Marketing & Promotions
How to Design a Restaurant Website That Converts
5 min read
Aug 20, 2024
5 min read
Aug 20, 2024
Having a restaurant website with a PDF menu, a few pictures of food and basic contact information simply doesn't cut it anymore.
Today's consumers are savvy and accustomed to getting all of the information they need to book and interact with businesses on their websites. In fact, 35% of diners prefer to book reservations directly through a restaurant’s website. For these guests, calling a restaurant or having to navigate to a third-party site to book may push them to dine elsewhere.
You need elements that entice guests to convert directly on your website.
Keep reading for tips on how to design a website into your most powerful tool for converting visitors into paying guests.
We talked with Alfred Goldberg, a seasoned restaurant veteran who leveraged his 20-year tenure in front- and back-of-house roles to build a thriving digital marketing agency for hospitality businesses. Today, Absolute Marketing Solutions helps restaurants worldwide establish an online presence, bringing customers from the streets to their seats.
His go-to tip for restaurant owners? Good food only goes so far.
“A lot of restaurateurs have great food, and they think that’s all they need,” Alfred explains. “These days you gotta get the plate right, but you also have to market beyond the plate. In other words, how visitors find your website and what they experience when they get there.”
User experience (UX) design considers how your potential customer will interact with a website. The more seamless the experience, the better your chance of converting customers.
Haphazard designs and slapdash plug-ins can feel like an afterthought, and cause customers to search for a clearer, more informative experience elsewhere. Below are a few ways Alfred suggests you design a user-friendly website that encourages action.
Whether you hire a website design professional or opt for a DIY approach, the first step is to define all the ways you’ll engage with customers so the website can effectively serve your needs. This will inform your design, layout and even the integrations you use to connect with customers.
Alfred suggests starting with potential engagement opportunities. “Have a good sense of all the ways you want customers to interact with the brand. If [you] have a loyalty program, it’s something you should consider at the start. If you take online orders, sell merchandise, gift cards, offer catering…your website should encourage these interactions.”
Depending on your restaurant business model, think about how you might incorporate some of the following revenue and conversion elements into your website.
Once you determine what you’ll offer, you’ll need to add some integrations to your website to power them.
Most restaurants aren’t equipped to offer their own custom reservation platform, online ordering solution or digital store. For this, you need to leverage third-party integrations. What’s key is to make the user feel like they’re still on your website, even if it’s hosted on a third party.
“The more direct the integration, the better,” says Alfred.
For example, many third-party reservation apps allow guests to easily book, but their brand is front and center leaving the visitor with a mixed experience.
Leveraging a direct booking solution like SevenRooms integrates your branding and logos into the booking experience and guest communication so diners don’t feel confused about whose site they’re on.
Not only do direct integrations create a streamlined, branded look, they also allow restaurants to collect important, more specific guest data that can be used to refine the experience — like their birthday, whether they’ve dined with you before or dietary restrictions to consider.
For example, Sushi Samba uses the SevenRooms direct, branded reservation widget to ensure its integrations feel a part of the website rather than an afterthought.
Incorporating add-ons and upgrades into your reservation process — like a quiet, cozy table in the back room or a special dessert, can drive 35% higher guest spend. Fox & the Knife, for example, uses the SevenRooms widget to let guests kick things off with a creative round of cocktails.
Your website is your digital front door — your customer’s starting point. Therefore, it’s important to consider how your website will help you learn more about your customers so you better tailor the digital experience.
“Being able to understand how customers perceive the brand, read the menu or react to changes is very useful from any sort of marketing and communication standpoint,” Alfred says. “If you start noticing shifts in demographics, for example, your understanding of that improves your ability to serve them and offer value.”
You can understand a lot about the people who visit your website by measuring traffic from Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
For example, you might learn that a good portion of your traffic comes from users searching for vegan and gluten-free options or that your customers skew younger and female. These invaluable data points will help you better understand your customers and adapt your positioning, marketing and offerings accordingly.
As we mentioned above, leveraging the guest data you collect via your reservation or online ordering system can provide a wealth of information about your guests. Use this data to refine your audience and create targeted marketing campaigns to bring these diners back.
As artificial intelligence evolves, restaurants are also starting to use chatbots and pop-ups to encourage guests to join text marketing or email lists and book reservations.
Kevin Coetzee, People Director at Humble Grape says, “We use a chatbot on our website to funnel and direct enquiries from customers to the relevant stream — like weddings or private events — versus a FAQ.”
This is a great way to get guests to interact with your site and also collect information from web visitors that may not have converted into a reservation.
Part of designing an intuitive website means considering how and when visitors will find you. Alfred explains that websites are rarely where someone will first discover a restaurant. According to our latest research, one in three diners (33%) use Google to locate their next favorite spot. Think: “Italian restaurants near me”.
If you want to boost your discoverability online, Alfred suggests starting with an optimized Google My Business listing. Then, ensure that your website matches your Google listing. Everything, down to the formatting on your website, should be consistent to help boost your visibility in local searches. (BTW: Even franchise restaurants benefit from quality local search positioning.)
Uploading your menu items on your Google My Business listing will also help you rank for food-related terms.
Green Rock Tap & Grill’s Google positioning is a perfect example of an optimized local search listing. Google can easily parse the restaurant’s key information and showcase links to its website, ordering system and menu — so much so that when you google “burgers and beer in Hoboken, NJ,” they’re first on the list.
Once a customer finds you, ensure the website matches what consumers have heard and expect to find after digging in. Conversion is more likely to occur if the website is consistent and in line with customer expectations, which brings us to our next point.
Descriptive copy helps customers quickly understand your restaurant and offerings, but finding a balance between informative words and fluff content is key to making a great first impression. Your value proposition(s) should be one of the first things customers learn upon visiting.
“Let’s say you have an outdoor dining area, and that’s key to your client base. You don’t want this information tucked away somewhere in a blog post or FAQ section.”
Alfred urges restaurants to consider their branding and positioning, so guests instantly know how you stand up to competitors.
“Hiding information is a big mistake. Rather than having customers go line-by-line, it’d be a lot easier for a restaurant to say [something like], “Bring your dogs!” and list it front and center. If you set out water bowls, explain the experience and use high-quality images to showcase how that looks onsite.”
As Alfred likes to say, “A picture is worth 10,000 words, not just 1,000.”
Flat Iron Square, a taproom and beer garden in London, doesn't waste any time showing visitors what a trip to the venue will be like. With food photography, video montages and prominent links to their menus and reservations pages in the header, the value proposition is clear: watch live sports and drink great beer with your friends.
Using the SevenRooms booking widget, they’ve even customized their page to include a picture of the guests’ requested table location, so guests can make a more informed decision.
With so many diners perusing a restaurant’s menu items before visiting, it’s important to add your menu somewhere readers can access quickly. More importantly, make sure the menu provided is updated to reflect what they’ll see at your table.
“Restaurants use various systems that are rarely integrated, so they find themselves having to maintain their menu in too many locations. So, they save a menu as a PDF and send it our way. The challenge, though, is that it's a static document you cannot update. A PDF is fine for email, but not for your website,” Alfred says.
Text-based menus are also more accessible for readers with disabilities and can be updated more easily. PDF or image-based menus, on the other hand, are hard for search engines to detect and less mobile-friendly.
Recently, Google launched an AI menu feature that allows restaurants to scan their physical menu and upload it digitally within Google My Business listing. You simply take a photo of your menu and AI will generate the digital details complete with pricing and headers.
Design your website so that it’s equipped to grow alongside your business. This includes being able to handle quick updates or additional features that’ll help you deliver custom experiences and (hopefully) drive more revenue.
“Not only do restaurants need to think about marketing beyond the plate, they need to think about business beyond the plate.”
Alfred cites a local sushi restaurant that experimented with sushi classes as an additional revenue stream. These classes became so popular that the model quickly expanded to hosting corporate outings and selling take-home sushi-making kits — and the website needed to support the new lines of business.
Following this example, the sushi site might now require custom event landing pages and a way to collect payments online. If you use SevenRooms, you can drive sales via event ticketing guests can reserve and pay for in advance. For example, The Garden Las Vegas uses a customizable, flexible landing page for ticketed events, as seen below.
Alternatively, if you decide to start offering delivery service or a perks program, you’ll want to update your website to promote these new features accordingly. Plan to optimize your webpages continuously as you learn more about your customers and what they want.
Customer conversion — encouraging a guest to place an order or book an online reservation — requires a well-designed website where they can take action.
Start by educating customers about your food, your vibe and your story. Then, make it easy for them to experience you with intentional integrations and streamlined user journeys. To learn how SevenRooms can help elevate your website to match your onsite experience, book a demo.
Your homepage is the digital front door of your restaurant. You should include eye-catching images of the food and guest experience, a link to your online menu, phone number, address, hours and location and a prominent placement of your reservation and online ordering widget to encourage action.
A great restaurant website is part of the customer experience — visitors should learn exactly what they can expect during an on-site visit just by going online. When designing it, be sure to include all the information your customers could want to know about your venue and make it easily accessible. This includes practical information, like location, contact info, social media links, hours and location, photos of food and ambiance, menus, about pages and an easy way to book reservations or online orders.
Two additional features to consider are accessibility features to ensure your site is accessible to all by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This includes elements such as descriptive alt text, keyboard navigation, and high-contrast color schemes. Additionally, with internet traffic skewing heavily toward mobile, it’s important to keep your website mobile-friendly. A professional website designer or optimized design template should help ensure your pages are readable by smartphone or tablet.
