In a blind survey conducted by Toast, 65% of diners preferred making online reservations through the restaurant’s website.
Needless to say, online table booking is as essential as a fine dining experience for customers who are accustomed to the digital life.
For restaurant owners, a reliable reservation system is essential for managing bookings and ensuring customer satisfaction.
To help you choose the right solution, we’ve compiled a list of the best WordPress restaurant reservation plugins based on features, ease of use, and overall value.
These reservation plugins will allow you to accept online bookings, manage table reservations, send automated confirmations, and more—all from your WordPress restaurant website.
5 Best WordPress Restaurant Reservation Plugins
We’ve curated a list of the 5 best restaurant reservation plugins below, each with their own pros and cons. So, read until the end to find the plugin that fits the requirements of your restaurant website.
1. Everest Forms
We are starting this list with Everest Forms which is a flexible form builder for WordPress.
It comes with advanced form fields like date/time, phone number, dropdown, and checkboxes that you can use along with name and email fields to receive booking details.
There are payment fields as well in case you want to take a nominal booking fee. You can also avoid spam and bots by integrating CAPTCHAs.
You can also get instant email notifications whenever a reservation is made. Further, it’s also possible to send autoresponders like welcome emails or confirmation emails to your customers.
In addition, Everest Forms supports seamless integration with Google Calendar and other apps for convenient reservation management.
Key Features of the Everest Forms:
- Less bloated solution as you’re using your form plugin for restaurant reservations
- Several pre-built form templates (including one for restaurant table booking)
- Easy-to-use date and time picker
- Comes with PayPal and Stripe payment gateways
- Support for CAPTCHA and other anti-spam mechanisms.
Price: Freemium (Premium starts at $49/Year)
2. Five Star Restaurant Reservation
Next up, we have Five Star Restaurant Reservations, a dedicated booking form for restaurants.
It offers custom reservation forms with fields for date, time, party size, table, and the customer’s contact details. You can even add an image to demonstrate the seating layout.
Further, you can add your reservation form anywhere on your site using the Gutenberg restaurant block or shortcode.
However, the free version doesn’t support email and SMS reminders and deposit acceptance which are available in the premium plan.
Key Features of the Five Star Restaurant Reservation:
- Flexibility of scheduling rule
- Email notifications for both restaurant admin and customers
- Responsive table booking and reservation forms
- Support for PayPal and Stripe payment (Premium)
- Option to ban users based on email and IP address
Price: Freemium (Premium plan starts at $67 for a 1-site license)
3. WPCafe
If you want an all-in-one solution for your restaurant, then WPCafe is a likely contender. It is a WooCommerce-based plugin designed to cater to all kinds of online food businesses.
This all-in-one restaurant solution plugin comes with features like location-based online food menus, food ordering with pickup and delivery schedules, branch-wise table reservations, and promotional tools.
This multifunctional restaurant plugin comes with a beautiful design and many customization options. It is readily compatible with popular page builders like Elementor, Gutenberg, WPBakery, Beaver, and more.
Thus, you can easily tailor your restaurant site to your liking to deliver a great customer experience.
Key Features of the WPCafe:
- 33+ food menu templates
- Food ordering with QR codes
- Live order notification with beep alert
- Single and Multiple-slot reservation schedule
- Analytics to track reservations and food orders
Price: Freemium (Premium plan starts at $69/year for a 1-site license)
4. Calendarista
Calendarista is a premium WordPress restaurant reservation plugin that can be utilized in a number of businesses and services.
It comes with 20+ demos, including a multi-part restaurant reservation form called “Book a Table.”
This plugin provides fast and efficient online reservation services and allows you to sync the appointments with Google Calendar.
The plugin also has custom form fields, cost calculation by distance, easy booking cancellation within certain time limits, and more.
Further, it supports booking with or without payment. You can use secured payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe without any third-party installations.
Key Features of the Calendarista:
- 12+ booking style
- Supports seasonal rates
- Customizable email notifications
- WPML and Polylang support
- Live Google map integrations within your site
Price: Premium (Costs $89 for a Regular License)
5. WP Booking Calendar
WP Booking Calendar is the ultimate booking plugin for all types of business and services imaginable. It’s a flexible plugin that you can customize as per your restaurant’s business needs.
You can opt for full-day and time-based appointment slots, time picker or traditional drop-down for reservation slots, and choose from multiple pre-built booking forms.
Additionally, it comes with an easy-to-use admin panel that shows bookings in a calendar overview or listing table and enables you to manage bookings efficiently.
Key Features of the WP Booking Calendar:
- Easy to install and setup
- Perfect booking plugin for a wide range of businesses
- 4 Free Booking Forms
- Booking and Timeline view for the dashboard section
- Booking Calendar Blocks for integrating booking forms to pages
Price: Freemium (Premium plan starts at $39 for a one-time purchase)
How to Add a Restaurant Reservation Form in WordPress?
We’ve discussed the best WordPress restaurant reservation plugins in detail. Now, let’s look at how you can add a restaurant table booking form in WordPress using these plugins.
Here, we’ll use the Everest Forms plugin because it has a user-friendly interface and incredible features that make creating WordPress forms easy.
So, let’s start with the plugin installation.
Step 1. Install and Activate the Everest Forms Plugin
To install Everest Forms on your site, go to Plugins>>Add New from your dashboard.
Then, search for the plugin by typing its name in the search box on the right. Once the plugin displays, click on the Install Now button.
After the installation, don’t forget to hit the Activate button to activate the plugin on your WordPress website. That’s it!
Step 2. Create a Restaurant Table Booking Form
Soon after the plugin installation, navigate to the newly added Everest Forms>>Add New. This opens up an Add New Form page.
You can either create a form from scratch or use a pre-built form template at your convenience.
I. Create a Form with a Pre-built Template
One of the perks of using Everest Forms is that you get a restaurant table booking form template for free.
Choose the Restaurant Table Booking Form from other templates and click on the Get Started button.
Next, give the form a suitable name and hit the Continue button.
Then, a form will be created in no time. However, you can always edit and modify the form to match your requirements.
Also, if you opt for the Pro version of the plugin, you can further customize your form to your heart’s content using the Style Customizer add-on.
II. Create a Form from Scratch
Now, if you’re interested in creating a form from scratch, that’s also easy to do with Everest Forms.
For this, click on the Start from Scratch option, give your form an ideal name, and hit Continue.
Then, a form builder interface opens up. After that, you can drag the required fields from the left and drop them into the blank space on the right. You can add First Name, Last Name, Email, etc.
Also, there’s a Number field to allow your users to enter the number of guests.
Further, the Date/Time field enables the users to choose the appropriate booking date and time. Likewise, you can add other form fields as per your need.
Moreover, you can click on each form field to customize its options.
For instance, if you click the Name Field, it’ll take you to Field Options, from where you can edit the label and description, make a field required, and more.
Similarly, clicking on the Date/Time field lets you edit the label, choose the format for the date, pick the style, and so on.
Once you’re done, don’t forget to click on the SAVE button at the top.
Step 3. Configure General and Email Settings of Your Form
Now that you’ve created a request form, you need to configure booking confirmations, email notifications, anti-spam, and design settings.
I. General Form Settings
Go to Settings>>General to configure the general form settings.
From here, you can edit your form name, add a form description, choose your layout, and even add a custom form class.
Further, there are options to add text to the submit buttons and enable/disable Ajax form submission, and entry information storage.
II. Email Notification Settings
Similarly, to configure email notifications, go to Settings>>Email and enable the Email tab if it isn’t enabled already.
After that, set the To Address under Admin Notification to your email where you want to get notified about reservations and From Name to your restaurant name.
Additionally, you can also add Email Subject and Email Message.
Once it’s all configured, Everest Forms will send a notification to your email whenever users make a reservation.
You can even set up email notifications for your user by clicking on the Add New Email and mapping the To Address to the email field on the form.
III. Successful Submission Setting
Next, you can configure the form submission message under the Confirmations Settings.
If you want to redirect users to your menu after booking submission, you can do it here.
And if you don’t want to enable email notification for customers, you can enable form entry preview here.
IV. Anti-Spam Features
Furthermore, you can protect your form with Honeypot, Akismet, and more features in Settings >> Anti-Spam and Security.
You can also add your Custom CSS and JS, if required, directly from the settings.
Step 4. Add Restaurant Table Booking Form on Your Site
To see your form in action, you need to add it to your site. You can add the form to pages, posts, or anywhere on your site.
Here, we’ll show you how to integrate it into the posts. To do this, copy the shortcode of your form.
Then, go to Posts>>Add New.
When the posts editor page opens up, paste the shortcode. Also, don’t forget to provide a suitable title for your form. Finally, hit the Publish button and make your form go live.
View Your Restaurant Table Booking Form Entries
Once the form is published, you’ll start getting requests for table reservations. Now, you must be wondering where you can view the booking request entries.
Navigate to Everest Forms>>Entries to view all the restaurant table reservation requests.
Not to mention, you can also view each entry individually for its details or even trash it.
Wrapping Up the List of Best WordPress Restaurant Reservation Plugins
Whether you need a basic reservation form or an advanced system with payments and automation, there’s a plugin on this list that fits your needs.
Still unsure which one to pick? We suggest you go with Everest Forms. It’s a flexible form builder that you can create a powerful booking system.
Then there is Five Star Restaurant Reservations if you have a niche use case and can give up on flexibility.
Did we miss your favorite restaurant reservation plugin? Give it a shout-out in the comments below!
And if you are thinking of revamping your restaurant’s website design, check out these WordPress themes to get started.