Calendly on Your Website: the Simple Guide to Receiving Appointment Bookings¶

Calendly is the best-known tool in the world for letting people book without a back-and-forth of messages. You put it on your website, the client picks a time, the appointment shows up in your calendar. No phone call, no "I'll let you know".

It works very well for what it is: a booking form. In this guide we look at how to set it up step by step, how to embed it in your website even if you have never touched a line of code, and how to make it live alongside your practice's WhatsApp assistant without ending up with two clients at the same time.

Calendly on your website: what you need and what is free¶

You need three things:

• A Calendly account. Signing up is free.
• Your Google Calendar, the one you actually work with.
• The ability to edit a page on your website, or someone who can do it for you in two minutes.

On the free plan it pays to know what to expect. You can keep one single event type active, so one single type of appointment, and connect one calendar account. The booking page shows Calendly branding and you cannot customize it with your own colors and logo. Embedding the form in your website, however, is available on the free version too, and to get started that is what matters most. Up-to-date plan details are on the Calendly pricing page.

How to set up Calendly for your practice's appointments in 6 steps¶

1. Create the account on calendly.com and connect your Google account when prompted.
2. Open your event type and edit it. Give it the name of the real service, for example "First visit" or "Treatment session". That is the title the client will see.
3. Set the duration to the real length of the service, not the ideal one.
4. Define your availability, meaning the days and time ranges when you accept bookings. You can set two ranges on the same day, morning and afternoon, leaving the lunch break out.
5. Add buffers between one appointment and the next. In the advanced options section you will find buffers: those ten or fifteen minutes you need to tidy up and take notes. How they work is explained in Calendly's guide to buffers.
6. Set a minimum scheduling notice. Without it, someone can book for twenty minutes from now while you are already with another client.

The field you cannot forget: the phone number¶

By default Calendly only asks for name and email. For a practice, that is not enough.

In the booking form section (Invitee form) add a question, following Calendly's guide to invitee questions. You can add up to ten, but for now you only need one.

As the question text, write something that explains what it is for:

WhatsApp number you want to receive the reminder on

Tick Required and choose Phone number as the answer type. There is no need to ask for a particular format: however the client writes it is fine. If you often get clients from abroad, add "with international country code", because a number written without a country code is interpreted based on the country your practice is in.

On the same screen it is also worth turning off the client's ability to add other guests to the appointment. In a practice it is almost never needed, and with several people invited it becomes harder to work out automatically who the real client is when the appointment lands in your calendar.

A second field always worth adding: "What do you need?", not required. It gets you into the practice already knowing who is in front of you.

How to embed Calendly in your website: the three options¶

Calendly generates the code for you. The full procedure is in the official guide on how to add Calendly to your website.

1. Go to your event types page.
2. Click the three dots next to the event and choose Add to website.
3. Choose how you want it to appear:
4. Inline embed: the calendar appears inside the page, as if it were part of it. It is the right choice for a "Book" or "Contact" page.
5. Popup widget: a button stays visible in a corner of the screen while the person browses, and opens the booking when they tap it.
6. Popup text: a clickable word inside the text opens the booking. Great inside articles, because it does not interrupt the reading.
7. Click Copy code.
8. Paste the code into your website inside an HTML or Custom code block. On WordPress it is called "Custom HTML", on Wix and Squarespace "Embed code". If you paste it into a normal text block you will see the code written out on the page: it is the most common mistake, and it is fixed by changing the block type. The differences between the options are summed up in the embed options overview, and for anyone using Google Sites there is a dedicated guide.

Always check the result on your phone before considering it finished: the inline embed, on small screens, needs verifying.

Calendly and Google Calendar: the connection everything depends on¶

This is the part that decides whether the system works or causes you problems. Follow the official guide on connecting your Google Calendar and stop on two settings in particular.

Calendars to check for conflicts. Here you tell Calendly which calendars to read to work out when you are busy. Select the calendar you actually use for the practice. If you do not, Calendly will offer times when you already have someone in front of you.

Calendar where events are added. Here you tell Calendly where to write booked appointments. It must be the exact same calendar you connected to your WhatsApp assistant. Not a similar one, not one dedicated to online bookings: the same one.

It is worth remembering that Calendly only counts time marked as busy: an event marked "Free" on your calendar blocks nothing, as explained in the guide on busy vs free calendar settings.

One last thing useful to anyone working in person: Google tends to add a video call link to every event automatically. If you see patients at the practice, that link is useless and confusing. You turn it off following Google's instructions.

Calendly and a WhatsApp assistant together: three rules for never taking two appointments at the same time¶

If you receive bookings from Calendly and you have an assistant that books on WhatsApp, you have two systems writing into the same calendar. It works perfectly well, on one condition: that both look at the same calendar.

Wably reads availability straight from Google Calendar before offering a time, and checks it a second time the instant it writes the appointment. So a slot already taken by a booking that came in from Calendly is never offered to the client writing on WhatsApp. And the other way round, an appointment taken in chat shows up in the calendar, Calendly reads it as busy time and stops offering it.

Rule 1: one single calendar for everything. The calendar Calendly checks, the one Calendly writes to, and the one connected to Wably must be the same. How to connect the calendar is in the documentation on the Google Calendar integration.

Rule 2: line up durations and buffers. If in Wably the session lasts 45 minutes with a 15-minute buffer, set the same values in the Calendly event. If the two channels use different grids you end up with ten-minute gaps that are impossible to fill. Wably's durations and buffers are set in the Business hours page of the dashboard.

Rule 3: keep personal commitments in the calendar, marked as busy. That goes for holidays, courses, meetings. If it is marked "Free", for both systems that time is bookable.

WhatsApp reminders for people who book from Calendly too¶

This is why I insisted on the number format.

Wably syncs your calendar periodically: when it finds an appointment in the calendar that it did not take itself, it recognizes it, records the client and adds them to your contacts. From there that person enters the normal flow, meaning they receive the automatic WhatsApp reminder before the appointment and, after the visit, the review request.

Recognizing the client happens on its own. Name and email are read from the event invitee, and that is exactly where Calendly writes them when it creates the appointment in your Google Calendar. You do not have to adopt any convention or any particular way of writing the event title.

What is missing, and what you have to ask for in the form, is the phone number: without it, the appointment stays in the calendar but there is no channel to send the reminder on. The format is not a problem, Wably recognizes the number however it is written: +1 555 123 4567, 001 555 123 4567, (555) 123-4567, 555-123-4567. When a number arrives without an international country code it is completed based on the country your practice is in, so check just once that the correct country and time zone are set in your dashboard profile.

Make one test booking, just once. Book from your own Calendly using your number, then check two things: that the appointment showed up in the calendar and that you appear among the contacts in the dashboard. If you are there, the chain works and you will never have to think about it again.

It is one extra reminder on every appointment taken from the website, and it is the cheapest way there is not to lose a slot. On the real cost of no-shows we wrote a dedicated article: what managing appointments by hand really costs.

What Calendly covers and what it does not¶

Calendly does one thing and does it well: it books the appointment for someone who has already decided. They have read who you are, they know what they want, they are only looking for a free time. For those people the form is perfect.

The point is that those people are the minority. Before booking, most want to know whether you treat their problem, how much it costs, whether there is parking, whether they need a referral, whether you can see them on a Saturday. Someone with a question who finds a booking form does not book: they close the page. They will never write to tell you, and you will never know you lost them.

Then there is everything that happens after the booking. The reschedule, the cancellation, the "can I come half an hour later?", the "can you remind me of the address?". Those requests do not arrive on Calendly: they arrive on WhatsApp, and if nobody answers they become phone calls you pick up yourself, or they become no-shows.

An AI assistant that holds a conversation on WhatsApp covers exactly that part: it answers questions, offers the free times and confirms the booking in the same conversation, on the number your client already has in their contacts. If you are interested in the comparison with button-based chatbots and with traditional practice management software, we put them side by side in this article.

The two together cover the whole journey: Calendly on the website for those who have already decided, WhatsApp for everyone else, and a single calendar underneath keeping it all lined up.

Five mistakes to avoid¶

1. Having Calendly write to a different calendar from the assistant's. It is the number one cause of double bookings.
2. Not selecting the calendars to check for conflicts. Calendly will offer times when you are already busy.
3. Not asking for the phone number. No number means no reminder, and no reminder means the no-shows stay where they are.
4. Leaving the automatic video call link on appointments that take place at the practice.
5. Publishing without testing from your phone. That is where most of your clients will book from.

Frequently asked questions¶

Is Calendly free? Yes, there is a free plan. It lets you keep one single event type active and connect one calendar account, it shows Calendly branding on the booking page and does not let you customize it with your own colors. Embedding the form in your website is available on the free version too.

Do you need to know how to code to put Calendly on your website? No. Calendly generates the code for you: you just copy it and paste it into an HTML block on your website page. If someone else manages the site, it takes them two minutes.

Can I use Calendly on the website and Wably on WhatsApp at the same time? Yes, and it is the recommended setup. They have to work on the same Google Calendar: Wably reads real availability before offering a time and never offers a slot already booked through Calendly, while appointments taken in chat are read by Calendly as busy time.

Do people who book from Calendly get the WhatsApp reminder? Yes, if their phone number is present in the calendar event. Wably reads name and email from the event invitee, which is where Calendly writes them, and recognizes the number in whatever format it was entered. The only thing to do is make the phone number question required in the booking form.

Calendly or a WhatsApp assistant: which is better? They serve different moments. Calendly books the appointment for someone who has already decided and is browsing the website. The WhatsApp assistant answers people who still have questions about services, prices and hours, and walks them through to the booking. Used together on the same calendar they cover both types of client.

How do I stop two people booking the same time? By having Calendly and the assistant work on the same calendar. Calendly does not offer times taken by events in the connected calendar, and Wably re-checks availability the instant it writes the appointment, so a slot taken a few seconds earlier is not confirmed.

In short¶

Put Calendly on your website: it takes a quarter of an hour to set up, it is free to start with and it recovers bookings from people who would never call you. Then remember that the website is not the door most people come in through.

Wably answers on the other one, the one your client already has open on their phone, and it writes into the same calendar. Try it free for 30 days or take a look at how syncing with Google Calendar works.