Creating a Booking Form in WordPress: A Complete Guide

A booking form allows web visitors to book appointments with your business online. If you’re in a business sector that requires taking appointments like spa and salon, dentistry, hospitals, consultation, then having a booking form on your WordPress website is must.

It automates a lot of stuff and you can utilize those free hours somewhere else. In this article, learn how you can create a booking for in WordPress.

Creating a Booking Form in WordPress: Three Ways

There are more than one ways to create a booking form in WP. Both the methods requires you to install the necessary plugin. However, the approach for the booking form is different. Here are two ways ou can create a booking form in your WordPress website:

1. Using WPForms

The first way is to use the WPForms plugin. It’s a highly popular plugin used by over 5 million websites. It features a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to make any form you want. You’ll also find many templates that you can right off the bat.

What’s even better is WPForms work with many email marketing platforms. So you can capture those leads that come via the booking form and send them notification or promotional messages.

To get started with this plugin, you need to install and activate it. Find it from the plugins directory in WordPress. Once installed, follow the below steps:

• Go to WPForms > Settings
• Enter the license key when prompted (you can grab this key from your WPForms Account)
• Navigate to WPForms > Add New
• Select the Event Planning category from the list since we’ll be building a booking contact form
• Go through the available templates and click on View Demo to preview a template
• To start using a template for your booking form, click on the Use Template button
• You’ll be taken to the drag-and-drop interface where you can further edit the template. You can add further fields or delete thee existing ones depending on what information you need for booking. But it’s recommended to keep the form short
• Once you’ve completed the form, click on the Save button

Now the form has been created. It’s time to set up the notification so that you get notified when someone has filled up the contact form.

• Go to Settings > Notifications
• Then click on Send to Email Address option
• Fill in the fields one-by-one. By default, the email address to send notification will be set to {admin_email}. Change it to anything you want
• Similarly, make all the adjustments and save the changes

Now that you’ve created the booking form and set up notification, it’s time to publish it. And it’s easy to do so.

First, open the page where you want to include the booking form. Or you can create a new page altogether. After that, open the page and click on the ‘Plus’ icon in the block editor and type ‘WPForms’. Once the block appears, click on it to add it.

In the new WPForms block, click on the dropdown menu and select the form that you just modified. Once it’s on the webpage, click on ‘Publish’ to make it live.

Now visitors will be able to set up appointments with your business via the booking form.

You can also use other booking plugins like Formidable Forms for this purpose.

1. Using a Widget

The second way is to add a widget to your WordPress website. These are not individual pages but are modular elements that exist on the sidebar or footer areas.

To create a widget, you need to install the Formidable Forms plugin and create a booking form with it. Then click on ‘Insert Manually’ and grab the shortcode which you’d have to paste in the Shortcode block.

Save the changes to see the booking widget added to your website.

So that’s how you create a booking form easily in WordPress.