Restaurant Website Design: Delicious Strategies for Success

restaurant website design

There’s no physical way to convey delicious smells, wonderful presentations, and an array of textures through the internet. Unless your customers are seated in your restaurant and experiencing it themselves, these crucial aspects of your cuisine will be lost in translation.

This is why it is incredibly important to have the perfect restaurant website design. With the perfect pictures, descriptions, and overall set-up, you can entice more customers who have never seen or tasted your food before to come to your restaurant.

Restaurant website design can be tough. Making the perfect website is not easy, but with these tips and strategies, you’ll find the process a breeze. If you’re interested in learning more about the perfect design strategies for your website, follow along!

Why Your Restaurant Needs the Perfect Website

Consumers always appreciate an interface that is easy to work with. If your customer wants to place an order, the last thing you want is for them to be frustrated. Restaurants often lose clientele due to their frustrating website design.

Perfect restaurant websites are designed with the customer in mind. You must identify the needs of your customer. Make sure you understand how they’ll navigate the page, what information they would like to be able to read online, and where they will look for all this information.

If key restaurant features, such as your hours of operation, menu, or contact-us page are buried amongst a sea of links and tabs, your customers will not find them. Slow speeds will also frustrate customers, making it less likely they will purchase something. In fact, 40% of people click out of a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

Having a restaurant is already a challenging business. Around 60% of restaurants fail within their first year. Improving your odds by having a user-friendly website is definitely a no-brainer.

Restaurant Website Design Tips

1. Design around Searches and Orders

The main reason a potential customer will access your website will be to search for something, whether it be your hours of operation or dinner menu. Therefore, the most important part of a restaurant is how easily “searchable” things are.

Don’t bury important information within tabs that are not properly named. Having a clear, to-the-point structure will be highly appreciated by potential customers.

Also, think about where your “Place Order” button should be located. The bottom left corner of the screen might not generate as many clicks as the top right corner. Figure out the most convenient and logical place for your order button within your existing design.

2. Use SEO Tools to Your Advantage

Ranking highly in web searches for “restaurants in my area” is arguably one of the most important tips. This will ensure that your website will reach the largest audience possible, bringing in a load of new customers.

Your performance in search engines depends on a lot of things, such as keyword-rich pages. This attracts people who are searching for something specific, like a specific dish you make.

Understanding SEO is critical. If you’d like to learn more about how you could bump up your restaurant’s position in Google searches, head on over to our website. Our free tools will help you understand how you stack up in the SEO world.

3. Use an Adaptive Design

Whether someone is looking at your website on their computer, phone, or tablet, everything should look impeccable. Your restaurant website design should not be affected by the medium through which it is accessed.

Responsive design is a great way to build a website that adapts to different environments. It will scale everything to the perfect proportion, automatically fitting large and small screens.

Trying to zoom in and out of non-mobile friendly websites can be incredibly annoying. Don’t ward off potential customers in this way!

4. Take Some Awesome Foodie Photos

A restaurant website cannot be complete without amazing food photos. You want your food to seem appetizing and inviting, not bland and boring. Hiring a photographer for this part may be expensive, but completely worth it.

Customers are more likely to buy from a restaurant that incorporates photos on the menus. Ordering something blindly is a gamble for some people. Plus, popping photos in each section of your website will make it more inviting and appealing.

5. Show Off Your Staff

A fun way to make your website design more personal is to include your staff in it. Making your design more personable will attract customers who enjoy knowing who is preparing their food. Letting customers “meet” their chef gives them a better idea of your company and brand.

6. Integrate Your Website With Social Media

Social media is definitely a tool you should be taking advantage of. Engaging your audience through different platforms can dramatically increase the number of tables you’re filling on a regular basis. This interaction can go from posting Instagram photos of dishes or staff to responding to reviews on Yelp.

Keeping a healthy social media standing can make you incredibly popular and will give you an option to showcase the magnificent foodie photos you took for your website. It’s important to realize, though, that both positive and negative feedback from customers should receive responses from your team.

Wrapping Up

Restaurant website design can be a frustrating process. When it comes to new clientele and increased ratings, however, the results can be astounding. Making your website a place through which you can interact with existing customers and create bonds with new ones will bring a whole new personality to your brand.

Working on the SEO side of things can be even more beneficial. Understanding how search engines work can become a great marketing tool. You can learn about how wording can make such a huge impact on where you appear on word searches.

SEO strategies can really make your business boom, so what are you waiting for? There are great tools available online that can help you get started today!