If your business depends on appointments, then the only thing that can make your work easier is an online scheduler. Online booking means less effort and fewer errors because machines do not get tired.
Furthermore, online booking provides additional options for booking appointments since multiple individuals can do it at the same time, whereas you can only talk to customers one at a time.
Today, there is a myriad of technical possibilities to accomplish this. But how do you integrate an online booking system into your website? Managing every appointment and meeting manually is a little tricky and difficult to manage.
Why Do You Need An Online Scheduler?
It doesn’t matter if your business is small or big, if it uses a scheduler or anything that handles appointments, it’s time to move to an online scheduler. It will help you to manage and organize all the appointments with clients, and meetings within the workplace or with clients.
Another benefit is that you don’t need to spend your time taking calls from clients and scheduling appointments manually, you can simply create a scheduling form on your website or software that you provide, and the clients will fill in the form and schedule the meeting time on their own. There is also a feature to notify both parties for scheduled meetings.
There are many benefits of having an online scheduler on your website. Have a look at them.
1. Increase and Explore New Clients
Most of the time people prefer appointment booking instead of phone calls, text messages, or emails. In some cases due to technical issues, there might be some miscommunication between you and the client about their requirements or appointment times. To avoid such problems, partner up with an online scheduler. It will handle all the details for both parties.
2. Automatic Appointment Update
Most online schedulers provide automatic time management for appointments so you don’t have to worry about empty booking slots if a client cancels the meeting. The next client can easily move up in the queue, filling the empty slot.
3. Availability
If the appointment booking form is accessible all the time on your website, it shows that you are available to schedule a meeting anytime. As the system runs automatically, you don’t have to manually collect information, send confirmation emails, or schedule phone calls.
4. Excellent Information Management
Since the client requirements or problems are recorded online, both parties can access and discuss them at the time of the meeting. This service allows the clients to select any empty slot for booking and record all the necessary information required for the meeting; it makes day-to-day life easier for business owners.
Now that you know about the benefits of the online scheduler and the need for it for your business, it’s time to learn if your website is ready for an online scheduler.
How To Prepare Your Site For Implementing An Online Scheduler?
When we talk about implementing tools on a website, it’s crucial to audit the website, check its current health parameters, and make sure the online scheduler adoption doesn’t hurt website performance. Here are some quick steps on conducting a website audit before implementation:
- Run your website through the SE ranking site audit tool to analyze website performance, crawl all pages, and get specific recommendations.
- Once you run a website audit via the SEO tool, uncover technical errors, check HTTP status codes and meta robots, inspect JS, CSS, and images files.
- Test your website load speed and Core Web Vitals with Google PageSpeed Insights (such plugins can decrease the page load time).
- Check the average time duration (and bounce rate additionally) in Google Analytics.
- Fix the critical issues manually and implement an online scheduler.
Complete regular website audits after making significant changes on the website. After implementation of an online scheduler, run another website audit:
- Set an audit at SE Ranking, where you can compare the website performance with the previous check. Make sure every tech indicator remains in order and the online scheduler doesn’t cause tech errors.
- Test the page speed using Google PageSpeed Insights after the implementation and compare it to your previous results. Make sure the load speed of the page didn’t increase.
- Check if the average time duration was not decreased. Ensure the online scheduler didn’t cause a bounce from the website. Otherwise, it can signal a bad user experience.
Once your website is ready for implementing an online scheduler, you can proceed further. There are many ways to implement an online scheduler on a website. For example, you can do it with a plugin if you are using WordPress CMS.
There are some popular plugins available on WordPress, but first, let’s find out more about WordPress.
What Is WordPress?
If you want to create a website or blog, then WordPress is the most popular and easiest way to do it. Around 43 percent of the websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
If we talk a bit technical, WordPress is a free source content management system (CMS) which anyone can easily access or modify for free. A CMS is a helpful tool that allows you to manage crucial components of your website, such as content, without diving deep into programming. As a result, anyone can create a website – even those who aren’t developers.
What Are The Features Of WordPress?
WordPress is a website hosting platform with some amazing features. Let’s learn about them:
Customizable Design
WordPress provides themes and designs that enhance your business website. After going through some choice-making scenarios, your primary design will be ready. You can also customize your design as per your desire.
SEO Friendly
These days, website ranking is a must for your business since the competition is tough. You have to stay ahead to outwit the digital world and WordPress will help you do so. All you have to do is go through some multiple choice screens, like you did while choosing your design. These questions will help WordPress to generate specific SEO settings for your business website and help you rank higher on the google search page.
Responsive To All Device
Nowadays the various devices that help customers to interact with websites have different screen sizes. Because of those different screen sizes, WordPress has already made its themes and designs responsive. They fit into almost all types of screen sizes so you don’t have to make some particular settings.
Easy To Use
The WordPress personal dashboard is much easier to understand. They also provide an introduction at the beginning on how to follow the steps and you are good to go. With just a few clicks you can make major changes to your website.
Huge WordPress Store
There are approximately 59000+ themes, forms, and plugins available for free use. You just have to add your required plugin name and there will be thousands of plugins that support your desired requirement.
It can be thought of as a tool that makes it easier for content creators, even without a previous understanding of web programming, to manage an important aspect of the website, such as website content and multimedia elements in web pages.
What Are The Plugins?
Plugins are extensions that help you modify apps, computer programs, web browsers, and also customize website content. You can also use them as add-ons to customize programs and apps. However, their popularity in web browsers has declined slightly in favour of browser extensions.
Plugins are also the small add-ons that help you maximize the material you produce as an online creator. They are the extras that allow you to enjoy the internet as a content consumer in a variety of ways, including visuals, sound, movies, and animation.
Note: While installing plugins make sure that they are trusted and installed by a large audience, since some hackers are targeting WordPress websites. These plugins are third-party programs, so they may compromise your data.
Here is a list of some top and trusted plugins for your online scheduler:
Bookafy is cloud based online scheduler that automates scheduling of meetings, calls and service appointments and offers end users online scheduling with payments, automated confirmations, text reminders and reviews.
- WordPresss Integrations
- Two-way calendar sync
- Skill-based routing
- Group events
Features for the pro version:
- Secure payment acceptance
- Custom scheduling software features
- Own appointment review links
Whenever you search for any online scheduler plugin for a WordPress website, this plugin shows up first due to its popularity. This plugin is much more popular for its simple yet effective functionality. It’s currently used by 100000+ business owners and has a 5-star rating for its user-friendliness. It takes less than 5 minutes to set up and schedule an appointment.
Here are some basic functionalities provided by this plugin:
- Customizable UI
- Unlimited bookings with notification
- Event calendar included
- The translation is available in a well-known language.
There are some other features available in the premium part of this plugin.
- Google calendar sync
- Mailchimp support
- Payment Gateway integration
- Sms notification
This plugin shows up just after the first one. This plugin is popular for its user-friendly functionality and well-designed User interface. With more than 100000+ installations, this plugin is translated into more than 10 Human languages and has a 4.5-star rating. This plugin provides the following functionality for its paid version.
- Provides daily, weekly and monthly views
- List, table, and tile view
- Event location system
- Recurring event scheduling
The added features in the premium part of this plugin are:
- Book multiple dates
- Lock pre-filled fields
- Discount option
- Refund booking
This is another popular plugin available at the WordPress plugin store. Supported with an updated version, this plugin is installed by 50000+ business owners and has a 4-star rating. It has a user-friendly interface and provides minimal user input fields to gather more information.
Features provided by this plugin for the basic and free version.
- Full appearance customization
- Unlimited booking form
- Customer management
- Filter, search, and sorting option
Features for the pro version:
- Secure payment acceptance
- Additional multiple templates for email notification
- Google calendar integration
Conclusion
Like anything else in life, there may not be a “perfect online booking system.” You must assess your needs, what you want your online booking system to do for you, and decide which system best suits your audience. The good news is that you can always gain experience. Start out with one of the above-mentioned options and then move on to a better, more expensive option as your budget allows.