How to accept payments for appointments on WordPress

Decide whether customers will pay the full appointment price, pay a deposit, or book first and pay later. Full payment is simplest; deposits can reduce no-shows but require clear wording about the remaining balance and cancellation policy.

You need a booking system for live availability, time-slot protection, appointment records and payment status. WordPress alone can display a form or payment link, but it does not provide the scheduling logic needed to prevent double bookings.

Install an appointment-booking plugin or connect an external booking service. Create your services, durations, prices, staff members and locations, then set business hours, breaks, holidays and lead-time rules.

Do not publish the form until every service has a price and at least one staff member or resource assigned. A missing price or unavailable provider commonly makes the payment option disappear or leaves customers with no bookable slots.

Open the booking plugin’s payment settings and enable a supported gateway such as Stripe. Sign in or enter the credentials requested by that integration, then set the currency and decide which payment methods customers may see.

Use live credentials only after testing. Live card payments require HTTPS, and many integrations also use webhooks or return URLs to update an appointment after Stripe confirms or rejects a payment. If those callbacks are blocked by caching, security rules or a staging URL, the customer may pay while the appointment remains pending. Stripe documents both plugin-based integrations and hosted checkout flows.

Choose whether a successful payment automatically approves the appointment or leaves it pending for manual review. Add your cancellation, refund and rescheduling rules to the booking form and confirmation emails.

If you use deposits, show the amount paid and the balance due before the customer submits the booking. Also decide what happens when someone abandons checkout: the time slot should expire or return to availability after the interval supported by your booking system.

Add the booking form to a page using the plugin’s block, shortcode or page-builder widget. Check the form on a phone as well as a desktop, and make sure the selected service, staff member, time, price and payment method are visible before checkout.

Run a complete test in the gateway’s test mode: select a slot, pay, return to the site, check the appointment status, confirm the emails and verify the transaction in the gateway dashboard. Then test a failed payment and an abandoned checkout. Clear or exclude the booking page from aggressive page caching if old availability or broken payment buttons appear.

If your site already uses Bookly, the Bookly Stripe Add-on is a practical route for connecting Stripe to the booking workflow. Bookly’s documentation says the add-on requires Bookly PRO, is enabled under Bookly > Settings > Payments, and uses Stripe keys plus webhook events for payment updates.

Check the form type before installing it: Bookly currently states that the Stripe add-on is not supported in its modern booking forms. The alternative Bookly Cloud Stripe option uses a separate setup, so do not mix the two configurations while troubleshooting.