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If you have a business that relies on appointment booking, then having the ability for your clients to book online is crucial. Online booking means that you can spend less time on the phone and have potential clients book appointments even when your business is officially closed.

Another benefit of online booking is the fact that it helps you reduce the amount of no-shows because you can send automated messages that remind potential clients about their upcoming appointment.

WordPress makes it easy to accept appointment bookings on your website thanks to the Amelia plugin. In this post, I’ll show you what the plugin has to offer and then show you how you can use it to make a powerful and beautiful booking website with WordPress.

What Does the Amelia Plugin Offer

The Amelia plugin is a premium appointment booking plugin that makes it easy to add booking functionality to your website. It’s available on CodeCanyon and boasts 5-star reviews. The plugin allows you to accept online bookings as well as payments. It’s a great choice for lawyers, clinics, beauty and spa salons, hair salons, vets, gyms, and any other business that relies on appointments. Let’s take a look at the main features in more detail below.

Booking Features

The most important feature of the Amelia booking plugin is booking functionality. You can choose between several different appointment displays and allow your customers or clients to choose not only the appointment but also a specific employee.

Customers can go straight to your booking form if they know which service they want to book or they can search for available appointments based on criteria such as date, appointment or service type, trainer or employee, and more. Your customers can also choose to bring a certain number of guests to their appointment.

The Amelia plugin supports booking for multiple services and service categories and you can set the minimum time required before booking and cancellation as well as buffer time before and after each appointment.

As far as the admin side goes, you can set a number of non-recurring days when customers can book special appointments. You can also set some days as unavailable and globally configure working hours, holidays and non-working days so each employee can have this schedule by default.

The plugin also allows you to set different schedules for different locations which is useful if you have offices in multiple places. You can manage multiple employees and assign a different schedule to each employee.

In addition to that, you can add custom fields to booking forms which allows you to collect information about your customers prior to booking. You can use this feature to find out more about their case or exercise plan.

Lastly, you can quickly book appointments from the backend, in case you’re on the phone with a customer and they want to book an appointment. You can create customer accounts and profiles from the back end just as easily. This makes it easy for customers to book your services later on from the front-end.

Payments

You can accept payments via Stripe and PayPal. This means that you can easily accept credit card payments and allow customers to choose the most convenient payment method.

The plugin integrates perfectly with WooCommerce so you can use it to manage all your payments which gives you even more payment options that you can provide for your customers.

You can also accept payments on site which is a great solution if you don’t want to bother setting up external payment gateways or paying processing fees. The Amelia plugin makes it easy to have a full overview of payments received or pending, as well as any discounts, coupon codes, and other financial data.

Reminders

A major benefit of the Amelia plugin is the ability to send automatic reminders about appointments to your customers. They can receive notifications via SMS and email. You can set up notifications for both customers and employees and they will be notified when an appointment is booked, canceled, rescheduled, and more.

On top of that, your employees can sync their schedule to their Google Calendar which allows them to see all the appointments they have booked.

Admin Dashboard and Reports

Another standout feature of the Amelia plugin is the ability to see how your business is doing right from your website’s dashboard. You can see how many appointments are booked, which employees have booked appointments as well as how much you have made in revenue.

The dashboard also allows you to see upcoming appointments and reports based on preselected time periods. On top of that, you can see which services are popular and getting the most bookings as well as which locations are more popular with your customers.

These detailed reports allow you to make smart business decisions so you can see where you’re getting the best return on investment.

Customization Options

Lastly, let’s take a look at the customization options that the Amelia plugin has to offer. For starters, the plugin has a minimal design that allows it to blend in seamlessly with any WordPress theme. It doesn’t have a lot of customization options but you can easily adjust the background colors and gradients as well as font colors. Customization options can be found under the plugin settings menu by going to Amelia > Customize.

You can also choose a font that will be used for your text that matches your branding. Although minimal, the customization options are more than enough to create a branded experience for your customers.

Pricing

The Amelia plugin costs $59 and includes 6 months of support and future updates. You can extend support to 12 months for an additional one-time payment of $20.25.

Video Walkthrough: How to Make A Booking Website With WordPress

With the plugin features out of the ways, let’s take a look at how you can use the Amelia plugin to create a booking website with WordPress. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will also be using the free Astra theme and the free Elementor page builder plugin. Let’s dive in!

Final Thoughts

Adding the appointment booking functionality to your website is a must if your business relies on appointments or if you offer workshops and classes. Thanks to Amelia plugin and WordPress, you can easily create your booking website so use this tutorial to familiarize yourself with the plugin features and then make your beautiful booking website.

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