Need to accept appointment bookings on your WordPress site? In this Booknetic review, we’ll take a look at a new’ish WordPress appointment booking plugin.
Booknetic excels if you’re just looking for something that’s going to work and look great right out of the box. It has a user-friendly, modern interface on both the front-end and backend and it offers paid bookings, easy booking management, a custom booking form builder, and more.
Keep reading and we’ll take a hands-on look at everything this appointment booking plugin has to offer.
Booknetic Review: The Feature List
Booknetic provides a polished booking experience right out of the box. Overall, I was impressed by both the frontend and backend interfaces.
To set up your appointment options, you can add as many locations, staff members, and services as needed.
To control availability, you can set up:
- Working hours
- Holidays
- Buffer times
- Etc.
If you want to charge for bookings, you get built-in support for PayPal and Stripe, as well as a WooCommerce integration if you want more functionality.
You can either charge the full amount or just require a partial deposit.
Other useful features include:
- Visual appearance customizer
- Drag-and-drop custom booking form builder
- Option to create recurring or group appointments
- Customizable email and SMS notifications
- Google Calendar two-way sync
- Option to add service extras/upgrades
- Coupon/discount support
- Option to link staff members with WordPress accounts to create separate dashboards for staff members
In the hands-on section, I’ll show you all of the features in much greater depth.
Booknetic Pricing
Booknetic only comes in a premium version. It’ll cost you $79 with standard Envato licensing. That means lifetime updates for one site and six months of support.
Hands-On With Booknetic
Once you install Booknetic and activate your license key, Booknetic launches its own dashboard.
While the dashboard is entirely self-hosted and located on your WordPress site, it doesn’t fit “inside” the WordPress dashboard like most plugins.
Instead, it offers this full-screen dashboard, with an option to take you back to the regular WordPress dashboard if you want:
I haven’t seen this approach very often but I will say that I like it. It gives the plugin a very “SaaS” feel.
This is especially nice if you’re planning to give your staff members their own accounts to manage appointments in the backend. They won’t have to mess around with the regular WordPress dashboard – they can just focus on the Booknetic interface.
Adding Appointment Booking Options (Services, Staff, Locations)
To start offering appointments, you need to set up the actual services that people can book.
To help you do
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This article was written by Colin Newcomer and originally published on WP Mayor.