Eye-catching Restaurant Website: Features & Integrations to Succeed in Post-COVID Era

After pandemic recovery for restaurant industry mixed with new challenge: labour-intensive processes needed to be automized or reduced, rising prices from suppliers push resourcefulness on how to re-fresh menu but keep the prices, hiring professional and passionated team and regulations that aren’t becoming easier – motivate restaurant business owners to invent new sales’ channels, open food online delivery and streamline take-away orders that became a mainstream since COVID-era. How investments to well established and SEO-optimized website can keep your restaurant business moving forward? Scroll and find out!

Must-Have Features to have on Your Restaurant Website and Gain clients

1. Booking
2. Menu
3. Testimonials 

• Integrations with TripAdvisor, Google map and Open table
• Gallery

Trendy Features to Stand Out of the Crowd and Increase Your Restaurant Online Sales

1. Gamification & Engaging elements.
2. Testimonials with all possible formats: text, photo, video, audio.
3. Food blog to improve your website ranking and move your website in TOP 10 Google search results.
4. Influencers and columnists engaged in content creating and promotion.
5. A special guide for people with different food preferences, intolerances, and allergies.
6. Special occasion services.
7. Professional food photos.

e-Commerce and Online Sales for the Restaurants’ Websites: Best Solutions to Win

Wither you woild like to sell online some positions from your menu or cover take-away you can gain from ecommerce add-on or plugin, It will cover for you all the main tasks: photo, size, ingredients, price, promo proposition, special promos for registered users and so much more. To chose the right e-commerce for your restaurant take-away sales, please, review what options do you have.

eCommerce for Restaurant Take-Away and Online Orders

1. WooCommerce. Popular, simple to navigate and set up. Can be used with WordPress blog that will improve your SEO greatly and generate organic leads from Google Search Results as well as from local SEO efforts.
2. Shopify. One of the most popular ecommerce builder that gives you an opportunity to start your online sales in a couple of day. The corns of Shopify can be noticed later, when you start to grow your sales and will require more customization. 
3. BigCommerce. Powerful ecommerce product, that can give you a lot of features and opportunities to scale your online sales, but can we complicated for beginners as well. 

Also, some restaurant POSs providers can be considered as an ecommerce add-on to your website, doesn’t matter what CMS it’s built in. For example, TOAST POS and Square POS provide an opportunity to sell online.

Food Delivery Plugins

More simple to start online sales, setup the processes and then extend on your website, Facebook and Instagram sales’ channels is adding your menu on the food delivery websites and services. Some the most popular in North America among those are:

• Delivery.com
• Postmates
• Grubhub
• DoorDash
• UberEats

The pros of these resources for restaurant business is that they cover marketing, delivery, and payment processes. The cons are that you will be just “one of hundreds” other businesses there, so the prices, how fast delivery is and the reviews in, a while, -will be 3 main points of customer’s consideration. 

Website vs APP do You Still Need Both for Your Restaurant?

In 2024 and beyond you still will gain from both, especially if you have offline restaurant as well as online bookings and sales.

Restaurant Website’s Pros for Your Business

• Online Presence. It provides an information about your restaurant, menu, location, and contact details. It’s your unique channel to communicate with customers, future employer, and suppliers. You can generate valuable content, gather reviews and add more features to engage users become your clients. Key value of your restaurant website -it’s a channel of sales and communications free from competitors. 
• SEO opportunities and lead generation. Once your website is optimized for search engines it becomes easier for potential customers to find you online. SEO traffic is good as it’s low-cost and can bring leads in long-term period. 
• Flexibility. Your website -your rules. You can setup engaging processes, tone of voice, gather emails and transfer leads to email marketing, quizzes and so much more.
• Accessibility. Website can be reachable worldwide. It give you an opportunity to win not only your local audience, but those who travel, make business trip and this will extend your customers’ database greatly.

Restaurant’s Application 

• Enhanced user experience: Apps provide a more personalized users experience, usually, with features like push notifications and loyalty programs. Moreover, application is more complicated to track by your competitors, comparing to your website, so you can build outstanding users experience and improve retention rate.
• Brand loyalty. Once the app is uploaded on your customer’s device you have unique communicational  channel. If you’re doing a great job with your products, promotions and marketing activities -you can strengthen brand loyalty and encourage repeat business.
• Direct engagement and 1 to 1 communications. An Application offers a direct channel for customer communication and feedback.
• Offline functionality. If you will make your app to function offline, you will provide convenience for customers no matter what is the speed of Internet connection.

Templates and Themes for Restaurant Website: What Can be Wrong with Them?

• Junk code- slow down website speed.
• Unexpectable updates .
• Not unique- not memorable. If you don’t create this wow, eye-catching effect from the first seconds of your contact with the user- you can lose this lead forever.
• Limits and possible conflicts between pre-installed plugins and addons of the Theme with other plugins, addons and integrations you will add.
• Once you will customize the theme or plugin, you are limited in updates as all the customized code will disappeared.  There’s no issue to put it back. Just additional time and work.
• Security Issues. Especially if the theme or template is free or low-cost. 

Website builders for your Restaurant Website: Yes-s and No-s to Consider

Website Builders for the Restaurant Website Gains:

• Fast launch;
• Ready to use integrations (payment gateway, delivery plugins, etc);
• Regular security updates and system upgrade;
• User-friendly interface that combine best practice;
• Affordable pricing.

Website Builders for the Restaurant Website Threats:

• limits to extend your business;
• Customization limits;
• Business security, especially with website builders who provide their servers/hosting without alternative to migrate on your hosting;
• Visual similarity to many other restaurant websites;
• Website builders limitations and restrictions. This is another side of customization limits. however with more technical background. It can cause SEO, Google Ads and other issues that makes this kind of the websites low effective or not effective at all.
• Performance issues. However website builders are usually smart and customizable, the back turn of this is a lot of code that slow down your website performance. Also, if the hosting is provided only by website builder, you can’t optimize website performance from this side. The effect is predictable: your efforts are very low0effective and capacity to improve performance -limited.

What Do We Offer in IDL WEB Inc to Make Your Restaurant Website Stand Out of the Crowed? 

We just don’t build the regular web designs & layouts, we create masterpieces : a full fledged web software that powers your restaurant website, a social media connected restaurant website that will automate your social sharing to help you reduce you input, increase local visibility and the admins can spend more time on content creation. Our Web developers will make sure that your web design project has the best SEO coded layout to give you a headstart over your competitors.

To Wrap up

With a properly optimised website, many of the restaurants in Toronto have opened and closed shutters in a short span of time just because of the lack of a proper digital presence in the market. 

Thrive in the post-COVID restaurant world with a powerful website and win this tough competition!

• Must-mave features for your website: Bookings, menu, Reviews, payment, delivery and other services integrations, gallery with high quality food-photos.
• To stand out and underline your restaurant exceptional features: gamification, diverse types of reviews, food blog, influencer marketing, dietary guides, special occasion services.
• Ecommerce Solutions: food delivery, take-away or catering services.
• Website vs. App: Both! You will gain two times more leads, cover different audience and can propose special products and services more customized and focused on your clients needs.
• In IDL WEB Inc.: We build custom restaurant websites that stand out, boost SEO and online presence.