How to Setup Online Reservation Form on your WordPress Website

Today, WordPress is one of the widely used CMS for creating blogs as well as websites across the world. Currently around 23% of websites in the world are powered by the WordPress Platform. This means that almost business of every niche is using WordPress for their website. Today, I will be reviewing a plugin that would help Restaurant owners take their business online with few simple clicks. If I say, a restaurant owner can start taking orders online on its WordPress website in 5 minutes, how cool would be that? The plugin name which I am talking about here is – “ReDi Restaurant Reservation”. Let’s begin with the plugin –

• Download the plugin here.
• Go to Plugins page of your WordPress website and upload it.
• Activate the plugin.
• As soon as the plugin is activated, the plugin automatically creates a new page named “Reservation” on the website. Also, you can configure the plugin settings from admin section.

Plugin Features

• Automatically checks for available timings and slots of your restaurant
• Confirm your visitor’s booking/reservation immediately within minutes via email
• 24 hour availability for your visitors from your online reservation website
• Impress your visitors by knowing them face to face as the plugin auto retrieves the user’s public Gravatar image
• Comes with inbuilt responsive design that allows you to access upcoming reservations even when you’re on mobile and doesn’t have access to your tablet/PC
• Reduces the manual work involved and thus increasing efficiency
• Allows you to set the Restaurant Open timings
• Allows you to configure the minimum and maximum number of persons allowed for booking a reservation
• Sends emails automatically for each action performed by the user.  Some of them are –
  • Email to client when reservation is created.
  • Email to client when reservation is cancelled.
  • Email to restaurant when reservation is created or cancelled.
  • Full list of upcoming reservations/past reservations.
• Allows you to take corporate/Large Group bookings from your website.
• From the admin panel, lets you view/manage all the reservations made on your website.

Configuring the plugin

To configure the plugin go to Redi Reservations > Settings in Admin. Below are the different things that you can configure on the plugin –

• Minimum Number of persons per Reservation
• Maximum Number of persons per Reservation
• Reservation Time
• Time Slot Interval
• Early Booking for large events/seminars/corporate events
• Create Custom fields you need for booking a reservation
• Restaurant Timings

Once you’ve configured the basic settings, this time to see the plugin in action.

Other Features

Apart from this, the plugin also offers some super cool features such as –

• Availability of Seats in your restaurant on different days of the week
• Perform different actions on different days of the week based on the restaurant timings and give your users a different flavor of booking
• If you’re going out for a vacation and the restaurant is closed for few days or for some reasons, the restaurant services need to be put on hold, it’s easy to set it up via the plugin. You just need to use the “Blocked Time” features of the plugin and the plugin takes care of the rest
• Configuring Email Templates. You are able to configure the default templates provided by the plugin to suit as per your website look and feel.

These features are part of the “Basic Package” functionality of the plugin that needs to be subscribed to at a very nominal rate of only 5 euros per month.

Screenshots

I am sure you would like the plugin if you start using it.

Hope this article helps you. In case you need any customizations to the plugin or any new modifications, I am available and you can contact me via this.