Your licence and support access

Keep Booked activated, and let support in when you need help.

Your licence is what switches Booked on. It lives in one place — Booked › Settings › Your plan — along with the add-ons your plan includes and the one-time code you hand to Booked support when you want someone to look at your site for you.

Where your licence lives

Open Booked › Settings and pick Your plan from the tab rail down the left — it is ninth, between Add-ons and Activity. There is no Save settings button on this tab, and that is deliberate: every button here acts the moment you press it. Calendar and Activity behave the same way.

• 1The Licence tab — ninth down the rail. There is no Save settings button in the header here; nothing on this tab waits to be saved.
• 2Status chip — reads Active, Payment overdue, Cancelled or Not activated. Only Active keeps Booked running.
• 3Licence key — your gbk_… token. Refresh and Remove from this site only appear once a key is stored, so on a new site you see Activate on its own.
• 4Locked to — the one website address this key belongs to. Worth reading carefully after your first activation.
• 5What your plan includes — the only two things that are separately licensed. Buying the add-on flips both rows to Included at once.
• 6Add-ons — buy or drop the paid add-on without leaving WordPress. This section only appears while the status is Active.

Activate the key on this site

The key comes from your Booked account at trybooked.co, under Account. Only paid, active licences show one.

1. Copy the key from your accountPress Copy next to Activation key. It begins gbk_. Keep it to yourself — it is the credential for your whole subscription.
2. Paste it into Licence key and press ActivateThe button reads Working… while your site talks to Booked. On success you get "Licence active — your add-ons are unlocked."
3. Check the "Locked to" lineIt should show your live website address. If it names a staging or test address, read the next section before doing anything else.

Three things can go wrong here. "That licence token was not recognised." means the key is mistyped or has been replaced — copy it again. "Could not reach the Booked licence server." means your site could not get out to the internet, so ask your host about outbound requests before blaming the key. "This licence is already in use on somedomain.co.uk." means the key is locked to another site.

Moving to a new domain

A key locks itself to one domain the first time it is used. This catches people out when a site is built on a staging address first: activating there burns the lock, and the live site is then refused. Re-pasting the key does nothing — the fix is on the Booked side.

In your Booked account, open Account and press Change domain. Enter the new website address to move the licence, or leave it blank to unlock the key so it can be activated anywhere. Then activate as normal on the site you want. The same card has Rotate key, which issues a new key and stops the old one working instantly — use it if a key has been shared or exposed.

When the licence stops being Active

Booked does not fade out gracefully. The moment the status is anything other than Active, the admin app is replaced by a single activation screen, every Booked request is refused, and the booking form vanishes from your public pages. Visitors see nothing where the form used to be; a logged-in administrator previewing the page sees a small dashed grey hint instead.

• 1Activate Booked — this card replaces your Dashboard, Calendar, Bookings, Customers and Settings entirely. You cannot reach the Licence tab, so the key goes in here instead.
• 2The key field — paste and press Activate (Enter works too). On success the page reloads and the real app boots.

Refresh re-checks your status with Booked straight away and pulls down anything newly bought, so it is the first thing to press after sorting out a payment. Booked also re-checks itself daily in the background.

Adding or removing an add-on

Only two things in Booked are separately licensed: Video consultations and the AI note-taker. They are sold together as one add-on, so both rows change at the same time. Everything else — calendar sync, secure documents, the guided setup assistant, analytics, payments — comes with your platform subscription and will never appear in that list. If you are hunting for "Calendar sync: Included" and cannot find it, nothing is missing.

To buy it, press Add — £5/mo in the Add-ons section. It goes on the card already on file, prorated to your renewal date, and Booked re-reads your entitlement immediately so the feature is usable at once. On an annual subscription you are charged the annual price of £50/yr, even though the button always shows the monthly figure. Remove drops it, and that also takes effect immediately rather than at the end of the period.

You can do the same outside WordPress: your Booked account has an Add-ons page with a card per licence, a tick box per add-on, a running total and a Save changes button.

Let Booked support in — and take it back

To have Booked support fix something on your site, you do not need to share a WordPress password or create an account for them. The Booked support access section at the bottom of the Licence tab mints a one-time code instead. Press Grant support access, then read the code out over the phone or paste it into your support conversation.

• 1Support access is currently active — a code is outstanding. It stays outstanding until it is used, until 30 minutes pass, or until you revoke it.
• 2The code — fourteen characters, single use. Booked only ever stores a scrambled version of it, which is why it is shown once and cannot be looked up again. Generate a fresh one if you lose it.
• 3Revoke access — kills an outstanding code instantly. Press it as soon as the call ends, and any time you generated a code and then changed your mind.

Using the code signs support in as a dedicated Booked Support user that holds Booked's permissions and nothing else — it cannot touch your posts, pages, plugins, themes or other user accounts. Both the grant and the sign-in are recorded on Settings › Activity log as "Support access code generated" and "Booked support signed in", so you always have a record of who came in and when. If someone follows an expired or already-used link they get "This support link is invalid or has expired. Ask the site owner to grant access again."

Keeping Booked up to date

Booked does not appear in WordPress's usual plugin updates screen. Instead, a small toast reading Update available — "Booked 1.4.0 is out — you're on 1.3.0." — appears at the bottom of the app with an Update button. That button opens your Booked account, where you download the new ZIP and install it over the top in the normal WordPress way. Booked HQ also uses the banners along the top of the app for short announcements.

• Dismissing the toast remembers that one version. A newer release brings it straight back.
• Dismissals are remembered per browser, so a colleague on another computer still sees the toast and the announcements you have already cleared.
• Booked chooses which versions are downloadable, so a release with a known problem can be withdrawn. A rollback you expect to be there may not be.