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Restaurant business is one of the demandable business nowadays. Do you want to create a restaurant website with WordPress? A magnificent restaurant website doesn’t need much. But it should have everything that a potential customer needs to know.
A restaurant website displays menus, reservation, location, and contact details. So customers can easily find it and book an online reservation. WordPress makes it easy to create a restaurant website even if you’re not tech-savvy.
In this article, I’ll show you how to create a restaurant website with WordPress step by step.
Why WordPress?
This is a common question why WordPress?
Right now WordPress is powered by more than 25% of the whole Internet. It’s a very stable choice. It has thousands of contributors around the world who build free themes, plugins and offer online support for free.
WordPress is also a free and open-source platform so you can easily modify or download a copy of your site and keep it saved locally. With a WordPress website, you have full control over everything.
What Are The Key Features Your Restaurant Website Needs?
Before you start creating your Restaurant website, it’s a good idea to research what sort of information you want your website to include. Here are some of the essential elements that a great restaurant website should have:
1. Menu and Service Hours
The menu is one of the most viewed pages on any site. People want to know what type of food you are offering. A menu shows them what’s available so they can decide whether they want to visit your restaurant or not.
2. High-Quality Restaurant Photos
A high-quality image is more attractive than a certain meal. Include images not only on your menu pages but throughout your site. Show them your food but make sure to include images of your establishment to convey the atmosphere of your restaurant.
3. Online Reservation Forms
An online reservation form can considerably increase the number of reservations you get. It also decreases the amount of time you spend on the phone taking reservations.
4. Show Rated Customer Reviews
Showcasing rated reviews from potential customers can help potential visitors make their final decision and encourage them to book a table. Consider asking your regular customers to share their experience on your website so others can see their satisfaction.
5. Location and Contact details
Having a map of your location and contact details makes it easy for potential visitors to find you and get directions to your restaurant.
How to Create a Restaurant Website With WordPress
Now that you know about the key features, let’s walk through step by step and create a website for your restaurant.
Step 1: Buy a Domain Name and Web Hosting
A domain name is the URL address that visitors type to see your webpage.
You should stick with a .com domain because it’s the most common. Many .com domains are already taken but you can find a domain just by adding extra details like the state or country.
After choosing the domain name, you have to purchase a hosting plan. Kinsta is always one of my favorites. Recently, Kinsta moved everyone to Google Cloud Platform’s Compute-Optimized (C2) machines; which provided a huge performance gain – varying from 30% up to 200%.
- The new GCP C2 machines are on average 2.1x faster for bypassing cache.
- The new GCP C2 machines are on average 2.08x faster when it comes to Nginx page cache.
Go to Kinsta and click on View Plan. Next, you’ll be redirected to the hosting plan. Let’s choose the starter plan as you’re just getting started. It includes 1 WordPress install, 20000 visits, 10 GB disk space and Free SSL & CDN. You can upgrade later as your site grows.
just click on the Choose button and fill up the necessary field like Email, First name, Last name, Password and Repeat Password.
On the next page, you will be redirected to the Billing information page. Fill up the information and finish it up.
That’s it!
You’ve successfully subscribed to their hosting plan.
Step 2: Set Up WordPress for Your Restaurant Site
For your WordPress restaurant website, you’ll need a self-hosted WordPress.org because it gives you the full control over your site.
Kinsta offers 1-click WordPress installation on their dashboard. You’ll need to add details about your website and it installs WordPress in a few moments automatically.
Step 3: Customize WordPress
In this step, you have to customize your WordPress site. Go to the “settings” option in the admin menu on the left-hand side. It contains all the major features and controls of your site.
Click that link to get started on the general settings page. Here you can update your site’s information.
Now go to the settings menu and click on the Discussion link.
This will take you to a new page covering all the features for user comments and pingbacks.
Select the checkbox “allow people to post comments” and hit save.
Now move to the “Permalinks” settings. This will open a new page with a few URL styles to choose from.
Click on the “post name” style near the bottom and save.
Step 4: Select a Suitable WordPress Restaurant Theme
After setting up WordPress, the next thing you’ll need to do is to select a suitable restaurant theme and install it on your website.
There are lots of themes you could pick but here are my personal favorites free & premium themes.
Free Themes
1. Neve
It is clean, very easy to use and multipurpose WordPress theme. It is perfect for cafes, restaurants, bars and all types of food-related websites and blogs.
Bakes and Cakes is a beautifully designed WordPress bakery theme to create an interactive restaurant website. It can be used to develop food-related websites such as bakery, restaurant, cake shop, cafeteria, coffee bar, etc.
Restaurant and Cafe is a modern, responsive and SEO-friendly WordPress restaurant theme. It is specially designed for restaurants, cafes or any food and drink businesses. It is also very useful for all kinds of food-related bloggers, food joint, hospitality business, and luxurious hotels.
4. FoodHunt
It is a modern design free WordPress theme that helps you to attract food lovers right to your restaurant. It is specifically designed for restaurants and suitable for bars, cafes, and any food-related website.
Restaurant Recipe is an ideal WordPress theme to create a restaurant or cafe website. It is suitable for hotel, resort, lodge, homestay business or any hospitality business model.
Premium Themes
1. Ambiance
The ambiance is one of the best WordPress Restaurant premium themes. With this, you can create an attractive restaurant website. The regular price of this theme is $49.
2. Downtown
Downtown is a WordPress restaurant theme specially designed to create restaurant websites, food blogs, and online recipe magazines. The theme will cost $58 per year.
3. Delicio
Delicio is a perfect theme to create a restaurant, coffee shop, or a bakery website. The theme price is $69.
4. Confucius – Chinese Restaurant
Confucious is a WordPress theme for all kinds of restaurant websites. As its name suggests, it takes special design inspiration from Chinese cuisine. The price of the theme is $75.
5. Yummy Pro
Yummy Pro is another pretty, responsive and simple WordPress theme that’s specially made for restaurants cafes, fast food, among other types of businesses. The cost of this theme is $49.
Step 5: WP Restaurant Plugins
When you install WordPress it comes with a collection of default plugins. You can keep them or remove them also.
To install a plugin click on Plugins and then “Add New”. You can search for any free plugin, install and activate them.
Yoast SEO
There is nothing to say about SEO or Google ranking techniques to run a website. But you should know that ranking your site is very important to help people find you online.
Yoast SEO is a free plugin that performs all the dirty SEO work for you.
It won’t skyrocket your site to the top of Google. But it helps to optimize all your pages that will help you rank in Google.
Contact Form
Every website should have a contact page. This should include the restaurant’s physical address, a phone number, and an e-mail contact form.
Thankfully there are lots of free plugins you can use for this.
I recommend weForms because it’s one of the most secure plugins and comes with all the features you could possibly need.
Once you install and activate the plugin you can make a contact form with your e-mail address as the recipient. You can change the settings if needed.
When the form is done you can see it listed in the “All forms” options.
It’ll have a shortcode placed between [brackets]. Just copy & paste this code into your contact page to add the form.
Restaurant-Specific Plugins
Aside from the plugins above, there are some other plugins you might like.
If you installed a restaurant-specific theme then you might not need any of these.
Step 6: Promote Your Restaurant Website
When your website is ready to go, the next thing you need to do is to promote it online.
There are several WordPress marketing plugins that help you to complete the job easily. Let’s have a look at some of the useful plugins that you can use to maximize the reach and get more traffic online.
weMail – Email Marketing Simplified With WordPress: It is one of the newest plugin to send emails. This is an email marketing plugin that enables the user/users to send email newsletters with feature-packed email builder. The plugin connects with email sending solutions such as Amazon Web Services, MailGun, SparkPost, etc to send emails.
MailChimp for WordPress: MailChimp is the most popular WordPress plugin to integrate MailChimp. MailChimp itself is an excellent email campaign service and currently is the leader in email marketing fields.
With this plugin, you can connect to any of your MailChimp email lists and create your own email opt-in forms.
Popups by OptinMonster: OptinMonster is another most popular email marketing plugin. Basically, this is a popup tool that enables you to use any newsletter provider on your site alongside its own features.
Enjoy Your New WordPress Restaurant Website
If you need to create a restaurant website with WordPress, you won’t find an easier and more flexible solution than self-hosted WordPress.
Whether you use themes for an easy all-in-one solution or build your site from scratch using a page builder like Elementor, you should have all the tools that you need to create an excellent WordPress restaurant website.
If you have any questions about how to create a WordPress restaurant website, put it in the comments section below!
