Having only a website will not help you make your restaurant business successful. A good web design for restaurants is essential to lure the attention of foodies. It should reflect a perfect look and feel of mouth-watering dishes, and taste of astounding pieces of meat, coffee, and many other food items.
Make sure your restaurant website is capable of matching the feel and taste buds of customers and prompt them to visit your location. Approximately, 60% of customers use their mobile phones to visit restaurant websites. So, the most important thing you need to take into account is that your website is optimized for mobile
You need to understand that your restaurant website is not meant only for awareness about your food menu and services. It should have the capability of giving your prospects a great sense of dining experience.
In this post, we will discuss in detail how to design your restaurant website by keeping every important factor in mind.
What is Web Design for Restaurants?
When it comes to restaurants web design, it’s something that involves creating a user-friendly and engaging website that reflects menu, brand, ambiance, and services. It includes top-quality images, appealing layouts, mobile responsiveness, and online reservation or commission free online ordering systems.
A perfectly designed restaurant website brings a lot of benefits such as improved online visibility, dining experience, and increased reservations or takeout orders.
The most important features include customer reviews, interactive menus, social media integration, etc. With SEO optimization, your website can gain more traffic with increased online ordering to local diners.
An effective website design distinguishes your restaurant from others in the competitive market. It offers potential customers with necessary information and streamline operations while offering a unique identity of establishment, and atmosphere.
Why Do Restaurants Need Website Design?
Having a perfectly-designed restaurant website is necessary in today’s time. It’s essential for restaurants to flourish in the competitive market with an increased online sales. Apart from this, restaurant owner need websites for several other reasons as well.
- Build Customer Trust
A restaurant website with a perfect design is necessary to build credibility and trust among a large number of potential customers. When visitors come across a professionally created restaurant website, there’s the immense possibility that they will believe in both the quality and authenticity of the restaurant.
When you reflect hygiene standards, customer reviews, and quality images of dishes, your restaurant creates a perfect sense of reliability and transparency that encourages first-time visitors to dine and indeed online ordering.
- Boost Brand Image
Once you create a research-based and attractive restaurant website, it helps you create a good impression that will definitely result in recurring customers with an improved restaurant branding. That’s the main reason why every restaurant owner seeks to hire an experienced restaurant website design company. They have a professional design team that handles everything with a higher efficiency.
Having a dedicated restaurant website lets you get full control over the design where you can experiment with information, images, etc. You can use the top images from various angles, and offer necessary information with a clear objective to boost your restaurant branding. Images and details provide enough ideas about your business.
- Improve Search Engine Rankings
We all are aware of the fact that mobile-friendliness is one of the factors that determine the ranking of any website in Google. It reflects that search engines prefer those websites specifically designed to display on many devices such as tablets and smartphones.
If your new website needs zooming and scrolling to display its content on different mobile devices, your ranking tends to be affected as a result. If your restaurant site ranks well, it will gain more visitors and thus discover potential customers, which boosts online ordering.
- Minimize Advertising Cost
Many restaurant owners of late spend huge amounts of money on advertisements to promote their services. It helps them grab more online ordering and people. Having a dedicated website lets them gain an opportunity to advertise their food items, introduce new offers, and more.
Apart from this, you can leverage many advertising channels to drive users to your website. You can gain an opportunity to present lucrative offers, endless amounts of information, and more for just a small fraction of the cost.
- Maximize your Reach among Prospects
A well-designed website lets you maximize your reach among most of your audience. When users search for restaurants, they first look for the first thing they perform is to choose the nearest device and search for the right restaurants.
You can optimize your website perfectly with the right keywords to improve the ranking of your website in search engines. Once your website starts ranking, it can easily reach your target audience.
10 Effective Tips for Restaurant Web Design for Beginners
Whether you wish to design your restaurant website on your own or hire a reputed restaurant website design company, you need to consider various important factors. Keeping these factors in mind helps you make an astounding website with attention-seeking design. Let’s explore all those factors in-depth.
- Keep Eyes on your Competitors
Before you proceed with your restaurant website design, you need to take a complete look at your competitor’s website. You need to check everything clearly to know what works well and also whatnot. Analyzing your competitor’s website helps you understand the following important things;
- It helps you be versed in many industry trends
- Effective and modern design elements
- Customer expectations
Once you go through their content management systems (CMS), menu presentations, layouts, customer engagement strategies, or booking systems, it helps you find out what works perfectly and also the things that can be improved. For instance, if you find your competitor’s template is highly attractive, you can use the same template.
- Keep Search Engines in Mind
As we already explained, the appearance of your website impacts adversely on the overall performance of your search engines. So, to make your website rank highly in search engines, you need to create the design of your website by keeping search engines in mind.
Make sure your website is highly responsive. Google always prefers responsive websites in searches. You need to plan the design of your website across keyword-rich pages.
It should be designed to attract those who seek something specific including cuisine you offer or also for any particular dish.
- Prioritize Mobile-Friendliness
As per research, approximately 54% of web traffic comes through mobile devices. You need to keep this thing in mind while designing your restaurant website. Make sure every element of your restaurant website is mobile-ready.
We have explained here a couple of tips and tricks to optimize your website for mobile devices.
- Perform a Google mobile-friendly test to know whether your website is optimized for mobile You need to just put the URL of your website in the tool and push the ‘start’ button to get the final outcomes. The tool also indicates several issues that it finds.
- AMP is the most important method that is useful to create a mobile version of any web page through stripping down the content and also eliminating unwanted media files and many advanced layouts. Once you apply AMP for WordPress plugin, it helps you create your own AMP pages even without any need to know the way of creating any special JavaScript and HTML file.
- Fast loading speed is another important feature of a mobile-optimized website. It’s one of the major considerations for any mobile device. But, it’s specifically important for any mobile device. You can improve the loading speed of your website by choosing the right hosting provider, reducing loading times, minimizing large items in web design, and more.
- Design for Better Usability and User Experience
When it comes to usability, it’s one of the factors that yield higher conversion to the website. A large number of restaurant websites care only about appearance but few of them look only for creating a robust online presence preferred to the structure of the website.
While you create the structure of your website for better usability, your primary goal should be to keep the way users use your website. A well-designed website ensures users can easily and quickly find important information related to your restaurant and food items.
When you keep your prospects in mind while crafting your website structure, it helps you create an easy to navigate and clean website. Whenever users seek to get information, they first scroll the website altar and keep their eyes at the top navigation menu.
When you plan the structure of your website, make sure users find everything they wish to get. It’s advisable to place the vital information on the top to make it easily noticeable to users. Your website needs to tell a story especially when users start accessing and scrolling your website. It yields higher engagement and thus helps you get more guest.
So, when you create a restaurant website design, it’s always advisable to create a perfect website structure for improved usability and user experience.
- Implement Intuitive Navigation
A perfect website layout is essential to make crucial elements easy to discover. It’s necessary to implement a ‘Place Order’ button to generate higher clicks. You need to check whether visitors prefer ‘search tools’ or menus on top, bottom or side.
You need to design your website accordingly. It’s indeed the best idea to design your website that mirrors perfectly the natural viewing of your website. You can implement the following important tips and tricks to implement an intuitive navigation to your website;
- Keep your website menu simple and visible
- Highlight important pages
- Use breadcrumbs and add internal links to guide users
- Include a search bar for locations, dishes, company history and other details quickly.
- Use important and descriptive icons.
- Opt for the Right Color
Color is one of the important elements that determine the beauty of your website. So, you need to take into account this as an important factor. You need to always spend enough time selecting the right color for your restaurant website.
The most important choices are colors in your restaurant interiors or logo. Meanwhile, matching your color scheme to your physical restaurant is certainly not an important necessity. Black background can be the right choice for those in high-end establishments.
It offers a complete feeling of sophistication. Quite the contrary, a white background is best for offering a perfect air of freshness. Every color scheme works based on the type of your restaurant website. If you are still not able to decide the right color, you can consider the following important tips;
- You need to keep in mind the theme and cuisine
- Keep in mind your brand identity
- Create a color palette
- Focus on contrast and reliability
- Use High-Quality Images and Videos
Your restaurant website design is incomplete without quality images and videos. Images you wish to choose for your website play a vital role in grabbing the attention of visitors and thus encourage them to explore more about your business and website.
Make sure you opt for superior quality images on your website. You need to opt for using the best quality images for your website. It has enormous potential to provide a lot more about your restaurant atmosphere.
In case, if you own a great storefront in any specific area, you should never hesitate to reflect that off to your prospects. It’s a great idea to add more top-quality images from various angles. It’s indeed a great idea to use small background videos that reflect your food, restaurant, and many other services.
You should not just add any videos to your restaurant website rather than look for any top visuals. It’s indeed a great idea to add a great visual to your website for better and the most effective outcomes. The most important things you need to consider include;
- Always use powerful images at the beginning that catch the attention of users easily.
- Always display clear and top-quality images on your website.
- The image should highlight signature dishes
- The image should reflect your restaurant’s ambiance
- Use mobile-friendly images and implement alt-text SEO
- Be Clear with your Messages
Make sure your restaurant website design includes a clear message that can convert users into potential customers. It not only delivers the actual purpose of your restaurant but also lets you get an improved ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs).
It helps you tell your story most effectively and also your sole mission. You need to be aware that different people will respond in different ways to your message. The best idea is to add a combination of visual and textual messages to create a good impression. It increases the conversion rate of your website as well.
You need to be highly transparent while offering messages rather than holding any information. Apart from offering clear messages, you need to select the right font as well to make your message easily readable to customers.
Types of Messages you can include in your Restaurant Website
Following are the most important types of messages you can consider to implement;
- Welcome messages
- Daily specials
- Promotions
- Online reservation and online ordering reminders
- Contact information, company history, and business details
- Create a Blog
Always remember your website is incomplete without a blog. It’s an important method of interacting and engaging with your customers. You need to create blogs on relevant topics. It’s a good idea to integrate your blog with your social media pages.
Using your blog in the right way helps you to highlight your new mouth-watering dishes, special events, gift card offers, and many others. Following are some tips and tricks you can implement while creating a blog for your restaurant website;
- Make sure your blog includes user-generated content.
- It’s advisable to ask customers if they allow you to link to their social media pages where they posted their recent images at your restaurant.
- You can also ask your customer whether they permit you to use their images to mention their events in your blog.
- You can also highlight some great reviews in your blog. If you get a review of your restaurant on platforms like TripAdvisor, Yelp, or others, you can link those reviews to your blog.
- Use Social Buttons
It’s advisable to add important social media buttons on your website to let people follow you on these platforms. These buttons serve as a good marketing tools as well. Doing this allows your website to serve as an important connector between your potential customers and also many other marketing efforts.
You can use the following social media buttons;
- TikTok
Tips to implement social buttons on your restaurant website;
- Place on header, footer, side floating button, blog, or contact page.
- You can use the color and official logos of every platform.
- Implement ‘Share This’ buttons
- Embed social media feeds
Conclusion
Your restaurant website should be easy to use and perfectly organized to lure people to visit your restaurant easily. It should let people feel the same dining experience they get while easing one of your dishes.
Make sure you put the right effort into your design and also create an amazing restaurant website user experience. Getting in touch with a reputed web design company will help you get the right outcomes by maximizing visits and direct online ordering.
Additional Resources:
- A Handbook for Social Media Marketing for Restaurants
- Get It Right Guide to Local SEO for Restaurants
- SEO for Restaurants: A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Found Online
