What makes a good restaurant website?

September 25, 2022

Want to build a website for a restaurant, but don't know what it should contain in the first place? Here's my tips for building a restaurant website that covers most of things that customers want.

A good restaurant website entices customers to come and enjoy a meal or order the food online. It also meets all the technical, informational and design needs that create a seamless experience for the users.

Add location information

Every restaurant owner knows that location is king and it is indeed one of the most important informations to have on a website. It makes sense to put this information where it is easily found. Having a clear photo from outside the restaurant and Google Maps embedded on your website can help customers to find the right location. Customers also expect to find opening hours, address, contact details and parking information from this section.

Have a digital menu

While many restaurants still have printed menus and want to keep it that way, displaying your offerings on your website can help customers make decisions before they even arrive. Digital menu can also be viewed on multiple different devices, which makes it a handy alternative to have instead of paper ones.

Another positive is that, all the information on an online menu is easy to update and the changes are instant. You could even have separate product page for each dish and display ingredients, calories and allergy information for those that need them.

Online ordering system

Even though food delivery apps can bring a lot of exposure and sales to a restaurant, it doesn't always lead to profitability with deliverables. Commonly restaurants pay around 30 percent comission for food delivery services, which is a huge burden for a relatively inexpensive meal. That is why restaurants have started to implement their own online ordering systems and delivery personnel to save costs.

For a small restaurant, onlines orders are more of a nice-to-have feature. But as order volume grows it starts to bring a lot more value and opens up opportunities to have all around a better service than the competition. Don't forget that you can also process orders as pick-ups through your website and add a payment gateway to process all the payments without getting into the delivery side of things.

While this can be a big feature to implement, if you're running take-out type restaurant in multiple locations you can achieve better synergy locally with food deliveries. Having your own fast and easy to use order and delivery system really sets you apart from other restaurants.

Online reservations

For a traditional sit-down restaurant, adding online reservations makes life a little bit easier for the customer. It mainly helps restaurants to plan ahead and to avoid excessive overbooking.

A well executed online reservation system helps customers see the booking situation and choose a suitable time for themselves in a easy way. To make it even better, staff should be able to make edits, add, cancel and close reservations when necessary and do it all in real-time. The flexibility that a good online reservation system offers pays dividends in the long run and makes customers feel welcome again and again.

Awesome design that sells visually

With web design first impression counts! A well crafted website design supports the overall brand of your restaurant and helps sell different food items on the menu. Designing the layout and content to fit both desktop and mobile from day one makes the browsing experience feel good no matter what device your on.

What design elements are important on a restaurant website?

Now, you might be thinking - what design aspects should the restaurant website focus on to create interest? Here's my list:

Great images

• Variety of different types high resolution images help to sell the experience as whole.

Descriptive copywriting

• The right words help to convey the message and take action!

Responsive layout

• It's beneficial to design mobile-first to identify core features and usability issues.

Readable typography

• It is best to choose fonts that are easy to read, and also fit the brand well.

Colors that match

• Using the right color combinations can help to invoke feelings.

The layout

For most restaurant websites the layout tends to be very simple. To display only the bare minimum information in a quick manner, a one page layout with few sections is often sufficient enough. Yet still, setting up individual pages for each section of the website makes it more easy for customers and search engines to find the right information.

Hero section

The hero section of a website is commonly displayed first when entering a new website and it is perhaps the most important part to get right. Enticing looking images or graphics with descriptive short title and text section can make people want to learn more about your restaurant.

It's important to make sure that the hero section's copywriting is intresting, SEO friendly and descriptive of the restaurant. It answers what the restaurant is all about in short way.

Highlighting your unique selling point, a quality that you're most famous for, with an image or an background video is a great way to make most out of your hero section. You want customers to be excited after just seeing that and follow up with further actions!

Add action with animated gifs!

One way to bring more life to your website is by adding one or two short gif -videos. Seeing a chef toss food in the air and catching it or flambéing a desert can be a mouth-watering experience! And it doesn't have to be just food, perhaps it is the atmosphere, interior design or small details that intrigue people just slightly more.

Here's a example from Meating Steakhouse, where videos are being used to spice up different sections of the website. Personally I prefer smaller animated gifs like the one above, that don't overwhelm the whole screen and can be matched with some text paragraphs.

Colors

Colors invoke feelings in us and there's a lot of synergy with food and colors. Using just couple of matching colors usually works better than having too many. Having clear brand identity from the beginning sets you up for success and makes it much easier to figure out the rest.

Technical requirements

When building a restaurant website, there's a couple of technical aspects that should be taken care of before hitting 'publish'. First key point is to make sure that the website loads fast enough to prevent customers from cancelling page visits due to slow response times.

Security concerns

Another issue to consider is the security of the platform. With popularity of Wordpress as a CMS / website builder, it is commonly more targeted platform for hackers searching for financial or informational gain. It's not uncommon to have to update some plugin vulnerability every now then on a Wordpress site. This doesn't mean that Wordpress can't be made secure, it is just a matter of having good security practices and maintenance which do take some effort.

With static hosted website the risks are much lower, as all the code is already pre-processed for the user and are only served from a host.

Scalability

By building a simple website, the scalability won't be much of a issue with restaurant website. On average, the website might get thousands to tens of thousands visitors per month and most hosting services can handle the load without much of an issue.

Even with some backend services, you'd need quite a bit traffic to bottleneck incoming requests or data retrieval.

Larger widespread businesses attracting over 100 000 monthly visitors might have to start utilizing a CDN to serve all the content and perhaps setup load balancers to prevent service disruptions during traffic peaks.

Domain

Choosing a suitable domain, preferably the restaurant's name on a .com -domain is the recommended way to go. If that particular domain is not available, try to find short and memorable domain that best describes your restaurant.

You should register the website domain yourself to keep it under your control. Best way to check whether the domain is free is to type it in the browser and see if it leads to any page on the web. Getting a "Server not found" response page means that it's free. Do not use domain registrar's tools to check domain availability - by doing so you avoid the chances of exposing your planned domain to arbitrage.

Hosting

To choose a suitable hosting it is best to focus on speed and reliability of the service. Additional features like free SSL -certificate or email hosting are nice to have as well.

The prices of hosting vary some for a small website, but usually stay around the 5 - 10 USD/month range.

Mobile friendly responsive design

Adapting to different display sizes is part of the process designing the website layout. Writing the CSS from scratch to style each page can take some time without a proper page builder.

There are also CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS that help to speed up the styling workflow. On top of that, some websites utilize CSS animations or animation libraries to achieve transitional effects for content elements.

As a result of the responsive design phase, all the pages show up nicely with different browsers and devices enhancing the UX/UI design of the website.

Fast loading

As website load speeds have become more important for the customers, it has become also a ranking factor in SEO. Therefore optimizing the content for speedy delivery is more crucial.

Reducing the sizes of the hosted files is quick and easy fix to enhance the website load times. Also checking that images are loaded in a responsive way prevents the loading of unnecessarily big resolution images.

Targeting load times under 2 seconds or less should be the goal. You can check how long a website loads by typing the url to Google's PageSpeed Insights.

SSL certificate

SSL offers more secure way of communication between the client and the server. In essence, SSL makes your website seem more trustworthy as browser will flag your site without one. Additionally, SSL is a factor in the websites total SEO ranking.

SEO

With a brand new domain it can be hard to get any traction in the beginning. Using active marketing methods such as social media channels to get visitors in the early stage is a better option. Reaching out to different local newspapers and media channels can aid to get some coverage as well.

However by targeting the right location specific keywords with time Google will start to index the results higher in the search results.

As most restaurant websites do not rely on content marketing (blog or video) it is important to setup Google Business Profile to be found on Google Maps. This helps customers nearby find your restaurant in the search.

Add Google Maps

All that is needed for a Google Maps placement is a Google Business Profile. Creating the profile is quite easy and Google will actually send you a verification letter to finalize the process. Just make sure all the information is correct and you've added all the links to your website and other channels.

With Google Business you can also integrate reservations with different booking systems so that customers can reserve table straight from the Google Maps listing.

Brings results

To sum it all up, good restaurant website ticks all the boxes and helps to run a restaurant in a smooth and profitable way. It requires quite a bit of expertise from different areas of development to be able to put it all together and bring results.

In the end it all boils down to how great the food is at the restaurant and are customers willing to come again and recommend it to friends. And a website can be great advocate to convey those core values through and show everyone what you're passionate about.

In case you need help with your restaurant website you can contact me here or request a project assesment for a quote.