Website Tips for Cafes, Restaurants and Bars
Suzy Vaughan
Beautiful, affordable ?? websites ?? (with no jargon ??), from a friendly team in Bristol ??????
Once a customer falls in love with your restaurant (or cafe or bar!) you may well have a loyal customer for life. However, the first step is getting them to find you and then getting them through the front door. At first, a customer’s view and opinion of your business may be based solely on your website, so it is important that you provide a site that is engaging, fast and easy to navigate. However the good news is that it does not need to be difficult, just follow these few simple guidelines…
What does a good takeaway site contain?
The essential information
To make your site easy to navigate, all the essential information should be easy to find from the home page. Customers don’t want to waste time browsing confusing websites before choosing where to eat, so you risk losing customers if your website is not streamlined.
The most important things diners want to know are:
Providing a responsive website design is one thing, but making all these key pieces of information are located where they can be easily found makes sure your website is user friendly is also crucial. Your contact information should be easy to find to show you are ready to assist any type of enquiry or concern your customers may have. Being difficult to contact would be like taking too long to seat and serve customers, so it is important to be able to acknowledge their queries immediately.
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The Menu
One of the most obvious highlights of your homepage should be your menu as this is the main thing you’re advertising so should be easy to find. Your menu should be up to date, clearly indicate vegetarian and vegan options and highlight other allergy or nutrition information available.
Don’t upload your menu as an image (i.e. a photo of the menu), provide a searchable menu. An easily avoidable but very common mistake for restaurant websites is providing a copy of the menu as an image. This causes your menu to be unreadable by search engines and difficult for customers to access and navigate.?
Providing your menu as a searchable section of your website also makes it possible to make adjustments to it with an online editing system so making amends is quick and easy if prices or dishes change. Keeping your menu updated prevents conflicts or disappointment for your customers when taking orders and reservations.?
Make sure the menu provided is interactive, easily searchable and has adequate details to keep your customers informed about the contents of the dishes you serve.?
A gallery of high quality images
High quality is the key focus here. Delicious food does not always look so delicious on camera, as it’s surprisingly difficult to make food look palatable in photographs – poor attempts will make your food look worse and likely not do it justice. Hiring a professional photographer is the smartest route here. Professional images are also great to use for social media promotion.
Make it easier to make a reservation or order from you
Now more than ever, customers want the ability to easily reserve or order / pay online without needing to call. ?
There are a variety of options of how to do this; including contact forms or integration third party applications – the latter can be very sophisticated and manage online bookings, table managing, pre-orders and payments
Make it mobile-friendly
With over half of internet traffic coming from mobile devices, it is more important than ever for your website to be optimised for easy navigation on smartphones. Making your website mobile friendly is one of the most effective ways you can avoid losing customers. If your website is difficult to navigate, people won’t bother trying to use your website and will take their business elsewhere.
Reviews/link to TripAdvisor
Advertising reviews from previous customers that visitors can see without having to leave your website shows transparency and builds customers trust for your business. It shows visitors of your website you have nothing to hide and you’re doing your best to give all your customers a great experience.
Communicate Why they should use you
Many establishments make great use of their website to market their business in areas that are important to customers. For example showing processes they go through to clean their kitchens and personal protection equipment that is used to show how they are protecting customers during covid.
Next steps
Once you have ensured all the above information is readily available on your website, give it an additional push on social media or in your café / restaurant / bar. Also, build time in time to update your website so the information is always relevant. Hopefully this should see customers coming back time and time again.