How to Build a Direct Booking Website using WordPress
Looking to build your direct booking site on WordPress? Here’s a detailed guide on how to build your site, what hosting services to use, what plugins and themes you need, and some limitations you should be aware of. Owning a direct booking website is essential for short-term rental operators seeking to reduce OTA fees, build guest relationships, and gain control over their business.While WordPress offers flexibility and scalability, building a site from scratch can be a daunting, time-intensive process. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to build a direct booking site using WordPress. Step 1: Secure Your Domain Name When you build a direct booking site using WordPress, you want to first start off buy making sure that you are using securing a custom domain name. This domain name is where your guests will find your site. In this guide we’ll walk you through using a temporary domain to get your site up and running and then registering the custom domain that you purchased. You can read more about why a custom domain is more effective than a provided sub-domain url. Top Domain Registrar Options How to Register and Configure Your Domain Step 2: Choose and Set Up Your Hosting Provider Top Hosting Provider Options How to Configure Hosting 1. Purchase Hosting: Sign up for a hosting plan and link your purchased domain. 2. Set Up Your Site: Log in to your hosting dashboard and choose “Add Website” or “Set Up Site.” Step 3: Install WordPress Now that your have your hosting provider set up, let’s continue to build a direct booking site by installing WordPress. WordPress is a platform used by many agencies and companies to build flexible websites. Why it was born out of a platform to host your blog, many have now used it to build business sites. Though it has it’s limitations and complexities, it can build a beautiful site with a bit of effort. Installing WordPress 1. Choose your hosting location. This will be dependent on the location of your guests visiting your site. In more advanced options, hosting will be spread across multiple data-centers bue most commercial hosting providers only provide one server location so while not optimal pick the one that’s closest to the majority of your guests. 2. Choose Create new website as your option since we’re starting fresh. If you have an existing site you’re taking over you can copy existing site. Keep in mind that this is not often recommended as this does not copy all plugins and data associated with that wordpress instance. 3. Provide the domain that you have registered. Alternatively you can provide a temporary domain to be used. For this guide, we will set up our domain at the end to get through the critical steps to set up the direct booking site. Select your domain and follow the prompts to configure your WordPress installation: 4. Create a Login for this wordpress account. This is different than you Hostinger account. Hostinger is just the hosting provider (the server where you wordpress site lives). You’ll have a different login for your wordpress site for when you make necessary changes and plug-in upgrades. 5. Complete the installation and access your WordPress using the “Admin Panel” button on the hosting provider dashboard Step 4: Set Up and Configure the Homey Theme Why Homey? Homey is a robust WordPress theme for vacation rentals, offering features like built-in booking tools, customizable property pages, and advanced search filters. It makes it an effective way to build your direct booking site using WordPress without needing to design all the logic that goes into building the site. How to Install the Homey Theme 1. Purchase the Homey theme from ThemeForest. Tip: Opt for the extended license so that you get upgrades for this plug-in. These updates are important as they include security patches. 2. Extract the files from the downloaded zip from Themeforest. 3. Navigate to Appearance → Themes → Add New → Upload Theme. 4. Upload the .zip file, install, and activate the theme. Install Required Plugins 2. Activate the Plugin after each installation. 3. Repeat this process for all plugins Import Demo Content 1. Navigate to Appearance → Homey Options → Import Demo Data 2. Select the demo layout that best matches your needs (e.g., single property or multi-property). 3. Follow the prompts to import pre-built pages, menus, and content. Be patient, as it can take up to 15 minutes to generate all necessary files. Step 5: Create and Manage Property Listings Now that we have our structure in place we’ll need to add our properties on our direct booking site. When we downloaded the demo data, it provided us with lots of examples on how to provide our property details. Before getting started it might be helpful to browse through some of the examples. We’ll end up removing these later so that we don’t have placeholder properties on our site. Adding Properties 1. Navigate to Listings → Add New in the WordPress dashboard. 2. Fill in details: 3. Remove all other demo listings from the site. 3. Tip: Remember to manually update listings if you add new properties or change your PMS. WordPress does not sync automatically. Calendar and Pricing 1. Login to your front-end dashboard. You do this by visiting your live site and selecting “admin” in the upper right corner. 2. Select “Edit” on one of your listing and access the Calendar tab 3. Set up availability calendars by selecting Import under the “Sync ICal” dropdown menu. 4. Go to your PMS and find the option to export your ical calendar for each property. They’ll provide you with a URL to sync calendars. 5. Enter your iCal URL into the Feed URL option. Tip: The calendar is pulled every 4 hours by default. This does present the slight risk of double booking if someone books before your site pulls the latest changes. Update Pricing Tip: Dynamic pricing tools (e.g., PriceLabs) do not sync automatically with WordPress plugins,