Need to accept appointment bookings on your WordPress site?

In our MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin review, we’re going to take a look at a freemium option that supports unlimited services, employees, and locations.

You get a good amount of flexibility in setting up your services and their availability and you can also accept online payments via PayPal or Stripe.

Overall, you can use it to set up booking for services, hourly equipment rentals, and more.

Keep reading our hands-on MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin review for a detailed look at what it offers and how it works.

MotoPress Appointment Booking Review: What Does the Plugin Do?

As the name suggests, the key focus of the MotoPress appointment WordPress plugin is to help you accept online appointments and bookings.

It can work well for any type of time-based or service-based business. Here are some common examples (though this is by no means a complete list):

• Hair salons
• Spas and other beauty salons
• Health providers (doctors, dentists, therapists, etc.)
• Sports facilities (e.g. a rentable tennis court)
• Hourly equipment rentals (e.g. renting a kayak for your lake business)
• Education facilities
• Private coaches or tutors

If you have a hotel or rental property with full-day/night bookings, the developer also offers a separate MotoPress Hotel Booking plugin.

By nature, a good booking tool requires a lot of flexibility when it comes to the features and configuration options, so let’s discuss the nitty-gritty details in MotoPress Appointment Bookings.

Online or In-Person Payments

To charge for your payments, the plugin lets you accept online payments via PayPal, Stripe (and associated options such as Bancontact, SEPA Direct Debit, and many others), or direct bank transfer.

You can also add a “Pay on Arrival” option that lets you accept payment via any in-person payment system (e.g. cash or your regular POS system).

The plugin also includes a built-in feature to let you create coupons, including limiting coupons to certain services and setting expiration dates/quotas.

If you want more flexibility, there’s also an add-on plugin that lets you use WooCommerce for payments, which unlocks all of the many payment options in WooCommerce.

Service and Time Slot Management

To configure what your customers can book, the plugin lets you add unlimited services of any type.

You can set a custom duration for each service and also add buffer periods before or after appointments to account for any needed prep time.

For services that allow multiple people, you can also specify a service capacity to define how many people the booker can bring with them. If you do that, you also have the option to multiply the service price by the number of people in the group.

Employee Management and Scheduling

The plugin also lets you add unlimited employees, each of which you can associate with one or more services.

You’re also able to set up custom schedules for each employee, including their working hours, breaks, special days off, vacations, and more.

Multiple Location Management

If you have multiple locations, you’ll be able to add those so that customers can choose their preferred location when booking a service.

When creating employee schedules, you’ll also be able to link their working hours to a specific location. If an employee splits time between multiple locations, that’s also easy to set up.

User-Friendly Booking Wizard for Customers

To tie everything together, MotoPress Appointment Booking offers a user-friendly frontend booking wizard that lets customers book their service, along with their preferred location and staff member (if applicable).

The booking form will automatically adapt to your theme’s design and you can also link forms to specific services/employees/locations.

You can also customize all of the field titles in the booking widget, so you could adjust the text that you see in the screenshots below.

Here’s the first step:

On the next step, they can choose the date and time:

They’ll then see a summary, along with an option to choose the number of people attending (if applicable):

Then, they can enter their details and, if enabled, make an online payment:

If you want, you can also give customers the option to book multiple services in the same transaction.

This works kind of like an eCommerce store, where customers can add multiple services to their “cart” (so to speak) and then book all of those services at once.

Easy Backend Management

You and your employees have two main ways to manage appointments.

First, you can see a booking calendar in the WordPress dashboard. You can also create WordPress accounts for each employee that let the employees view their own appointments from the WordPress dashboard:

You can also see a list view of bookings in the dashboard in addition to the calendar view:

Second, you can also set up a Google Calendar sync so that you (and all employees) can automatically see appointments in Google Calendar.

How to Set Up MotoPress Appointment Booking

Now that you know some of the key features, let’s get into what it’s like to actually use the MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin on your site.

When you activate the plugin, you’ll get a number of different settings areas under the Appointments tab in the sidebar, which is where you can configure everything:

It would be nice if the plugin gave you a little in-dashboard guidance on what to do first, but I was able to find the quick start guide in the documentation. It recommends configuring things in this order:

• Configure basic settings
• Add employees
• Add locations
• Set up employee schedules
• Add services
• Organize services
• Display booking content with blocks/shortcodes

So, let’s go through it in the recommended order…

Configure Basic Settings

To get started, you’ll want to configure the plugin’s basic settings, which you can access by going to Appointments → Settings.

There are four tabs here, each of which includes some important information:

• General – basic settings such as the default time step and whether people can book multiple services at the same time.
• Emails – enable/disable certain emails to send to clients and customize their content. For example, booking confirmations.
• Payments – set up one or more payment gateways and configure some other payment-related settings.
• Integrations – set up Google Calendar sync.

Add Employees

Once you’ve configured the basic settings, you’ll want to set up your employee(s), which are one or more people who will be performing the services.

There aren’t really preset fields here. Instead, you can add your own labels to collect information about each employee, which gives you a nice amount of flexibility. 

While there’s some extra setup here, I actually prefer this approach to other plugins that might force you into preset fields.

For example, you could collect certifications, areas of expertise, and so on.

You also get two useful integrations:

1. You can connect an employee to a WordPress account so that they can access their own calendars from the dashboard.
2. You can sync this employee with their own Google Calendar.

Add Locations

Next, you’ll want to add your location(s), which are one or more places where your services are performed.

This just opens up the standard editor where you can add a title and description:

Set Up Employee Schedules

Now, you can set up the employee schedules for each location that you’ve added.

When you add a schedule, you can choose the employee for this schedule to apply for, along with their main building (you can still set up schedules for different buildings).

You can then set up a general timetable, along with the employee’s days off and any custom working days. For example, you could use the days off schedule to account for vacations or holidays.

When adding to the timetable, you can specify both hours that the employee is working and those that the employee isn’t (e.g. a lunch break):

Add Services

Once you’ve configured your employees and locations, you’re ready to start adding bookable services.

First, you might want to set up service categories and tags, which use the regular WordPress taxonomy interface:

Then, you can add your services using the regular WordPress editor, along with some custom settings at the bottom.

You can use these settings to:

• Set the price.
• Add the duration and any needed buffer time.
• Set a minimum lead time. E.g. people must book at least two days in advance.
• Add a minimum and maximum capacity, as well as whether to multiply the price by the number of people.
• Assign employees to this service.

There’s also a really neat feature that lets you adjust the service’s details at the per-employee level. For example, you could change the price, duration, or capacity based on the employee.

One thing you can’t seem to do, though, is directly associate a service with a specific location. You could do this indirectly via the employee’s settings, but you might run into issues if an employee works at both locations but is only able to offer a specific service at one location. I doubt this will affect most people, though, as this is kind of an edge-case scenario.

Display Booking Content

To finish things out, you need to choose where to display your booking-related content on the frontend, which includes:

• Booking form
• Employee list
• Location list
• Service list
• Etc.

To do this, the plugin lets you use both blocks and shortcodes, which is nice.

Here, you can see all of the blocks that the plugin gives you:

You can see that you have lots of options to not just display the booking form, but also other relevant information.

Each block also gives you a good number of settings.

For example, in the booking form, you can choose to only use that form for specific employees, services, and/or locations, which gives you the option to create dedicated booking forms at various levels:

And that’s pretty much it in terms of setting up your booking platform!

MotoPress Appointment Booking Pricing

For simple use cases, there’s a pretty functional free version of the plugin at WordPress.org named Appointment Booking Lite.

The key limitation of the free plugin is that it doesn’t include the online payments functionality. So if you want to accept online payments via Stripe, PayPal, or Direct Bank Transfer, then you’ll need to upgrade to the premium version.

If you do, there are two pricing options, both of which offer all features:

• One site license – $59
• Unlimited site license – $199

If you just want to test out the premium features, you can also create a free demo on a fully functioning site.

You can also access it as part of the MotoPress Club, which gets you access to all of the developer’s plugins and themes for $299 (one year of support/updates) or $799 (lifetime support/updates).

Or, another option is to purchase one of MotoPress’s dedicated appointment themes, which cost $79 each. Let’s be clear – the MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin will work with any WordPress theme.

However, if you haven’t chosen a theme yet, the dedicated themes can offer good value because they include the plugin at no extra cost.

So instead of purchasing just the plugin for $59, you’re getting both the theme and the plugin for $79, which means the theme basically costs you just $20.

You can browse all of those themes here.

Final Thoughts on MotoPress Appointment Booking

Overall, MotoPress Appointment Booking gives you a pretty easy, yet flexible, way to start accepting appointments on your WordPress site.

I like that it integrates into the native WordPress interfaces as much as possible, as this makes it very easy to get up and running.

It’s also nice that the plugin has embraced blocks, as this makes it easy to set up all your frontend content (or you’re still free to use shortcodes if you’re using the older editor).

In terms of flexibility, you seem to have a good amount when it comes to setting up employees, locations, and services.

For example, you can add buffer times, min/max capacities (and price changes), and so on. It’s also nice that you can override these details for individual employees.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can install the free version from WordPress.org to access most of the features.

If you want the ability to accept online payments, you can either purchase the standalone premium plugin or buy one of the themes that bundle in the plugin at no extra cost.

You can use the buttons below to get started: