Your website is a visual representation of your restaurant. It acts as a welcome mat online. The way your website looks says a lot about the kind of experience the customer can expect at your diner. If your restaurant serves hot and delicious food, has beautiful ambiance, and offers exceptional service, only for your website to look quite unattractive, it might repel potential customers away.
For that, thoughtful design and easy-to-navigate website structure is essential for your restaurant’s online forefront. It will encourage the customers to get off the web and book a table at your diner. In this article, you’ll explore various website design practices deemed best by every restaurant marketing agency in the province. You’ll also learn the importance of having an exceptional web design for your restaurant.
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Website design practices: Driving foot traffic to your restaurant via online presence
As mentioned above, thoughtful design, coupled with easy-to-navigate web structure can straightaway drive your customers to your restaurant. Additionally, 59% of diners check out the online presence of a restaurant before deciding to visit it.
Your restaurant website’s purpose should be giving potential customers the information they want. This includes practical information, such as location, business hours, dishes, and wi-fi availability.
The website of a restaurant also acts as an extension of the user experience. If your restaurant website isn’t able to reflect the level of care you put into the dining experience, you may end up getting rid of potential visitors, thus leading to a fall in your restaurant’s sales and reservations.
Ingredients of a good restaurant website: Recipe for online success
When you plan to develop your website, you need to ensure that the information that might be potentially sought by your customers is included and easy to access. Here’s a list of important things that you need to include in your website:
- Contact Details:
You should ensure that the phone number of your restaurant is placed in a visible location. If you also conduct businesses via email, you should definitely add that to your website.
- Address:
Placing your physical location in a clear manner is also essential. You don’t want your customers to face any difficulty finding your restaurant for a pleasant dining experience, dont you?
- Hours:
A restaurant’s business hours should be showcased in a crystal clear manner. Nobody wants to arrive at a restaurant when they are not clear about the hours it is open. Hence, you need to properly place the details regarding your restaurant’s open and closed hours, which will help diners plan their dine-out accordingly.
- Menu:
As there are a lot of people checking out a restaurant’s menu online before deciding to dine there, publishing your menu online is extremely important. If there are frequent changes in your restaurant’s menu, be mindful of updating your website as frequently as possible.
- Photos:
Add high-resolution images of your food, drinks, and atmosphere, which will encourage customers to visualize themselves in your restaurant and see your menu to decide what they want for their dinner.
- “About Us” Page:
Develop an “About Us” page that showcases the story of your restaurant and mission to develop a thoughtful connection with your potential visitors.
- Online Bookings and Reservations:
If you accept bookings and reservations online, you should embed a link or widget that leads to your reservation platform. You should embed that link right on an accessible part of your restaurant website homepage.
- Social Media Icons:
Want to grow your restaurant’s social media following? Don’t hesitate for the same and include icons that lead the visitors to your restaurant’s social media pages right on your homepage.
Surprisingly, you can also embed your restaurant’s Instagram feed right on your website’s homepage.
- Newsletter Signup:
Email marketing is one of the most powerful strategies considered in digital marketing. You should encourage people to sign up your restaurant’s newsletter by interlinking a sign-up link or widget on your homepage. Offer an exclusive deal or discount to new subscribers, which will further make the deal sweeter for them.
- Videos:
Who doesn’t like videos showcasing the atmosphere of a restaurant? Restaurant videos offer a diner a sneak peek into what to expect at your diner. When potential customers imagine themselves at your tables, they’ll be potentially turning this fantasy into reality.
- Blogs:
Use your blogs and articles to promote any special event, preview an upcoming update to your menu, or give customers a behind-the-scenes scenario of your restaurant.
- Careers Page:
Are you seeking more staff for your restaurant? Post job openings on the homepage of your restaurant’s website, which will attract more candidates.
While implementing these strategies, make sure that your website looks more easy-to-navigate and attractive for your potential customers. This will help you drive more sales and reservations.
How to enhance restaurant website design for better user experience?
As mentioned above, having an easy-to-navigate website is a big win for your website as it will help you ensure a better user experience, translating into more sales and table reservations. For that, you need to consider the following things:
- Mobile-friendliness:
Most people visit a website through smartphones. You should ensure a mobile-first approach while designing your website, i.e, your website should be responsive to different screen sizes. You should also ensure that the users don’t have to zoom in our out to read the content on your page.
- Lower the loading times:
According to studies, 40% of online visitors would rather leave a webpage than wait for more than a few seconds for it to load. To avoid such a situation, you should resize and compress media content on your site to lower the loading speed.
Most importantly, the most important information on your website should be easy to find. Additionally, keep the font simple to ensure easy readability.
To summarize
Your website acts as the face of your restaurant. It offers your customers an idea about the dishes and ambiance you offer for dining. At the same time, your restaurant website needs to be meticulous and optimized for search engines. Most importantly it should be optimized for UX, ensuring a better conversion rate and more foot traffic to your restaurant.
