A booking page, with nothing to build

A booking page is a page hosted here where your customers book: a service, who does it, a free time on your business's clock and their details, with a deposit or the full price paid online when the service asks for one. Nobody has to build anything. Switch it on from the Booking page screen under Bookings, and put it in front of customers in any of the ways below.

Its address

https://backendfree.com/book/your-address, where the last part is yours to pick: lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, from 3 to 60 characters, not used by another website here, and not one of the few words kept for this platform. The screen suggests one from the website's name.

Changing it stops every link already shared from working, at once. The old address is kept from every other website for 30 days, so nobody else takes over a link you printed.

A link

Anywhere a link goes: a button on your website, a social profile, a business listing, an email signature. It works whatever your website is built with, and without a website at all.

Inside a page of your website

Paste the tag from the Booking page screen where the booking page should appear, in an HTML or embed block:

<script defer src="https://backendfree.com/static/bookings/page.js"
  data-page="your-address" data-title="Book at Your Business"></script>

It puts the booking page in a frame right after the tag. The frame grows and shrinks with each step instead of scrolling inside itself, and when a new step starts with the top of the frame out of view, your page scrolls back to it. data-title names the frame for screen readers. A tag naming an address of any other shape places nothing.

Where a website runs no scripts, a frame of a fixed height does the same job, scrolling inside itself when a step is taller:

<iframe src="https://backendfree.com/book/your-address" title="Book at Your Business"
  width="100%" height="900" loading="lazy" referrerpolicy="no-referrer" style="border: 0"></iframe>

If your website sends a Content-Security-Policy, it has to allow https://backendfree.com in script-src for the tag, and in frame-src for either.

What a customer sees

1. A service, with its price and how long it takes, unless you hide either.
2. Who, when more than one person does that service: somebody by name, or whoever is free. Turned off, this step is skipped and whoever is free is booked.
3. A day and a time, a week at a time and never further ahead than you take bookings, on your business's clock, with a note when the customer's own clock is a different one.
4. Their details: a name, an email address, a phone number (required when your booking rules ask for one), and anything they want you to know.
5. The answer: booked, waiting for you to confirm it, or waiting for payment.

When something is owed, Pay opens the payment page in a tab of its own, since a payment page is never shown inside a frame. The time is held while they pay, 15 minutes unless you change it, and the booking page updates by itself once the payment arrives.

The confirmation email links to a page where the customer sees, moves or cancels that one booking within your rules, unless Where customers manage their booking on the Booking rules screen names a page of your own.

How it looks

Customize on the Booking page screen opens an editor beside the page itself: every colour, the ticket summing up the appointment apart from the rest, the top of the page, the welcome and the note shown after booking, which steps are asked, the clock, and the layout, spacing, corners and lettering. The page changes as you edit, in test mode; customers see the changes once you publish them. The lettering is a font already on each visitor's device, so the page loads nothing more for it.

Trying it first

The Booking page screen shows the page in test mode, and its Open in a new tab link works for 24 hours, while the page is still switched off too. Bookings made there are test bookings: they hold no real appointment, and their emails come to you, marked as a test.

What it keeps to itself

• It sets no cookie, stores nothing on a visitor's device, and is not measured.
• Search engines are asked not to list it, so it does not compete with your website in their results.
• Before a booking is made, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person rather than a script is booking. Its script reads the visitor's browser to tell which, and this platform sends Cloudflare nothing else about them.
• Every call it makes is the API's own, under your rules and limits: free times and bookings count against your account's 250,000 requests a month, as they would from your own website.

An address nobody holds, a page switched off, and a website whose bookings are off or whose plan has lapsed all answer This booking page is not available.

To build booking into your own pages instead, the Quickstart takes a booking through the same API.