Create a Restaurant Website: Serve Up a Tasty Site

You've got a great chef, an awesome menu, and the perfect location: But, before guests can experience what your kitchen has prepared, they'll want to know more about what to expect. One of the best and easiest ways to do this is with a website.

Your restaurant's website helps foodies discover the next hidden gem and gives them an idea of what your establishment offers. In this article, we'll let you know why a restaurant website is so important and which ingredients you'll need to cook up one of your own.

According to an MGH survey, 77% of all patrons check a restaurant's website before visiting in person or placing an order. Should a Google search not reveal much about your establishment, prospective customers are likely to be suspicious and feast elsewhere.

Apart from guests these days expecting restaurants to have a website, it also serves a number of other purposes, such as:

In other words, restaurants and websites go together like bread and butter, so, what's the best way to make one?

While consistency is important in the world of gastronomy, your restaurant's website should be as unique as your dishes. With that said, there are some types of content and elements that should feature on every restaurant website, such as:

When entering a restaurant, the first thing you'll notice is its lobby or waiting area - If this is dark, dirty, chaotic, or otherwise unappealing, chances are that you'll walk back out the way you came, even if the food is to die for. In the digital world, this is no different, so make sure that your homepage is as visually attractive and polished as possible.

From here, you'll be able to offer a glimpse of the atmosphere and meals your guests can expect by including pictures of your interior or signature dishes. To add a personal touch, it's also possible to include a picture of your team or head chef.

To avoid winding up in the wrong place, most visitors to a restaurant's website are interested in one thing: Its menu. This shouldn't be difficult to find, and easily reachable via a dedicated menu option or direct link on your homepage.

In case your menu changes frequently, or you want to add different daily or weekly specials, make sure that these are reflected on your website. There's nothing worse than visiting a restaurant and finding out that what you wanted is off the menu or that its price has increased significantly. The best way to do this is to link your regular menu and (daily) specials separately so that you'll only need to upload the latter.

What your menu looks like isn't as important: A simple PDF file that will be elegantly displayed in your website's menu area is one way, however, there are also interactive options, which allow prospective visitors to filter choices based on their diets (such as 'vegetarian' or 'vegan'), or even to search by keyword.

Make sure to include allergy and calorie information here if legally required.

Integrating a reservation system onto your website can help guests book tables while also allowing your team to devote their energy to more pressing matters than answering the phone or filling out seating charts by hand.

These can be simple, allowing guests to specify a date, time, and size of the party. Online reservation systems make things even easier by showing how many tables are still available for particular dates and times.

Does your restaurant deliver? If so, you can easily offer this capability through your website, saving patrons and staff time by allowing the former to add menu items to their cart and pay for them digitally, with the orders forwarded directly to your kitchen staff for fulfillment.

There are also third-party online delivery systems and services that handle this and can easily be integrated into your website.

Does your establishment have a unique story? Is a well-known or up-and-coming chef working in the kitchen? Even though neither will help if your food isn't great, they can transform a good meal into an excellent experience. In the About Us area of your website, introduce visitors to your restaurant and showcase the people behind the menu.

You'll also want to include some basic information on your restaurant's website, such as contact details and hours of operation. The best idea is to display these on the homepage, however, dedicated contact or information pages are also fine.

Directions to your restaurant and/or a map showing where it's located can also help prospective guests find it more easily, whether they're arriving by car or public transport.

Customer reviews, either directly from customers, or linked from a third party like Google Maps, TripAdvisor, or Yelp, are also worth including. If you're confident in your establishment's quality (and you should be), actively solicit these from satisfied patrons. Doing so allows future guests to see what others have to say and base their decisions on (positive) experiences others have had before them.

Let's take another look at the MGH survey we mentioned above: This doesn't only show what's important for a restaurant website, but also, what a restaurant website shouldn't do. According to it, 68% of those surveyed noted that checking out the restaurant's website discouraged them from visiting in person.

This doesn't necessarily have something to do with the website's quality: Perhaps the menu didn't offer anything appealing, or the ambiance wasn't right for the occasion. However, a poorly-designed website can frighten potential guests.

Below, we've listed the five most common mistakes that you should avoid:

Now that you have a broad idea of what's important for a restaurant website, it's time to think about how you're going to make it a reality.

Below, we'll briefly introduce you to four options for creating a website for your establishment:

One option is to program your restaurant's website yourself. This requires programming know-how, hosting for online storage, and enough time to bring the project to life. Keep in mind that if selecting this option, you'll also have to handle your website's security.

Running a restaurant is difficult enough. If you'd rather let pros handle building your restaurant's website for you, so that you can focus on the day-to-day of the service industry, there are freelancers and agencies:

You don't need to program everything yourself: A content management system (CMS) can handle a large part of the work for you. Many important website components come pre-configured, which makes setup particularly easy. In addition, CMSs are usually open source and free, however, you'll still have to pay for web space, domains, and so on.

The most popular CMS is WordPress, accounting for an estimated 75% of the world's websites.

Website builders are even more beginner-friendly than CMSs since they're designed for newcomers without any coding or web design knowledge.

Thanks to their intuitive editors, it's possible to completely design a website on your own. Just select ready-made elements, drag them onto your website, and customize them to your preferences. As an added bonus, website builders typically offer a nice variety of pre-configured templates for different types of sites, including restaurant websites.

Hosting is included in subscription packages, while the templates are automatically optimized for things like mobile-friendliness.

One of the few drawbacks to website builders is that you'll need to order from the menu: That is to say, you have to make do with whatever features and layouts are included, as many make it difficult to 'break out' of these. Your restaurant's website will certainly look professional, but, chances are that it won't be truly unique.

We took a close look at 12 of the leading website builders in our comprehensive comparison, seeing how they performed in a number of areas, like "Configuration and Usability" and "Templates & Design". First place was awarded to Wix.

EXPERTE.com's overall winner impressed us with its wide array of features packed in an easy-to-use interface. Thanks to its drag-and-drop functionality, users are granted complete freedom when it comes to arranging elements. And for restaurant websites, Wix serves up quite a few sleek templates:

But that's not all: Wix Restaurants is a specialized app for restaurant websites that comes with many relevant templates. With it, you'll be able to manage your menu(s), orders, and other important areas of your business.

Since Wix offers a free version of its platform, you can test it out risk-free. If you'd like to be able to access all of its features (and have a custom domain), its most affordable package costs around $16 per month.

Wix is far from the only website-building option out there, as there are dozens of similar services that you can use to create a digital presence for your restaurant. Our full ranking is here:

With a professional website, your restaurant will be able to make prospective guests' mouths water, even without getting a whiff of what's cooking in your kitchen. Make sure to include all of the most sought-after information, like a current menu and your opening times, as well as practical features like table reservations or order forms.

You'll have different options for bringing your restaurant's website to life: If you possess the necessary coding skills, you can program it yourself. With a large enough budget, it's possible to contract the work out to pros. However, if you're lacking both, you'll need to either use a CMS like WordPress or a website builder.

Website builders are a particularly beginner-friendly option, even if they are somewhat limiting in terms of features. In EXPERTE.com's website builder comparison series, we comprehensively reviewed 12 of the leading providers.