How Smart Restaurant Websites Drive Reservations and Online Orders

Diners expect a seamless experience to order online, book a reservation, or find basic details about your menu and hours. You can turn your web presence into your best tool to drive sales with a custom-designed website that is optimized for search engines, features the best data and analytics integration, and prioritizes user experience. 

Building a restaurant website doesn’t need to be difficult. Our full-service web development and design team can get an SEO-optimized restaurant site up and running for you quickly and efficiently. Schedule a free call today to discuss your web design needs. 

Drive Online Sales with a Customized Online Ordering System

Online ordering is here to stay. Eighty-six percent of Americans reported ordering food delivery at least once a month. That is why having an easily customizable online menu and ordering system is central to your cafe or restaurant’s continued growth. 

Our development team can work with your existing website to integrate crucial payment and ordering tools. This includes integrating your point-of-sale software with online payment platforms and third-party food delivery apps like GrubHub and DoorDash.

Don’t get left behind in the shift to online ordering. Grow your business with an effective, secure, and easy-to-update website with integrated online ordering.

How to Customize Your Site to  Make it Easy for Customers to Book and Order Online

Many restaurant owners use a free website builder for restaurants and call it a day. While this approach is fine for posting basic details like your location and a static PDF menu, it doesn’t allow for the functionality that new customers expect from restaurants.

A beautifully designed, customized site with updated menu items and delivery and pickup options is now the expectation. In fact, 90% of customers report checking out a restaurant’s online presence, including its website and reviews on Google Business Profile, before deciding to eat there. 

You can work with a restaurant website builder template, but that requires you to add in interactive menus and payment processors manually, one at a time.

Our team can quickly create a restaurant website that includes integrated search engine optimization best practices, security and plugin updates, payment processing, and even a customized restaurant app. Even better, you’ll work with a dedicated account manager who is focused on designing the best website for you — not a generic website template that looks just like the place down the street. 

WordPress Development and Design for Restaurants

It’s no wonder WordPress hosts over 564 million websites across the globe. With tens of thousands of themes and plugins to choose from, it offers unmatched customization. 

Our team will help you design a customized restaurant website that functions beautifully on desktop and mobile. We also provide ongoing plugin maintenance and updates to ensure that your website runs just as smoothly next year as it does on day one. 

Joomla Development and Design for Food Franchises

As an open-source, SEO-friendly platform, Joomla is a popular choice for food franchises that need multiple geo-optimized pages thanks to its affordability and built-in device adaptability. Since this hosting option requires a fair amount of technical knowledge, it’s best to choose an experienced programmer to set it up and avoid broken pages or formatting mistakes.

SEO Design Chicago can set up a fully customized Joomla restaurant site with a user-friendly CMS. Even better, we offer affordable ongoing maintenance packages that keep your sites running smoothly.

Squarespace Development and Design for Takeout Restaurants

If you signed up for the free trial of Squarespace but aren’t sure where to go from here, SEO Design Chicago can help. We will integrate your POS system with online ordering functionalities that make it easy for you to track orders and generate reports. Most importantly, we will increase your takeout revenue by making it simple for customers to order from their phones or laptops. 

If you want to go further by creating customized email campaigns or mouthwatering food photography, we do that too! Just discuss your digital marketing needs with us during your free consultation, and we’ll design a customized digital marketing plan that fits your goals. 

HTML5 Development and Design for Upscale Restaurants

What is HTML5? It’s the most common programming language used for websites across the internet. If you have an existing website that’s already receiving good traffic but just needs technical or design updates, our HTML5 programmers can give you a tune-up. We work with any CMS to integrate online ordering or give your home page a fresh look. This is a good choice if you don’t need a full website redesign but need to stay current with trends or diner expectations for their online reservation experience. 

Shopify Development and Design

Shopify offers a number of great restaurant website examples, but it can be tricky to navigate all the different options available for themes, plugins, and updates.

Our experienced team can help you secure a custom domain and design that integrates the fast load speeds of Shopify, along with ongoing updates. We can also handle social media integrations, payment integrations, and even custom application development to add any feature you want for your Shopify restaurant website. 

Geo Landing Pages for Restaurant Franchises

Franchises must have geographically specific information to avoid giving customers information about their pizza menu downtown instead of in the suburbs! Our team will create custom-designed templates that communicate brand identity, then customize them with conversion-focused design for each of your locations. 

Dynamic Landing Pages for Fast Food Franchises

Like geo landing pages, your dynamic landing pages need to be conversion-focused. We can create as many landing page designs as you want to promote your specific offerings, tailored to your different audiences.

Customers searching for quick snacks at midnight? Use a dynamic landing page to encourage them to order for delivery to their home or dorm room. Local sports fans hungry during the big game? Use a dynamic landing page to promote party-size servings of fries or tacos. 

Our team can handle the design, ideation, and audience segmentation you need to increase sales through specific marketing. 

Application Development for New Restaurant Concepts

Sometimes DoorDash or Uber Eats isn’t enough. For cutting-edge restaurant concepts, diners expect digital integration along with a unique food experience. Our team can create a customized application that communicates your brand identity and makes it easy for diners to order or explore online.  

FAQs: Know Your Hosting and Design Options

Want your website to quickly and affordably bring in more reservations and online orders? You need an all-in-one web development solution that increases traffic and conversions by maximizing your website’s functionality through digital design best practices. 

With SEO Design Chicago, you’ll work with a dedicated account manager who discusses your needs and goals and custom-quotes a plan to get you the best ROI for your marketing dollars. 

What makes a good restaurant website design?

Customers want to have their key questions quickly answered. A good restaurant website template will communicate appealing food and dining options through attractive visuals that load quickly on a mobile-first design. Well-designed restaurant websites should prioritize user experience with a clear navigational menu that makes it easy for customers to find vital information like your location, hours, menu, pricing, and allergy information. 

All of these technical and visual details should work together to communicate the ultimate concept that yes, I want to eat or order here. 

Which website platform is best for restaurants: WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, or Joomla?

Any of these platforms can host a visually attractive website with online ordering capability. The best choice will depend on what kind of functionality and ongoing maintenance you need from your site. Joomla and Squarespace are popular for their drag-and-drop interface, while WordPress and Shopify have a number of restaurant templates that integrate well with payment systems. 

SEO Design Chicago offers multi-platform web development and ongoing maintenance services. We can design customized pages and ordering platforms for an existing website, or build one from scratch. Choosing a professional agency to handle your web design saves you time and is more efficient than trying out a dozen different pre-designed templates that don’t quite fit your needs. 

How can my restaurant website drive more reservations and online orders?

Your online presence should make it easy and obvious for customers to place an order or make a reservation. You can do this through conversion-focused design. This approach integrates everything from your food photography to the fonts and spacing on landing pages to draw diners’ attention to the actions you want them to take — placing an order or making a reservation.

A well-designed restaurant app can also make online ordering simple. The key here is efficiency and speed. If customers have to wait a long time for the payment page to load, or the menu is outdated, they will get frustrated and choose a different food option. 

Do restaurants need custom landing pages for local SEO and promotions?

Geographic landing pages are fantastic marketing tools for multi-site restaurants. These pages update the information presented based on the searcher’s geographic location, meaning they will be shown personalized specials, details, and offers that encourage them to convert. 

Dynamic landing pages are similar because they change based on the characteristics of the searcher. This can be geographic location, but it can also include whether or not this person is a previous customer of your business, or what search terms they used to find your restaurant.

For example, a customer who searched “Thai delivery near me” can be shown a dynamic landing page that prioritizes their geographic location and highlights your online ordering and delivery services. A customer who searches “date night restaurant” can be shown a landing page that emphasizes your atmospheric in-restaurant dining. This helps your restaurant present marketing messages that are specifically targeted to each of these diners, encouraging each of them to take different conversion actions. 

How much does it cost to design and develop a professional restaurant website?

The best restaurant website builder will optimize your ROI and help you get found on local search, while delivering a customizable analytics dashboard that lets you track traffic and conversions to your website. 

SEO Design Chicago delivers on all three counts. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel by using one generic service for your website and then trying to tack on online order and third-party delivery app integrations, you can trust our full-stack website developers to get you up and running quickly and on budget.

Just like you hire an accounting firm to handle your business taxes, you can save time and money by working with experts who have proven success boosting visibility, bringing in reservations, and increasing online ordering capability for dozens of restaurants, from start-ups to large multi-site operations. 

Improve your local presence with a custom restaurant website designed by our full-service team! Schedule a free call today to get a customized quote that fits your budget and business goals.