Have you ever wanted to add event booking and appointment functionality to your WordPress based website for free? Luckily, there are many WordPress calendar plugins available for you to use. In this post, we will cover six different free to use WordPress calendar plugins to help you get started with booking events and appointments.

All these plugins offer a common set of features which is expected because they perform similar functions but some features and the UI of these plugins set them apart from each other.

Before we start with our list of free plugins, I would like to mention that you should also take a look at some premium WordPress calender plugins available on CodeCanyon. In general, you can expect more features and better support from the plugin developers when using a premium plugin from the market. This basically means that you won't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use a specific feature and be able to just get the job done.

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Without any further delay, here are the six free WordPress calendar plugins that you can try out today.

1. The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is currently the most popular free plugin for creating and managing events.

When creating a new event, you can use this plugin to specify the start or end date and time for the event. If the events lasts for a whole day, you can simply check the box for an all-day event.

It also lets you provide information about the location of the event with extra information like the phone number that users can call or a website they can visit for more information. You can also embed Google Maps on the webpage to let users know the exact venue of the event.

The plugin also gives you the option to specify how many events should be shown on a single page for a day. It is also possible to enable comments on the events page in order to get some feedback from the visitors.

My Calendar

Although not as popular as other plugins, the My Calendar WordPress plugin offers a lot of interesting features that make it quite useful.

Visitors can view the events in either grid form or list form. They can also view the events on a monthly, weekly or daily basis. The plugin also offers different widgets to show users the events of the day, upcoming events, a compact calendar and the ability to search through the events.

You can also create recurring events in the plugin and edit individual instances of those recurring events.

One of the features that might be of interest to you is the ease of customization of the plugin. For instance, you can directly edit the primary colors used in the calendar and also change every other aspect like the margins, fonts, padding, and border. In other words, you can get the calendar to look exactly the way you want.

All-in-One Event Calendar

The All-in-One Event Calendar plugin presents events to users in a very unique and refreshing way. It can also import events from other website calendars and allow users to subscribe to get updates about different events.

The plugin allows easy import and export of iCalendar (.ics) feeds so events that you create on one website can be automatically made to appear in the calendar of some other website that you manage.

You can assign different categories and tags to an event. This way it is possible to filter and color code the events based on category. You can also directly create a link to filtered calendar views.

The plugin offers five different views that you can use to display the events on your website. These are: day view, week view, month view, agenda view and posterboard view. You can also show upcoming events to visitors using the upcoming events widget.

Modern Events Calendar Lite

This Modern Events Calendar plugin is a good solution if you are running an event website or a booking website. You can use it to easily add and publish events while organizing them quickly in different groups.

The calendar displayed to the users actually has a more modern design compared to other plugins in the list. It also provides easy ways to migrate all your data from existing event plugins like The Event Calendar.

The plugin offers a lot of views including common ones like full calendar, monthly, daily, and weekly, and other views like countdown view, list view, and carousel view. Some of these views have different skins that you can apply as well. Check them all out on the plugin description page.

There are many other features that you might like including integrations for Mailchimp and BuddyPress. You can import events from Google event calendar. The events can also be exported to various file formats including CSV, JSON and XML.

You can embed Google maps in your events and use custom CSS to completely change the look of the calendars you create.

Easy Appointments

If the website is meant to be used by a lawyer, doctor, mechanic or another professional who has to constantly schedule and cancel appointments with their clients, the Easy Appointments plugin is a great choice.

It allows you to manage all your appointments with ease. You can use it to create appointments for multiple locations, services and workers. It is also possible to have dedicated calendars for particular locations and services.

The plugin provides email notifications to clients when appointments are created or updated. These notifications can have their own custom subject and content. Links to confirm or cancel a booking are also provided within the email itself. Any information from the booking forms can be included inside the emails. Finally, you can have custom emails for different appointment statuses: pending, reservation, canceled and confirmed.

You can either use one-column or two-column layouts for creating the booking forms on the front-end. It is also possible for you to add your own custom fields to the booking form.

If you plan on using the Easy Appointments WordPress plugin, we also have a tutorial to help you get started quickly.

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Booking Calendar

The Booking Calendar plugin is similar to the easy appointment plugin above but uses a different approach.

You can begin by creating booking resources. Each of these resources will identify and services or properties for which you are accepting bookings. For example, if you manage 5 different apartments or 3 different hotels, you could have create them all as separate resources. This means that the booking schedule of different apartments would not interfere with each other.

You can also change the layout of the booking form and add your own custom fields. Similarly, you can customize the email templates to send different emails for different booking actions.

The admin panel makes it very easy for you to manage all the bookings. You can easily changes the details and dates of different bookings. Similarly, you can copy a booking from one resource to another or change the resource of any existing booking.

It is also possible to import bookings from Google Calendar or export existing bookings to CSV format.

Final Thoughts

In this post, we have summarized the features of some popular and free WordPress calendar plugins. Each of them offers something unique that you might find useful. For example, the My Calendar plugin lets you completely change the CSS of the event calendar displayed to the user. Similarly, the Modern Events Calendar Lite plugin has a great looking design and a variety of views with countdown timers. Additionally, it provides integration for Mailchimp and BuddyPress.

Hopefully, one of the plugins mentioned in this post will meet all your requirements. Just in case you are looking for more features, make sure you check out these premium WordPress calendar plugins available in the Envato market. You will also get free support from the plugin developers so that your project is up and running in no time.

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What's your favorite WordPress calendar plugin? Let us know in the comments below!