Booking Plugins, And When To Stop Using One

Every few months someone emails asking which booking plugin to install. It is usually a hairdresser or a barber whose nephew built them a site, and the honest answer is not the one they want: it depends less on the plugin than on how much of your week the bookings actually are.

If you take two or three appointments a week around other work, a plugin is fine. Most of them do the same handful of things. A calendar, a form, an email when someone books. We have covered a lot of them over the years and the good ones share a trait: they stay out of the way and they do not try to become your whole business.

The trouble starts when bookings become the business. A plugin sits inside WordPress, so it inherits every WordPress problem. Your booking system goes down when your host has a bad night. It breaks when a theme update changes a template. It needs the same plugin updates, the same backups, the same care as the rest of the site, and none of that is work a salon owner signed up for. We have watched people lose a Saturday of appointments to a failed update more than once.

At that point the question is not which plugin. It is whether the booking should live in WordPress at all. Dedicated systems exist for this, and the ones worth looking at are the ones built for a specific trade rather than for everybody. Moshee is a reasonable example of the shape: salon booking that runs separately from the website, so a theme update cannot take the diary down with it. Deposits go to the bank rather than through a plugin someone stopped maintaining in 2010.

None of which makes plugins bad. It makes them the right tool up to a point and the wrong one past it. The point arrives earlier than most people expect, usually the first time a broken booking costs real money.

Our own rule, for what it is worth: if losing the booking form for a day would cost you more than a day of your time to fix, it should not be a plugin.