Availability

The grey blocks show your available time for appointments or, as we like to say in Wappointment, when you are bookable!

You can modify your regular weekly availability from your settings at any time.

You can also create punctual availability from your Admin Calendar.

When you mouse hover, a tag comes visible indicating the type of availability the slot corresponds to.

Non-bookable time

The white areas of your calendar are your non-bookable time. The slots in diagonal shows when you are busy, and so when you are also unavailable for bookings.

Your busy time might come from your personal calendar’s events. Learn how to synchronize with your personal calendar if you didn’t do it yet.

Form your admin calendar you can also block time directly.

You can check the source of your busy time by hovering the event.

Slots available for bookings

As you well imagine, the number of possible appointments will depend on your bookable time and the duration of your service (plus any buffer time between appointments that you might have set).

You can see the number of slots available in the top of your Admin Calendar, next to the week.

Timezone

Your timezone is indicated in the upper-right corner. You can modify it at any time from the settings.

But the beauty of your Admin Calendar is that it allows you to visualize your availability in different timezones without modifying your settings.

Let´s say you have to schedule an appointment with a client who is placed in Mexico. Which time will work for both of you?

Just look for Mexico in the drop-down menu on the right top corner and that´s it, now your availability is displayed in Mexico´s time. It seems early in the morning in Mexico would be suitable to both of you!

Appointments

And finally, the best of your calendar: bookings!

The appointments your clients book from your website are displayed here.

When placing the cursor over the appointment, an eye icon will appear, allowing to visualize extra information on your client such as email or phone number. Pretty handy if you need to contact them!

From your Admin Calendar, you can reserve an appointment on behalf of your client. A confirmation email will be sent to your client with the booking details.

If you need to reschedule an appointment, simply drag it into the new time slot. An email will be sent to your client with the details of the rescheduled booking.

So, start using your Admin Calendar at its full extent! If you don’t have it yet, just install it on your WordPress’ site. It is free!

Here is What’s New

• Synchronize from multiple calendars
• Buffer time after appointment
• Auto-select first day with available slots in booking form
• Tag replacement on subject of email reminders

Synchronize across Multiple Calendars

Up until now you could connect only one of your personal calendars (Google Cal, Apple iCal, Outlook Calendar, etc..) .

Why limiting to one calendar only?

Well synching calendars can be a bit of heavy process depending on how many appointments you have and when you’ve created your calendar.

For instance your Google Calendar holds all the events since the creation of your google account, for some of us that’s like nearly 20 years of data. So depending how active you were during those past 20 years, let’s say that file could be pretty heavy.

Anyway, talking to users made us realise that we needed to give you more flexibility. So we’ve added a Sync tab in your Wappointment > Settings and you can now connect up to 4 calendars. Basically any calendar that is in the .ics format.

Our system is pretty optimized, it will check your calendar every 5 minutes, and will parse it only if changes were detected(huge saver). So here is some powerful stuff for you straight in our free plugin.

Buffer time after appointment

Well this one is a feature we were hesitant on adding earlier as we’re trying to keep our settings panel as simple as possible. We really want it to work for the 90% of you and then add more features in new addons for specific needs.

We really value your experience and want you to just have a smooth sail handling your appointments’ schedule, and not having to read documentation to just understand how to configure our plugin. This said buffer time was at the limit of core features, it can be pretty useful. So let’s dive in.

What is buffer time?

Basically that’s the time you need in between appointments so that you can prepare for the next one.

For instance, let’s say you provide short 25 minutes 1 on 1 English Classes to your students.

But you need 5 minutes to prepare for your next class, well before we implemented the buffer time you’d need to set your appointment’s duration to 30 minutes and just explain individually to each of your client that the appointment duration is actually only 25minutes long. Sounds confusing for your customers right?

Now with buffer time, you simply set your appointment duration to 25 minutes, then set the buffer time in Settings > Advanced to 5 minutes. And here you go, no more confusion, the appointment lasts 25 minutes, so that’s clear to your customers what they are getting; and then you become unavailable 5 minutes after the appointment, so nobody can book you during that short period of time.

Booking form auto-select first day with available slots

Here is a small win, it took us 5 minutes to implement and it’s our way to make your visitors’ experience way smoother.

By adding that feature, we’ve just saved your visitors one click and avoided potential confusion.

What’s one click you may ask? Well that’s one step closer to conversion. Instead of letting them confused in front of a calendar that may or may not have any availability in the current month, well we just skip to the good part where they can select the first available slot you have.

Tag replacement on subject of email reminders

Well this one is a tiny one, but it can prove useful. when you setup your email reminders and confirmation, you are able to add different tags(Client’s name, appointment’s duration, Service name, …), that will be then dynamically replaced when sending to your customer. This was working fine in the body of your emails, but it was not working in the subject of the email.

So that’s it, it does work now!

Why so many updates?

At the end of the day some of you contact us, there are bugs that needs to be corrected. And we try to ship the corrections as fast as we can. Above I’ve listed some of the features we’ve added, but here are some others we’ve fixed:

• Optimized external calendar sync
• Tag replacement issue in emails sent with WP Mail sending method
• Phone input missing their flags
• Booking on behalf of customers from the admin panel was broken
• Wappointment has been tested and works with WordPress 5.4
• Rescheduling form which was off in terms of styling
• etc…

What’s next?

We keep improving our free plugin, making sure it works for you. We only need your feedback, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We’re working on a couple of addons that should be out soon:

• SMS reminders with Tweelio
• Appointments synch to your personal calendar

This is the immediate future, but we have a long list of addons ideas, so get ready to be given more power soon.

Here are all the improvements :

• Added Sendgrid API for email sending
• Added Mailgun Area (EU, US) for email reminders
• Added header logo selection for email reminders
• Corrected rendering issues for emails
• Corrected bug for shortcode insertion of booking module
• Corrected booking module appearing on reschedule  and cancel page
• Dropped vue-form-generator

Read more below for a deeper insight.

Emails Looking Better than Ever

We have to admit, before this release our emails were not so sexy…

Nevermind, this was the past, from now on they will look great in all the major email clients, Gmail, Outlook, ProtonMail, etc …

As we were correcting the email issue we have decided to also let you add your logo or a banner for the header of your emails.

And guess what? Adding your own header/banner is  as easy as one – two – three.

Send Emails with SendGrid’s API

While fixing our email rendering issue, we thought it was due to our MailGun integration; it certainly was not…

But heck, the good thing is that while trying to demonstrate that, we’ve created an adapter so that you can send your emails with SendGrid’s API. So now you have the choice between MailGun’s and SendGrid’s API. With SendGrid you can send 100 emails per day for free, and signing up with SendGrid is free too.

APIs are faster to send emails, but you can still set your own SMTP server if you use another provider.

Once you get traffic, how do you convert visitors into clients? Filling your calendar with new appointments is another big challenge, and it shouldn’t be all that hard.

Getting Visitors to Contact you

Whether you provide services online or at your physical address, your ultimate purpose is to get your agenda fully booked every week and get paid. Now chances are that you already provide a visible call-to-action on most of your pages so that visitors can quickly contact you over the phone or send you an email through a contact form.

Over the Phone

Displaying your phone number on your website is a great way to reassure potential customers and provide them a direct line to you. It definitely removes barriers and makes you accessible which based on your business can be great especially if you’re just starting.

Now if you’re starting to get more and more traffic on your site and receive more calls than you can handle. It quickly can become a pain to deal with these calls the whole day. Getting constantly interrupted while working will make you less efficient in what you do and ultimately the service you provide will be of lesser quality.

Through a Contact Form

The most common feature for any website on the web is the contact form, whether it’s here to help answer pre-sales questions, provide support or simply make an appointment. There are various solutions existing to get this done, the most popular plugins for WordPress are the following:

• Contact Form 7
• Ninja Forms
• WP Forms lite

Depending on your needs you can take care of really complex scenarios thanks to those plugins.

These are a great way to get a first contact, also it allows you to deal with customers’ requests asynchronously meaning you can dedicate special time during your day to reply to your customers instead of being randomly interrupted during the whole day.

Now you will receive various contact requests daily about many different topics. But for sure depending on your business some will be redundant. And you need a way to deal with the most common requests in the most efficient way.

This is a question that you need to ask yourself based on the kind of services you provide to customers, and maybe based on your experience.

If you provide services with specific durations to your customers, then using our appointment scheduling plugin will benefit your activity.

Appointments Plugin for WordPress

Wappointment was created firstly for service based businesses, the idea is to make the process of scheduling an appointment a breeze.

Make an Appointment as a Visitor

The concept is simple, your visitors will click a “Book now” button in your site

1. A calendar with your availability appears
2. The client pick an available day and a time
3. He enters his personnal details
4.  A confirmation screen is displayed
5. Finally the appointment details is sent to him by email

Setup Wappointment Under 1 Minute

Wappointment is made for dummies,  in our design process we made sure that no one will feel overwhelmed using our plugin.

Setting up Wappointment is extremely straight forward, you will be facing a simple 3-steps wizard in which the most basic setup to start receving new bookings will be covered.

The three steps of the wizard are as follow:

1. Set your availability
2. Define your service
3. Design your booking widget

Wappointment is Free

Wappointment is a free plugin for WordPress, you can install it easily from your WordPress’ dashboard in the Plugins’ page.

We could write extensively about it but it’s so simple to use that we believe it’s just better to install it and try it directly.

Not convinced check out our one minute learner video below.