The customer experience begins long before customers walk through the front door of your restaurant. Today, customers often start searching for your restaurant online and land on your website. Your restaurant website is the face of your brand as it forms first impressions and plays an essential role in the success of your business. Therefore, your restaurant website design should be unique and attractive to your customers.
How do you design a restaurant website that gives customers the assurance that they will have a great time dining at your restaurant while not fooling them? Here are some great restaurant website design tips to help you create a great website.
How to Design to Improve Online Ordering
Creating a vibrant atmosphere and mouth-watering dishes will only make your restaurant expand, but that’s only half the battle in the culinary business. Remember to add all the vital content for the restaurant website that your customers could want. Knowing that restaurant websites can be an extremely potent means of tapping into the immense crowd that is available in the market, you must include these seven restaurant website design tips in your restaurant website design.
1. Understanding your audience
When you start to create your restaurant website or start a significant redesign, you need to consider who you are trying to reach before you start creating new design elements for the site. Due to the nature of the online food and beverage business, it’s common to have both existing and new customers, and you need to seriously think about how you want to best engage with them. As a result, many food websites are able to meet the requirements of an audience that can range from a regular customers looking to buy a single item to wholesale buyers and brands looking for a B2B food service. Always include content for the restaurant’s website that your customers find useful.
When your restaurant serves existing customers, you need to know not only who they are but how they use your site. For new customers, show them your selling points and give them a reason to be interested in your business and interact with you.
2. Display the desired information
Your restaurant website design should clearly display the desired information. Consider your restaurant’s website as your online spokesperson. You should be able to answer the main queries of your customers. Therefore, always include important content on the restaurant’s website.
(i) Menu
The first thing a client looks for in a restaurant website design is the menu. Whether they want to order online or plan to dine at your restaurant later, a hearty menu is what would convert a website visitor into a buying customer. Make sure you have clear categories on your menu, such as vegetables, non-veg, starters, main course, drinks, and beverages.
If you have enabled online ordering, it is highly recommended to have a separate online ordering menu.
(ii) Online Order Button
Having an online ordering button on your restaurant website gives you the opportunity to convert your website visitors into buying customers. Therefore, it is also important to have delicious images of your menu items that encourage your website visitors to order food from your restaurant right there.
(iii) Store Locator
If you have multiple restaurants, your customers may be confused about where to order. Therefore, it is recommended to place your various outlets on a map along with their full address, contact details (such as phone number and email id), and their service hours. This would help your customers to visit your restaurant easily and allow them to order online without any hassle.
(iv) Feedback Button
Soliciting customer feedback and acting on it is essential to a restaurant’s success. Seeking customer feedback makes them feel valued, helps resolve their complaints, and also gives you insight into your restaurant.
(v) Social Media Buttons
Having a presence on social media has become essential in today’s era as it is one of the most critical platforms for achieving customer engagement. Therefore, it becomes even more important to highlight your social media pages everywhere, and your restaurant website is one of the best ways to achieve this. Make sure links to your social media pages are visible on your website. Include an engaging call-to-action that encourages people to connect with you on social media. Take a look at the latest rumors, or Do you like our food? Likes on Facebook are some of the ways to get people to click on your social media buttons.
(v) Who are we
People are likely to connect with you better when you tell your story. An engaging about us page that talks about your restaurant’s beginnings, team, and values will grab your customers’ attention. Be sure to include an About Us section in your restaurant website design.
3. Structure your restaurant website for usability
Many food websites don’t think about building site structure through the mindset of how users should use it and instead build restaurant website design around how their team uses it internally. This often leads to a development process that lacks clear, user-friendly navigation elements. Remember that simpler navigation will always be easier to use than something that is more complex and difficult for users to use. More specifically, it’s important to note that users don’t go to a site and go to the top navigation when looking for more information; They start to scroll down.
With this in mind, also keep in mind that most of the relevant information should be in the top half of the page, so it’s visible and gives users a good idea of what your company is in case they miss it. It tells a story to your audience as they scroll down, allowing them to learn more as they go while still clearly providing all the “essential elements” of the page.
4. Using images to convey an idea
You don’t need to use large amounts of text in your restaurant website design to get the main message across to your audience. Using minimal text that is supported by great images will do a better job of conveying your core ideas than having too much text. You don’t want to start with a big paragraph and overwhelm the reader. Instead, show what you’re known for and convey that idea with the images you use.
5. Restaurant Website Mobile Optimization
If you’re in the food industry, you can be sure that most of your users won’t be sitting at a desk, they’re on the go, so it’s essential that you have a responsive site to reach your audience on mobile devices. The mobile version of any food website should include concise messaging associated with images to effectively emphasize critical points without overloading or boring the user with too much text, especially on a small screen. This is becoming more and more true across all verticals, and as a result, mobile should be a priority, regardless of industry. Find out how to optimize your restaurant website to get more orders and increase usability.
Also, take the time to analyze your various media elements and consider alternatives if they are slowing down your website load times on mobile devices. Not everything that is suitable for your desktop version will be suitable for your site’s mobile rendering; however, your mobile site’s overall look should be branded consistently with your desktop version.
6. Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Even if you have a well-designed, attractive website, it would be of little use if your customers couldn’t discover it. Doing the SEO of your restaurant website means that your restaurant will appear at the top of the Google rankings and will be visible when someone searches for something relevant to your restaurant. For example, if someone searches for Ice Cream & Smoothies Near Me, your ice cream parlor’s website link should appear on the first page of Google. This article will tell you how to do your restaurant website search engine optimization the right way.
7. Consistency in restaurant website design and theme
As we mentioned earlier, your restaurant website is the virtual face of your restaurant and plays a crucial role in maintaining your restaurant’s online presence and brand. Therefore, your restaurant website must reflect the theme and concept of your restaurant brand. Make your restaurant logo and make sure it is visible on the website. Ideally, the website should also follow your restaurant’s color scheme and theme.
An attractive restaurant website design and using it to enhance your online business can be challenging. However, when done correctly, it can pay big dividends that will help substantially increase your return on investment online. A helpful way to ensure these elements are done right is to find the perfect digital agency partner to help you create the best possible presentation for your specific vertical regarding design and usability.
As a restaurant owner, you need to be aware of the various ways you can tap into potential customers in the marketplace, so follow these essential tips and make your restaurant website a success.
