It can be quite tedious and expensive to make and schedule your appointments with your clients, whether over the phone or by email. It is just as good to try to set up an appointment booking system on your WordPress site. If you receive your customers online or at your premises by appointment, you may have already noticed. In this tutorial, I will show you how to easily manage your appointments in your WordPress site.

To manage your appointments, you could for example add a Google calendar to your WordPress site. But the solution that I propose to you in this tutorial allows you to give your visitors or customers the possibility of reserving the time slot of their choice, of course, according to your availability, from - and with the comfort of - your WordPress site. This is the plugin pay.

Appointments integrates very well with Google Calendar. You can make an appointment in Google Calendar and pass it on to WordPress, and vice versa.

It comes in a PRO version and a free version that comes with an impressive list of features.

If you manage teams for different departments, you can create and customize profiles for each of your team members and Appointments will automatically display their availability periods. This will allow your customers to make an appointment directly with the available team members assigned to each department.

 Visit his page on wordpress.org and realize the many options available to you. If you want more, the PRO version will bring more.

Start with Appointments

Before installing a plugin or any other WordPress extension, it is always a good idea to Make a backup of your site. Once finished, Install and activate the plugin Appointments.

Then you have to configure it and then create the pages of Reservations, confirmation, cancellation of appointments.

Configuring the Appointments plugin

To access it, visit Appointments> Settings, you will see an impressive number of options arranged in tabs. Don't be alarmed, they are not very intuitive. Also, you should have noticed tooltips here and there that guide you and familiarize you with the interface. You also have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) included in the plugin under Appointments> FAQ. Some of your questions might be answered. Now, let's see some options.

Add a service  : In Appointments> Settings click on the tab Services. To create a new service enter in Name, The name of the service, in Capacity, the number of customers who can register for the service simultaneously, the duration (Duration), the price (Price) and choose the service description page. When you are satisfied with your settings, click Add New Service above online form to add a new line on which to enter information for a new service, or Save Services, below the online form to save your changes.

appointments-service-settings

Add service providers : Always in Appointments> Settings open tab Service Providers. To set providers, click the button Add New Service Provider so that the input fields appear. Then fill these and when you are done, click on the button Save Service Providers.

Note that providers must be site users and additional fees (Addditional Price) you enter will be added to the price of the service to which you are assigning the service provider. If you check the box Dummy, then the provider's emails will be redirected to those of another user that you have chosen in the general tab, in the field  Assign dummy service providers to.

appointments-settings Service providers

Choose colors and add custom styles

In Appointments> Settings, in the general tab and in the section display Settings, you can customize the display of your calendar, for example, to make it better suited to your site. Choose Custom in the drop-down list of the field Color Set to see the customization fields and click on the text fields that appear to see the color selection controls.

appointments-general-colors

Creating pages

The principle is to add shortcodes (available to Appointments) to pages in order to personalize them. These shortcodes are very configurable (include several parameters each), which gives you more flexibility when creating your pages (no need to be an expert in web programming). For example, [app_monthly_schedule] displays the available reservation spaces for a month while  [app_services] Displays a list of all available services. Read this article on how to use and manage shortcodes on WordPress. To see the full list of available shortcodes and their settings, in your dashboard, visit Appointments> shortcodes. Here is an example on a page that will give you an overview of the task:

<h1>Prenez un rendez-vous</h1>
<p>Vous pouvez ajouter des informations ici pour indiquer le processus de prise de rendez-vous</p>

<h2>Etape 1:</h2>
<h3>Choisissez votre service.</h3>

[app_services]

<h2>Etape 2:</h2>
<h3>Choisissez la fenêtre de temps qui vous convient, remplissez le formulaire et cliquez sur le bouton "please click here to confirm your appointment". Si vous êtes un membre vous pouvez aussi vous authentifié.</h3>

[app_login redirect_text="Vous serez rediriger vers la page de login"]

[app_monthly_schedule]
[app_pagination month="1" date="0"]

[app_confirmation]

<h2>Step Three:</h2>
<h3>click the "confirm payment" button that will appear below to pay for and fully book your consultation.</h3>

[app_paypal]

 Refer to the list of shortcodes in Appointments> Shortcodes for further understanding.

Add appointments manually

In your dashboard visit Appointments> Appointments And click Add New which is at the very top of the page. A online form will appear. The latter is divided into 3 sections. The first for customer information, the second for the service and the last for the time slot (Appointment). As you can see, it's very easy to create an appointment manually from the dashboard.

appointments-create-hand

See financial transactions on appointments

By logging into PayPal, Appointments allows you to keep tabs on financial movements relating to the appointment. For security and accuracy reasons, you can only watch, that is, changes are not allowed. To monitor financial transactions, visit Appointments> Transactions.

Do you want more ?

Since the start of this tutorial, we've only scratched the surface of what the free version of the Appointments plugin is capable of. But, if you want more, here's what the Pro version will give you:

- Off-peak dates and times
- Display monthly and weekly schedules
- Integration of Gravatar
- Limit reservations
– Auto completion of forms for repeat customers

The free version of Supplements is great for starting a reservations service on your site. It natively comes with an impressive number of options for a free plugin. As business grows and your team grows, you will need more options. Plus, switching from Appointments to Appointments + is just a few clicks away.

 So much for this tutorial on how to easily manage your appointments on your WordPress site, where we saw what the Appointments plugin was and how to use it to make it easier to make appointments for your project as well as on your WordPress site.

Appointments is a pleasure for administrators, site owners, but also developers. It is easy to modify its behavior or integrate other plugins / themes thanks to the large number of hooks and filters available. There you go, now everyone is happy.

Do you have any other tips, advice or plugins that would make it easier to book an appointment? How do you organize this activity within your project? Please share your feedback with us in our comments section.