Restaurant Website Design: 9 Key Elements

Your website design is a direct reflection of your brand as a restaurant. When people visit your website to look for information, your website tells them a story about who you are, what you stand for, and what they can expect when they dine at your restaurant or hang out at your cafe.

Unfortunately, if you’re an expert in the restaurant industry, there’s a good chance you’re not an expert in the website design and development industry. But that’s okay – that’s what website design agencies are here for! A good website design agency can help you create a powerful website that will turn visitors into diners. Now let’s check what should be taken into consideration when designing a restaurant website.

Key Elements of Website Design for Restaurants

1) Mobile-Friendly Web Design

Data shows that penetration of personal mobile internet usage in the United Kingdom reached  71%. Moreover, approximately 60% of Google searches are conducted on a mobile device. For the restaurant industry where people are searching for dining options, this number increased to over 80%.

If a website is not mobile-friendly, it will drive away visitors because of the bad user experience and SEO. Mobile-friendly websites are favored by Google on search results. For these reasons, it’s essential that your website be compatible with mobile devices.

2) User-Friendliness

Many people who are searching for restaurants do so when they are hungry and looking for somewhere to eat. That means that they want quick answers. A good restaurant website design should be user-friendly, creative and giving visitors quick access to menus, prices, and location and contact information.

3) Speed

I bet there are very few people who love to wait in a queue. The same is true for websites. In fact, people have a lot of options on the web and no one can tolerate a slow loading page. One of the most important factors for a modern website is the speed of the website. We can say that a slow running website will decrease conversion rates and foot traffic to your restaurant. Let’s check three main aspects of why website speed is vital.

User experience: The speed of websites directly affects the user experience. Slow-loading websites can give users negative experiences and cause a loss of income. Considering this situation, it is very important to have a fast website.

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) quality score: If you have a restaurant, chances are you will want to use Google Ads. Google considers page opening times as an important component of the user experience. The opening speed of your pages directly affects the quality scores of your keywords. Let’s say, you will bid for “Italian restaurants in Edinburgh” keyword. Optimizing the loading speed of your pages will increase your quality score and will decrease your costs per click for this keyword.

Organic results: Besides all these, the loading speed of your pages is an important ranking factor for search engines. Google continues to emphasize how important the opening speed of both desktop and mobile pages is.

4) SEO Friendly Web Design

The main purpose of SEO is to bring more organic visitors to your restaurant’s website. If you own a Chinese restaurant in the Marchmont area wouldn’t be great to show up at the top of “Marchmont Chinese takeaway” search results?  SEO friendly website design is about creating websites that are easily accessible and indexable by search engines such as Google. It is the basis of successful SEO.

5) Social Media Integration

An active on social media use became one of the requirements of running restaurants, takeaways, cafes and bars. If your place is not visible on social media, you’re missing out on opportunities. Your restaurant’s social media accounts should be integrated into your website. This will bring more engagements.

6) Online Ordering Options

Did you know that online ordering is growing 300 times more quickly than dine-in options? Sure, you can offer take-up options through third-party vendors like UberEats or Deliveroo, but then you’re losing out on valuable revenue that could go directly to your bank because of the commissions. For this reason, you may want to consider adding an online ordering option to your website.

7) High-Quality Photos

When people dine at a restaurant, they want to know exactly what to expect. For this reason, a lot of restaurants post photos of their dining options online. But if your photos aren’t professional, it’s likely that you’ll sway visitors away as opposed to bringing them in.

8) Blog

In today’s world, blogs are an essential part of any website design. A blog is a way to give back to your customers by providing them with engaging, useful content and information. Here you can post how-to videos, recipes, advice, and other food/restaurant-related content that will establish you as an expert in the restaurant industry.

We’ve outlined the most important factors for creating a good restaurant website. Hope you enjoyed it. You can reach us if you have any questions.