Embed, button, or link — three ways to do it, the one most businesses forget, and the mobile mistake that makes a perfectly good booking page useless.
There are only three ways to put booking on a website, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason a booking system quietly fails: it goes live, it works perfectly, and almost nobody uses it.
| Method | What the visitor sees | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Embedded (iframe) | The calendar sits inside your page, under your header. They never leave. | The main “Book an appointment” page on your site. Highest completion rate, because it feels like your site. |
| Button / popup | A button anywhere — pricing page, blog post, header — opens the booking calendar over the page. | Everywhere else. This is the one people under-use, and it’s usually the one that gets the bookings. |
| Link out | They click through to your hosted Bookafy booking page. | Email signatures, Instagram bio, Google Business Profile, a QR code on the counter. Anywhere you don’t control the HTML. |
You do not have to choose one. Most businesses that do this well use all three: an embedded page, a button in the site header, and the raw link in every email footer and social profile.
All three are available on the Free plan — $0, one user. The iframe and button code aren’t a paid upsell. What Free doesn’t have is calendar sync, SMS reminders and payments, which is a different conversation (see below).
Bookafy gives you an HTML snippet. Anywhere that accepts HTML, it works. The awkwardness is always the platform, never the code.
Almost every complaint about embedded booking calendars is the same complaint: it looks fine on my laptop and it’s cut off on my phone. The iframe has a fixed height; the calendar inside it is taller on a narrow screen.
So before you announce it: open the page on an actual phone and book a real appointment. Not a resized browser window — a phone. If it’s clipped, give the embed more height, or use the button/popup instead, which handles small screens far better. Most of your customers are on a phone. Test where they are.
A booking page nobody can find is not a booking system. It’s a URL.
If you run ads and want to count bookings as conversions, be aware that the booking flow happens inside the embed. Analytics on your site sees the visitor arrive at the page; it does not automatically see the moment they finish booking inside the frame.
The pragmatic answer most businesses use: send the visitor to a thank-you page on your own site after booking, and fire the conversion there. It’s simple, it’s reliable, and it doesn’t require anyone to understand cross-frame tracking. Set it up before you spend money on ads, not after you’re trying to explain the numbers.
| Not available | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| A native Shopify app | Appointments don’t flow into Shopify orders or checkout. |
| An official WordPress plugin | You paste an HTML snippet instead. In practice this is fine, and it doesn’t break on WordPress updates. |
| Deep design control of the calendar internals | You can customise the booking page, but it isn’t a blank canvas. If pixel-perfect brand control matters that much, look at the white-label option for larger accounts. |
| Class timetables, memberships, packages | Not here at all. Bookafy books appointments with people. |
Bookafy’s Free plan is $0 for one user with unlimited appointments. The 7-day trial of Pro+ needs no credit card.
Yes. Bookafy gives you an HTML snippet you can embed as a calendar (iframe), attach to a button as a popup, or simply link to. All three work on the Free plan.
Yes — anywhere that accepts HTML. Use a Custom HTML block on WordPress, an Embed HTML element on Wix, and a Code Block on Squarespace (Squarespace restricts code blocks to its paid plans).
No. You paste an HTML snippet into a Custom HTML block. It works on any theme and does not break when WordPress updates.
No. Every account includes a hosted booking page. Many one-person businesses use only that link — in the Instagram bio, on the Google Business Profile, and in the email signature.
Yes. The iframe and button code are on the $0 Free plan. What Free lacks is two-way calendar sync, SMS reminders, payments, and more than one user.
Send the visitor to a thank-you page on your own site after booking and fire the conversion there. The booking itself happens inside the embed, so your site analytics will not see it automatically.
If you are still working out which tool you need, start with the overview: appointment scheduling software — what it does, what it costs, and when you should buy something else.
Also useful: every Bookafy integration, in three honest lists — what is native, what needs Zapier, and what we simply do not do. And the pricing page, where the feature matrix is the real answer to “is that on the free plan”.
