Culinary Clicks: 15 Essential Features Every Restaurant Website Should Have

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“Websites” A Should Have “Thing” For The Restaurants

In the current age of technology and the internet, itÂ’s quite good for everyone to get all their tasks done on the internet. Whether itÂ’s about communicating, booking journey tickets, buying something, or even getting a restaurant reservation. Nowadays itÂ’s quite common for consumers to research websites of restaurants while thinking of places to eat. Due to this reason, a lot of popular restaurant chains and local eateries are coming up with their own websites and while the competition for online business always remains on the surge. As someone who manages a restaurant, itÂ’s always beneficial to develop something unique that makes the restaurant stands out among the rest in the market.

Most people expect the restaurant website quality to be reflective of the restaurant itself. So if youÂ’re looking to have the best appearance for your website design, there are a few features that can be incorporated into your website to get a good visual appeal and convenience for customers as well as restaurant owners and ultimately more bookings and orders.

Below weÂ’ve listed down 15 essential features that would make your restaurant stand out as a business.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]

1. Information on Important Contacts

2. Having a Menu Option

3. Make sure to upload restaurant interior pictures

4. A distinctive section for about

5. Online reservation system and online ordering

6. Calendar for events

7. Responsive website layout

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8. Events and catering reservation information

9. Website Analytics

10. Automated marketing

11. Search Engine Optimization

12. Design and Logo

13. Optimize SEO images

14. Feedback form

15. Introduce loyalty programs on the website

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1. Information on Important Contacts

When youÂ’re designing a business website, you need to consider why people should visit your website rather than trying on others. When talking about restaurant websites, among the common reasons due to which people would open your website is to check on phone numbers, operating hours, your location or simply get details regarding the reservation.

Additionally to the contact page, the address, operating hours, and phone numbers should be easily viewable on all pages. With such a view most website visitors would easily turn to real visitors for your restaurant.

ItÂ’s better to link your location to Google Maps so anyone can easily reach your restaurant without much hassle. Likewise, you can also have a clickable phone number with an auto-dialing feature for the mobile website.

2. Having a Menu Option

Besides figuring out the restaurantÂ’s phone number or the location, among other common reasons for anyone to make a visit to your website should be to search for the menu.

The importance of a responsive menu is a high one. In this regard, most restaurant owners consider uploading the actual menu photograph but this shouldnÂ’t be done because:

Smartphone users would find it quite inconvenient to scroll down the entire menu

You wouldnÂ’t get higher rankings in search engines as it wouldnÂ’t be able to read your menu.

The same is true for menus uploaded in PDF versions. Instead of listing the menu online, forcing visitors to download it would lead to inconvenience for the readers. Also, mobile visitors never prefer downloading the PDF menu as sometimes it takes a lot of time.

An alternative for this could be linking a PDF menu version that opens new tabs. This loads quite quickly and has a simple view.

3. Make sure to upload restaurant interior pictures

Additionally to the food pictures restaurant websites also must have restaurant images. All images help customers in determining what to expect while getting inside your restaurant. Ideally, your website would have to feature pictures of both the restaurantÂ’s interior and exterior. If the exterior requires little work, interior images would also work fine for that.

Such images help in solidifying recognition of the brand and also help visitors in knowing that theyÂ’re at the right place.

Make sure to incorporate high-quality food pictures with high quality staged images. You donÂ’t necessarily require images of all the menu dishes on your website, but the more youÂ’ve got the better it would be.

4. A distinctive section for about

Restaurant websites mostly draw a lot of customers with the help of about section. They look at the about section for the website as an opportunity for conveying their story. WhatÂ’s your main specialty and goal? You can let your visitors know everything. You can tell them all that you want to for a great impact on words.

The about us section makes a fine play for upping your restaurant’s key benefits. Have you got ample of parking space? Do you only rely on experienced chefs? Let your visitors know everything beforehand!

5. Online reservation system and online ordering

Nowadays, most people want to have their favorite food right on their doorstep and by partnering with some leading food delivery companies or by having your own delivery service you can easily provide tempting food to customers, by online-based reservations and restaurant online ordering.

People typically feel more comfortable while providing their personal info such as credit and debit card numbers on an established and secure website rather than reading out loud their card numbers over the phone.

6. Calendar for events

This doesnÂ’t have to be necessary for different restaurant websites, but if youÂ’re having rotating specials or frequent events, it would be quite helpful to have a website calendar. Make sure to add regular updates for your calendar.

If youÂ’ve thought of having different fun events for hosting at your restaurant for drawing in customers, you can consider regular occurring trivia or bingo nights.

Restaurant websites are prime hubs for hosting information about any upcoming events that can be advertised with social media.

7. Responsive website layout

The source of most of the website traffic nowadays is mobile devices. This is imperative for all restaurants and websites. They need to adjust their website screen size to different types of devices.

Most people go on searching for restaurant websites while they were thinking of a place to eat.

YouÂ’re simply missing out of a lot if your website isnÂ’t simple to navigate on a mobile device. A lot of fast-food chains also provide options for mobile payment. This is an imporant part of your takeaway website design.

8. Events and catering reservation information

If youÂ’re offering different options for catering to help your restaurant getting rented out for weddings, parties and corporate events, you need to be sure to include such information on a separate website page.

This becomes quite a huge business opportunity, so you can make the information quite simple to find. Otherwise, all website visitors would be tempted to search for a different place.

9. Website Analytics

The website design feature isnÂ’t recognizable for customers but this is also essential for lots of successful restaurants for websites. You wonÂ’t be able to get a track of website effectiveness without proper analytics.

You can get a lot of tools for analytics that tracks a lot of things such as the location of website traffic source and pages that are getting a lot of views.

ItÂ’s essential to track a few metrics such as bounce rate, devices, and keywords.

10. Automated marketing

Most businesses also focus on retaining old clients in addition to finding new ones. This holds true especially in case of restaurants as restaurants encourage returning visitors for generating a stable average monthly revenue.

While making online bookings customers should be easily able to fetch contact details. Such information on marketing is highly valuable, but only if it is used in a proper manner. However, contacting customers on a regular basis isnÂ’t considered well and irritates them.

11. Search Engine Optimization

Known by the abbreviation SEO, it is the method whereby individual website pages are created or get modified to become most visible for crawlers on the search engines. Crawlers are basically robots that generally read different websites for online search engines and exactly tell them on how relevant and good these are. Pages considered to be relevant and valuable later on get placed higher in the outcomes while users conduct searches.

12. Design and Logo

A lot of websites place their logo in the topmost left corner of the page and there are a lot of scientific reasons for that. While users open the website, their view can easily run from the left to right as these are usable for reading.

A proper restaurant website design is mostly recommended by designing experts to get your restaurant logo placed on the topmost left page corner.

<h3 “Images”>13. Optimize SEO images

Images are ideally known to be among the main user traffic sources. According to a study that was conducted for traffic generating with the help of images, more than 60% of website traffic was present from users who were looking for images.

Make sure to consider all these points before you optimize images.

• Select images with content
• Have the right file name for all your images
• Reduce the size of the file for loading everything quickly
• Use images for all text
• Image measurements need to match images that were displayed.

14. Feedback form

This is the feature that should be included in every restaurantÂ’s website. With customer feedback form your business is indispensable and has ample scope for development. You can easily remain in touch with your customers and immediately react to all of their queries and complaints as well.

You can also introduce pleasant presents for customers when they fill the form.

15. Introduce loyalty programs on the website

Always value your customers and show them care by introducing loyalty programs. This might be a certain discount percentage, a free birthday boy meal, etc. Whatever, youÂ’ve thought of, always remember about clients and what theyÂ’re comfortable with. While selecting a wise loyalty program, you can get a significant boost to your restaurant business.

You can have a separate online page with all the necessary information and other details on loyalty and reward programs.

With just a fine quality website, you can sort out all the differences between a new customer and a mixed opportunity. Irrespective of how great your food, restaurant ambiance or service remains to be, without a good restaurant website design, you can notably affect your business in a negative manner.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]