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WordPress Bundle Booking Engine — Setup Guide

Step-by-step guide to creating your WordPress booking website with the Hostify WordPress Bundle: install the bundle, pick a domain, add cities and listings, initialize, and log in to customize your site.

Written by Nadya

What is the WordPress Bundle?

The WordPress Bundle gives you a ready-to-use booking website powered by your Hostify listings. With one setup flow you get a free hostify.homes subdomain, a pre-installed WordPress site (theme and pages ready to go), and WordPress access so you can customize the look and content yourself — colors, logo, menus, extra pages, and more.

Coming soon: adding your own custom domain (e.g. yourbrand.com) on top of your WP Bundle site, exactly the way it already works in the standalone Booking Engine. The site is still created on your your-name.hostify.homes subdomain; your custom domain is then added in the settings and pointed to it with two CNAME records at your DNS provider.

Step 1 — Open the WordPress Bundle

From Apps, open the WordPress Bundle tile. Once installed, it appears with an "Installed" badge.

Step 2 — Go to Websites and create a new one

Inside the bundle you'll see two items in the left sidebar:

  • Websites — the list of WordPress sites you've already created

  • Create New Website — start a new site

Click Create New Website to begin.

Step 3 — Give your website a name

A small dialog asks for a Name. This is just an internal nickname so you can tell your sites apart — it doesn't show up on the public site. Click Save changes.

Step 4 — Choose your domain, add cities and listings

You're now on the General → Main tab. Fill in everything you need on this screen before saving:

  • Domain — type the subdomain you want (letters and numbers only). Your site will live at your-name.hostify.homes. The .hostify.homes suffix is added automatically.

  • Cities — add at least one city from the Available list (you can add more later).

  • Listings — open the Listings tab and add at least one listing.

When you're done, click Save.

⏳ Saving kicks off the heavy lifting in the background. When you click Save, we provision the WordPress site on your subdomain — installing the theme, all required plugins, and the core booking-engine pages your site needs:

  • Home — landing page with the search bar

  • Listings [hfy_listings] — listings search result page

  • Single listing [hfy_listing]

  • Payment [hfy_payment]

  • Payment result [hfy_payment_charge]

We also index your selected cities and listings so the booking search works. This is the slowest part of the setup and can take a few minutes. The status updates automatically on the page — don't refresh or click Save again, just give it some time to finish.

Other optional pages (User bookings list, User booking details, User wishlist, etc.) are not created automatically — you can add them later from inside WordPress if you need them.

💡 Coming soon — add your own custom domain. Soon you'll be able to add a custom domain (e.g. yourbrand.com) on top of your hostify.homes subdomain. The site is still created on hostify.homes; your custom domain points to it.

It will work the same way as in the standalone Booking Engine: you switch to Custom domain in the settings, paste your domain, and the system shows you two CNAME records to add at your DNS provider (one for the domain itself, one for SSL validation). Once you click I'm Done, we verify the records and provision a free SSL certificate automatically — no need to handle certificates yourself. We'll let you know when this is available for WP Bundle.

Step 5 — Initialize API V3

Once your site is fully created (Step 4 finished) and you have at least one city and one listing, the Initialize API V3 button at the top becomes active.

This button switches your site over to our new, faster WP API V3 — the layer that powers the listing/search results on the front end. Clicking it doesn't recreate the website; it just enables the V3 API for this site so the booking search uses the faster version. When you see ✓ API V3 initialized in green, you're all set.

Step 6 — Get your WordPress login

Open the Connection sub-tab. You'll see everything you need to access your new WordPress site:

  • Website URL — the address of your new site (click Login to open the WordPress admin)

  • Username — your WordPress username (auto-generated)

  • Password — your WordPress password (auto-generated)

  • API URL and API WPKEY — used internally by the bundle, no action needed

Use the Copy buttons to save your credentials somewhere safe — for example, a password manager.

Step 7 — Customize your WordPress site

Click Login (or paste the Website URL into your browser and sign in). You're now in your own WordPress site, where you can:

  • Edit Site Identity — your logo and site title

  • Change Website Colors and Typography

  • Replace the Header Image and adjust the Top Bar and Footer

  • Add or rearrange Menus and Widgets

  • Create new pages (e.g. About, FAQ, Local Guide)

  • Tweak the Homepage Settings and Custom codes if you need to add scripts or styles

Your booking search bar on the homepage is already wired up — it pulls live availability from your Hostify PMS, so guests can search and book in real time.

Other settings work just like in our Booking Engine and WordPress plugin

The WordPress Bundle is built on the same foundations as our standalone Booking Engine and WordPress plugin, so the rest of the configuration — payment methods, discounts, long-term mode, tracking, multi-unit rentals, Google Travel feed and more — works exactly the same way. Instead of repeating ourselves here, please use the existing articles below as your reference. Anything that applies to a Booking Engine website or a WP plugin site also applies to your WP Bundle site.

Conection settings (must-read)

Tracking, updates and listing types

📌 Rule of thumb: if a setting (payment method, discount, tracking, long-term mode, etc.) is described in any of the articles above, it works the same way in the WordPress Bundle. You configure it once in the same Hostify settings — the WP Bundle site picks it up automatically.

Quick recap

  1. Open WordPress Bundle and click Create New Website

  2. Name your website

  3. On the Main tab, fill in your subdomain, add at least one city and one listing, then click Save (the site is provisioned in the background — give it a few minutes)

  4. Click Initialize API V3 to switch the site to the new, faster API

  5. Open the Connection tab to get your WordPress username and password

  6. Log in to WordPress and customize as you like

If anything looks stuck for longer than 10–15 minutes, contact our support team.

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