A booking system for your website: how to choose right

We have built booking systems for hair salons, tattoo studios and restaurants — and we run our own, NBS Booking. So we have seen both what works, and what clients ring about three months after launch.

The short version: choosing a booking system is less about features in a comparison table and more about who has to use it every day.

The four types — and what they cost

1. A ready-made platform with its own link. Calendly, Setmore, Booksy and the like. You create an account, and your customers book at booksy.com/your-company.

Price: DKK 0–300 a month
Up and running in: an afternoon
The downside: the booking happens on their domain, not yours. The customer leaves your site.

2. A ready-made platform embedded in your site. The same systems, but placed in an <iframe> on your own page.

Price: DKK 150–600 a month
Up and running in: a day
The downside: the design is rarely yours, and an iframe is heavy. Expect a noticeable dent in the site’s speed — and therefore in your Google ranking.

3. A WordPress plugin. Amelia, Bookly and the others.

Price: DKK 500–2,500 as a one-off licence plus annual renewal
Up and running in: 1–3 days
The downside: another plugin to keep updated. Booking plugins are among the most attacked, because they handle both customer data and payments.

4. Built into the site. The system is part of the website.

Price: a fixed quote as a one-off, agreed after a conversation
Up and running in: 1–3 weeks
The downside: more expensive to acquire, and you can’t simply switch to something else tomorrow.

When each type makes sense

Do the sums over three years, not over a month. If you want the numbers for your own situation, they are worked through in what a booking system costs.

A ready-made platform at DKK 400 a month costs DKK 14,400 over three years — and you own nothing afterwards. A built-in system at DKK 20,000 plus hosting costs roughly the same, but it is yours.

The line falls where booking stops being a convenience and becomes the business itself:

Under 20 bookings a week: take a ready-made platform. The money is better spent elsewhere.
20–100 bookings a week: an embedded platform or a plugin. This is where design and speed start to matter.
Over 100 bookings a week, or several staff and locations: build it in. Now every clumsy workflow costs you real money every single day.

The five features people regret skipping

This is the list we get phone calls about.

SMS reminders. The most important of them all. No-shows typically drop noticeably when the customer gets a message the day before. For a hairdresser with 30 appointments a week and 10% no-shows, that is revenue lost every week. SMS costs 15–30 øre per message — that is not where you should be saving.

Buffer time between appointments. Without it your calendar is booked back to back, and you are running behind from ten in the morning. Sounds banal. It isn’t.

Different durations per service. A haircut takes 30 minutes, colouring an hour and a half. Systems that only handle one fixed length force you to ring customers and move appointments.

A deposit or prepayment. For expensive services it is the only real protection against no-shows. Requires the system to take payment — not all of them can.

Syncing with your own calendar. Without two-way sync to Google Calendar or Outlook, you risk double bookings every time you add something yourself.

The technical parts that decide whether Google likes the site

This is where we see the most mistakes, and where it hurts most without anyone noticing.

Booking in an iframe is invisible to Google. The content in an iframe belongs to the other domain. Your page gets no credit for it. If you want to rank on “book an appointment with [your trade] in [your town]”, there has to be real text on your own page — not just an embedded widget.

Widgets are heavy. A typical booking widget pulls in 300–800 kB of JavaScript. On mobile over 4G that is often a 1–2 second delay. Google measures exactly that number (LCP), and slow pages rank lower.

The fix is simple: let the booking live on its own subpage (/book-appointment), and only load the widget when the user scrolls down to it. Then the front page stays fast.

Put Service schema on the service pages. Tell Google what you offer, where, and at what price. That is the kind of thing that earns you the rich results in the search listing.

Our own solution

We run NBS Booking, which we built ourselves. We did that for two reasons: we were tired of setting clients up in systems we couldn’t fix, and we wanted SMS reminders included from the start without a licence on top.

The system is part of the website, not an iframe. That means the booking page is indexable, fast and looks like the rest of the site. See it in use at New Style Barbershop.

You get one fixed quote as a one-off, and there is no monthly licence on top. SMS reminders are included. A ready-made platform at DKK 400 a month is cheaper the first year and more expensive every year after, because the subscription never stops. After five years you have paid DKK 24,000 for something you don’t own. We can hold that price because we are three developers with no project managers or salespeople, and because we have already built the system once — you are paying for the adaptation, not for developing it from scratch.

And we will say this just as directly: if you have fewer than twenty bookings a week, don’t buy it from us. Take Calendly and spend the money on something that moves more.

How to choose in ten minutes

Count bookings per week. Under 20 → ready-made platform. Done.
Do you need to take payment online? That halves the list immediately.
Do you have several staff or locations? Then the system needs calendars per person.
Work out the price over 36 months — not over one.
Ask: if I want to switch in two years, can I take my customer data with me?

Point five is the one people forget, and it is the one that hurts.

Frequently asked questions

Can I add booking to my existing website? Almost always. Either embedded or built in, depending on what the site is made in. We will look at it for free.

What does a booking system built into the site cost? The price depends on the number of services, staff and whether payment is taken online, so you get a fixed quote after a no-obligation conversation. You get the price in writing before we begin. See prices, or the full five-year price comparison.

Does it work on mobile? It has to. More than 70% of bookings happen on the phone. If you can’t complete a booking with your thumb on a bus, the system isn’t good enough.

Can I change prices and opening hours myself? In our system, yes — that is the whole point. Always ask about it, whoever you choose.