of your screen.

Publish your new booking page

Testing Your New Booking Form

Once you’ve added the Amelia block to your page, this is what the step-by-step wizard looks like on the front end for your customers. First, they have the option to select their services.

Testing your booking form

Then, they can select the date they want to book their appointment.

Testing your booking form - choose your date

Next, the available timeslots are shown. Notice that these dates and times coincide with the availability of the provider.

Testing your booking form - pick your time

After selecting a date and time, your customer can enter their personal information.

Testing your booking form - enter in your contact info

Finally, once everything is confirmed, they can see a confirmation of their appointment listing their service, the provider, and their information for notifications. They can also add their appointment to their calendar of choice.

Testing your booking form - final appointment confirmation

Adding Your Form to Your Website with Divi

If you’re using the page builder Divi, you can benefit by using the native Amelia modules to style and add your booking form to your page. Start activating the Divi Builder by clicking the purple Use the Divi Builder button at the top of the Block Editor.

Activate Divi Builder

Next, click the Edit With the Divi Builder purple button.

Edit with Divi Builder

Once the builder is activated, select the blue Start Builder button under the Use Existing Content card.

Use existing content in Divi Builder

With the builder activated, you can now click the gray plus icon to open the module library. Notice that there are several Amelia modules available for you to choose from. Choose the AM – Step Booking module to add it to your row.

Select your Amelia module

Just like other Divi modules, you have access to the Design tab and the Content and Advanced tab to use the powerful features of Divi on your new WordPress booking form.

Customizing the Amelia module

Though Amelia is a solid choice to add a booking form to your WordPress website, other options on the market may be better geared to your business use case.

Other Booking Form Options for WordPress

While Amelia is a great booking form plugin for WordPress, there are many more on the scene that might pique your interest. Additionally, there are some booking form platforms that you may want to consider outside of the WordPress space, depending on your business requirements:

  • Simply Schedule Appointments: A simple and powerful booking form plugin boasting an interactive setup wizard, customizable notification emails, and integration with Google Calendar and Mailchimp.
  • Appointment Hour Booking: With double booking prevention, an automatic price calculator, and a straightforward user interface, this plugin is excellent for providers whose business revolves around classes, workshops, and events.
  • Hotel Booking Plugin by Motopress: Geared towards serving the hospitality industry, this plugin has all the bells and whistles you’ll need to make your customers excited and stress-free to book their Airbnb, cabin, or retreat through your website.
  • WPForms: For those looking to build complex booking forms, WPForms is one of the best contact form plugins with plenty of features. Complete with more than 30 field types and a library of templates, building the perfect booking form is possible with this plugin.
  • The Events Calendar: This popular events calendar WordPress plugin can be used to create, manage and display events. Its Event Tickets addon allows you to sell tickets, manage attendees, and more. It also integrates with other booking form plugins.
  • Calendly: A relative newcomer to online booking, this tool is popular among business coaches and professionals for its feature-rich free offering and integrations. It integrates well with WordPress and has a beautiful and intuitive user interface.
  • Acuity Scheduling: With tight integration with Squarespace, Acuity is an online booking form platform with minimal aesthetics and compelling features.

In Conclusion

As a service provider, a booking form lets customers put themselves on your calendar without hassle. They can select their services, make a deposit and get reminders, which can be tedious to do through email. Whether you need video integration or the ability to include add-ons to your service list, a booking form plugin is available. Amelia is a great booking plugin with many features that can help you get started even in its free offering. A booking form should be a part of your business process as it can help you increase revenue, build brand loyalty and deepen customer relationships. WordPress has a great variety of booking form plugins that you can use to bring this powerful tool to your website today.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Before we wrap up, let’s answer some of your most common questions about WordPress booking forms. Did we miss one? Leave a question below, and we will respond!

What is a booking form in WordPress?
A booking form in WordPress is a type of online form businesses use to collect information from customers who want to book a service or event. These forms typically include fields for the customer's name, contact information, date and time of the booking, and any other details related to the service or event being booked. They can be customized and easily integrated into a WordPress website using plugins.
How do I add a booking form to WordPress?
To add a booking form to WordPress, you can use a plugin such as Amelia or Simply Schedule Appointments. Simply install and activate the plugin, create a new form, add the necessary fields (such as name, email, date, time, etc.), and customize the form to your liking. Then, add the form to a page or post on your WordPress site using a shortcode or block.
Can a WordPress website be used to accept bookings?
Yes, a WordPress website can accept bookings by integrating booking plugins such as Amelia, Simply Schedule Appointments, or Appointment Hour Booking. These plugins offer features like appointment scheduling, online payments, and availability calendars. They can be easily installed and configured on a WordPress site, enabling businesses to accept bookings and manage them efficiently.
How can I add a booking calendar to my WordPress website?
You can add a booking calendar to your WordPress website using a plugin such as Amelia or Events Calendar (and integrating it with Simply Schedule Appointments). Install and activate the plugin, create a new calendar, and add it to your website using a shortcode or widget. You can customize the calendar's settings and availability, and visitors can then book appointments or reservations directly from your website.
Why should I use WordPress to create my booking website?
WordPress is a powerful and flexible platform that offers a wide range of tools and features specifically designed for creating booking websites. Its user-friendly interface, extensive plugin library, and customizable themes allow you to create a professional and highly functional website in no time. Plus, it's free and open-source, making it a cost-effective option for businesses of all sizes.
Can I add a booking form without a plugin on WordPress?
Adding a booking form without plugins is possible by creating a custom form using HTML and CSS or embedding a third-party service. However, using a plugin like Amelia is still a better option as it doesn't require any technical skills and can give you great control over the branding of your booking forms.
What are the advantages of having a booking form on my WordPress website?
A booking form on your WordPress website allows customers to book and schedule appointments or services online easily. This saves time and resources on both ends, as well as improves convenience for customers. It also provides a seamless and professional user experience, ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and potentially leading to more business.
What are the best tips for creating a WordPress booking form?
To create a successful WordPress booking form, keep it simple and user-friendly. Use clear, concise language, include all necessary fields, and make sure it is mobile-responsive. Use a reliable booking plugin like Amelia and test the form thoroughly before launching. Offer clear instructions and support options for customers with questions or issues. Finally, regularly review and update the form to ensure it remains effective and efficient.
How can I increase bookings on my WordPress website?
You can increase bookings on your WordPress website by optimizing your site's performance and user experience, creating compelling content and offers, promoting your site through social media and email marketing, and leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to improve your site's visibility in search engine results.
What are the factors to consider when choosing a WordPress booking system?
When choosing a WordPress booking system, factors to consider include ease of use, customization options, integration with payment gateways, availability of customer support, and compatibility with your website theme and plugins. It is also essential to consider the pricing plans and any additional features or add-ons offered by the booking system.

Featured Image via Irina Strelnikova / shutterstock.com

Top Picks
Product Image

Get Started With Amelia!

Explore plans, pricing and features. Click here to get started. 👇

Visit Amelia

Get Started With Amelia!

Explore plans, pricing and features here. 👇

Explore Amelia
Premade Layouts

Check Out These Related Posts

Step-by-Step Guide For Setting Up Divi Dash

Step-by-Step Guide For Setting Up Divi Dash

Posted on September 25, 2024 in Divi Resources

Managing multiple WordPress sites can be overwhelming, but tools like Divi Dash is can make it easier than it seems. Included with your Divi membership, this powerhouse tool lets you oversee all your sites from one sleek dashboard. This step-by-step guide will show you what Divi Dash is, how to set...

View Full Post
How to Create a Stunning Restaurant Website in Under an Hour

How to Create a Stunning Restaurant Website in Under an Hour

Posted on September 21, 2024 in Marketing

Every chef knows their unique touch makes their dishes memorable. However, only experienced restaurant owners understand how crucial a website is for showcasing their culinary identity and attracting new customers. Are you preserving your uniqueness online? If not, don’t worry! This guide will...

View Full Post

1 Comment

  1. Hello,
    Is it possible to use Amelia on a Jobard?
    (Several different companies with several HR users per company)
    SincerelyHello,
    Is it possible to use Amelia on a Jobard?
    (Several different companies with several HR users per company)
    Sincerely

Leave A Reply

Comments are reviewed and must adhere to our comments policy.

Get Started With Divi