Top 15 Design Elements Every Restaurant Website Must Have
Restaurateurs running a restaurant online require an appealing website with an excellent look and feel, and a good user experience. Designing a restaurant website is nothing less than crafting a dish for customers. If you are designing yours, consider the restaurant website design elements we analyzed and explored in this article.
Quick Summary:Are you planning to create a restaurant website? Have you considered and explored all restaurant website design elements you need to have on the website? If not, we have done it for you. The article helps you with the best restaurant website design ideas and details of all crucial elements. Your website must have an appealing interface that attracts people, navigates them easily, keeps them engaged, and helps them place orders conveniently. Before you begin designing, understanding those elements will help you build an outstanding website for your restaurant business. Let’s explore.
Nowadays, people like to know everything about the products and services before they connect or visit stores to buy or experience products and services. This is similar in the case of restaurants. People thoroughly explore restaurant websites and check restaurant menus, prices, food information, and others before ordering. Providing all information is crucial in all these customer journeys, but what if they face difficulty accessing it? They will most likely swear off using your website for ordering, no matter how delicious the food you serve. UI/UX design of your restaurant is essential to help your users navigate from one page to another and make it easy to find the information they need.
The end of the story is that the food website design must be compelling enough to attract your customers.
To build the UI/UX design for your restaurant, you need to do various things, but what is more crucial to understand is “the website design elements.”
Today’s restaurant market faces cut-throat competition; a restaurant/café needs to stand out in every aspect possible. Be it hospitality, hygiene, food quality, taste, ambiance, etc., you cannot cut some slack. You have to be at the top of your game. Due to the advancement of technologies, another aspect that has gained significant importance in recent years is the digital presence of a restaurant/cafe. Even if they visit your storefront for lunch or dinner, they will likely check your website first. However, the benefits of restaurant websites are not limited to these; there can be many. Top Essential Restaurant Website Design Elements help you explore and understand in detail. Let’s explore.
The top design elements for a restaurant website include;
Inspiration from Website Example
Choose Between CMS or Website Builder
A Unique Brand Story
High Resolution and Professional Photograph
High-Quality Video
User Friendly UX
Create and Add Menu
Maintain Transparency
Create Comprehanvie Restaurant Webiste
Mobile Friendly Design
Integrate Online Ordering System
Reward Program
Location, Address, and Contact Information
Showcase Achievements and Certifications
Keep Your Website Updated
Your website’s design is the first thing your customer’s eye will catch, forming their initial impression. A great first impression means you’ve already won half the battle. With 86% of diners doing online research before trying a new restaurant, it’s clear that the first impression is crucial. The saying goes, ‘The first impression is the last impression.’
Inspiration from Website Example
Restaurant website design needs to be practical, accessible, and unique. Tools, themes, and templates are crucial, and you can grab them as you require, but design output depends on expertise, experience, and creativity. To enhance your knowledge, you need to explore some similar website examples. For example, if you build Zommtto, you must explore Uber Eats, Swiggy, and others. For restaurants, you can take some ideas from similar types of restaurants. Understand their UI and UX; find out the good and bad aspects of the example restaurants’ websites. Make points about what you can improve your website design and what could be ignored.
Choose Between CMS or Website Builder
Once you explore website examples for your restaurant, you must choose between CMS and website builder software. The software selection depends on the website type you want to build. For example, if you need a hundred percent custom website for your restaurant, you need to have a suitable CMS for your restaurant website. However, a restaurant website builder can be a good choice if you want cost-effective yet out-of-the-box features, predesigned templates, and restaurant-specific themes.
Tell A Unique Brand Story
Every restaurant, whether reputed or not, has a unique story. A breeze of freshness, uniqueness, and creativity should flow over the user when they first use your website. It should feel like something they have never seen before, in a good way. Everything from your logo, font, color palettes, and how you have designed the website should feel like something new. Develop a story behind the brand building that connects with the audience. Pick a USP which is your strength, and play to it. Your customers like to know everything about your website, including your idea behind building the website, your branding story, and the story behind selecting a particular logo. Your website is the most powerful place where you can tell the brand story and attract more customers.
High Resolution and Professional Photograph
We can’t emphasize enough the importance of photographs on a restaurant website. The good thing about food is that it attracts people whenever they hear a good food item, smell an aroma, or are reminded of a dish they had forgotten. Photographs are a great way to remind them and lure them in. Try to put aesthetic and delicious photos of the food items you serve, as it will act as a perfect segue for them to come to your restaurant.
High-Quality Video
Food is all about visual experience; showing your mouth-watering creation via video can grab your customers’ attention. From food preparation and kitchen cleanliness to highlighting visitors’ ambiance and happy faces, it can leave a great impression on customers looking for good restaurants to eat or order.
User Friendly UX
UX is the most crucial element of restaurant website design. Even if you use the best website builder for restaurants, UX must be appealing. Not at a single instance should the user feel any technical inconvenience. Especially after the arrival of social media, everyone’s attention span has decreased drastically, which may result in the user leaving your website and never coming again. This may also result in lousy word-of-mouth publicity. The website should be easy to understand, surf, and order.
Create and Add Menu
Most restaurant website builders come with high-quality digital menu features, enabling owners to create quality and informative menus. Keep the menu text-based, not PDF- or image-based. The PDF and image-based menus are unnecessary and unpleasant ways to present the menu. The menu should blend in with the restaurant web design guide very well, and the items should be kept according to their place in a dinner. For example, the starters should be placed at the beginning, the main course in the middle, and desserts and beverages should be placed at the end. It can be frustrating to see the dessert at the beginning and scroll down to the end for the main course. And if possible, segregate these things further down. For example, break down the menu into pizzas, bread, curry, etc., so the user can directly go to the item he wants to order.
Maintain Transparency
Inform your users what information you are collecting and how you will use them. Try to make the user comfortable while collecting his details like location, email ID, phone number, UPI ID, etc., as it should not seem like a breach of their privacy. The user should always feel like he is giving it at his will, and his trust will not be broken. You need to inform them that you will use the data to improve their services and update them about restaurants. It can be news, blogs, offers, and promotions (If they subscribe).
Create a Comprehensive Restaurant Website
Picture this: your customers visit your restaurant website, and they explore offerings, menus, and items you sell. But, they find no option to place an order right from the website.
In other instances, the visitors log in to the website and want to book or starve the table, and you don’t have that option for them.
Most probably, you have lost all those visitors. A food website design must be comprehensive and have all features and functionalities. Try to incorporate multiple features on your website. The user should be able to order, at the same time, book a reservation or even place an order for the desired food. You should provide users as many options as possible because you are unsure if they will return. Treat it as your final shot. Link your other social media accounts as well. As they say- “Never put your eggs in one basket.” Diversifying as much as possible makes your brand seem more professional and instills a sense of trust in the users.
Mobile Friendly Design
Is your website accessible across all devices? The best restaurant website must have this crucial feature. Millions of customers use smartphones and mobile to explore your restaurant, menus, and even information before visiting your store font. Ensure your restaurant website is accessible across all devices, laptops, PCs, tablets, and smartphones.
Integrate Online Ordering System
Do you know that online data suggests that the revenue of the online food delivery market will reach $1.22 trillion in 2024? Apart from revenue, there will be 2.5 billion users by 2028 who frequently order food using restaurant websites or food delivery platforms. These data are needed to integrate your online food drawing system with your restaurant website. Choose the best food or system, or if you are using a restaurant website builder, you must have this feature integrated with the builder. For example, Foodiv offers a comprehensive restaurant website builder with an online food ordering feature.
Reward Program
A reward program is a crucial feature you should have on your restaurant website. You can consider rewarding customers by revisiting your restaurants. You can offer discounts, free delivery, festival discounts, gift cards/coupons, and freebies. You can also explore options for first-time customers apart from loyal users. Try to reward them for using your website so that they are eager and excited to come back and, at the same time, be faithful to you. This will also result in a good word of mouth and will be a win-win situation for both of you in the long run.
Location, Address, and Contact Information
Does your restaurant website have the address, phone number, and operating hours visible on the Contact Us page and the footer of the home page? If not, you need to implement it right away. You can also consider integrating a map function so your users can quickly locate your restaurant location and reach store font for having lunch or dinner.
Showcase Achievements and Certifications
You have the world’s best chefs working in your restaurant, but what are your users doing about it? You prepare the best dish and receive appreciation from the most famous personalities and influencers, but what is the use of those achievements when your customers don’t know about them? Likewise, you may have various things to help users understand what you serve and the quality you deliver. Don’t shy away from portraying your achievements. Show them all the certificates and accolades you have been awarded, all the good reviews your restaurant has gotten, and all the celebrities who have come to your restaurant.
Keep Your Website Updated
This applies in every aspect. Be it the market trends, necessities, problems, or solutions. You cannot afford to be outdated in anything. Keep updating your website after some time so that it always has that tint of freshness. Your users must find everything they get from other (restaurant websites), meaning the food website design should appear or feel old to your customers. Keep them updated on every minor matter, like any addition to your menu, changes in the existing procedures, etc. Keep them updated even after their order. Is the food being prepared, or has it been dispatched? Who will bring the food, what is the estimated time it will arrive, and what is their review of the service and food?
Bonus: ADA Accessibility
Is your website accessible to all, including visually impaired persons? If not, it is going to be yet another restaurant website design. If you are using a quality restaurant website builder, explore the guide for building a restaurant website to understand and adhere to every necessary and legal part. Explore ADA and WCAG guidelines to avoid any legal issues in the future. Also, avoid unethical and immoral activities, as they will hamper your brand image in the long run.
Conclusion
In this guide, we have explored all essential elements for restaurant website design, but that’s not the end. We saw the measures that are necessary to build a good website. Invest as much time and energy as possible in building a good website because it will pay off exponentially and create a domino effect you may never have even dreamt of! Optimize the customer experience as much as possible by paying attention to the minute details because, as they say, “Beauty lies in the smallest of details.” You have plenty of other things to explore, and Foodiv can help you not just start a new restaurant but build an effective digital platform with a restaurant website builder. Apart from this, we help you to create a new restaurant website or integrate features and functionalities into the existing ones. Let’s connect.
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