A well-designed website creates trust and confidence in your brand and food while helping you gain a strategic advantage over competitors. When it comes to developing a website for your restaurant, is WordPress a good option or not? And the simple answer is YES!
As WordPress has become the world’s most widely used platform for managing websites, the goal isn’t simply to give your food business (i.e., Restaurants, Cafes, etc.) an online presence. With WordPress, you can have an extensive plugin library and many premium restaurant resources.
In this article, we’ll discuss ten reasons why your restaurant needs a WordPress website, so without further ado, let’s get started.
1. Free to Use
Even though WordPress is a leading platform for building websites. The good news is it’s 100% free to use, and thousands of developers worldwide contribute to WordPress voluntarily to make it better every day. Therefore, it is an excellent option for building a restaurant website because it allows you to create and manage it without paying for a proprietary CMS or website builder.
Additionally, within the WordPress library, you will find thousands of free themes and plugins that allow you to create a professional-looking website for your restaurant quickly and easily.
2. A User-Friendly Platform for Content Management
Suppose you are not a technical person to learn and manage all the technical aspects of website development. In that case, WordPress is the best option for you to manage content conveniently and simply.
All the major features of the design utilize a template, allowing you to drag and drop images, texts, and other interesting features. So, to edit the content, simply sign in to your WordPress admin dashboard, navigate to the edit option, and there you go. You can easily edit and manage your content, like Microsoft Word.
So, with an easy-to-use interface, you’ll easily be able to edit the menu and post event announcements, promotions, press releases, and much more. And the best thing about WordPress is that the most non-technical staff on your team can easily update content in minutes.
3. Flexibility
The best thing about WordPress is that it’s flexible, which means you can customize the admin section to suit your restaurant’s content needs (and requirements) with WordPress.
Besides manually editing the restaurant menu on your website using WordPress editor, you can import table menus in PDF versions or create a set of custom functionalities on your website so you can toggle the front end of the website to update the menu frequently.
With all these functionalities and features, WordPress offers great flexibility in building and managing a restaurant website.
4. The Best Platform to Create a Blog
WordPress originated as the first blogging platform. So, you can set up a restaurant blog on your website seamlessly. Having a blog is a great way to communicate your brand story and share your ideas with the public. But it is also an effective way to foster community and promote community engagement.
If you don’t know what to share on your restaurant blog, then don’t worry; here are some ideas for you to share:
- Recipes of the day.
- Featured daily specials.
- News and Announcements.
- Telling Stories about what made you open this restaurant, your journey, etc.
- Inspirational posts – for example, where your food comes from or introducing your new chef.
- Photos and reviews of your customers on Yelp, Google, Facebook, etc.
5. SEO Friendly
A great feature of WordPress is its ability to optimize for SEO. If you don’t know what SEO is, then it’s ok. It refers to the process of getting your website indexed by search engines. This way, visitors land on your restaurant website when they search the internet using search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.
As we’re talking about the website of an actual business, generating traffic alone is not enough. That’s where Local SEO comes in. It’s a fantastic SEO strategy for helping your business appear more prominently in local search engine results, especially Google.
So, if your business doesn’t appear in local search results, you miss out on many customers. However, you don’t have to be an expert in Google SEO to get a higher ranking in Google local search results. Fortunately, there are plugins available for WordPress, such as Yoast or Rank Math, which can make this job much easier for you and give Google all the information it needs to optimize your local SEO.
6. Industry-Focused Plugins
A WordPress plugin is similar to an app you find on smartphones. These plugins add innovative features to the WordPress installation process, allowing it to be more flexible. There are tens of thousands of free and paid plugins available for every industry, which you can purchase for a few dollars.
Compared to free plugins, paid plugins have more functional and excellent customer service, allowing you to troubleshoot issues more quickly. The paid version keeps your website secure by automatically keeping up-to-date with the latest WordPress version, saving you the time and effort of manually updating your plugins.
Some examples of industry-focused plugins are as follows:
- Automated Reservations: These plugins allow customers to make reservations conveniently by automating the process.
- Menu Makers: You can easily add an online menu to your website using any menu maker plugin. Also, you can easily edit menu items and include details like descriptions, prices, and images.
- Yelp Bar: Using this plugin, you can display your Yelp reputation to your visitors by adding a Yelp bar at the top of your website. It shows Yelp ratings along with customer reviews. In this way, your business will gain credibility, and prospective customers will feel confident that they can trust you.
7. Highly Optimized
With WordPress, you have complete control over your website’s code, allowing you to optimize it in whichever way you like. This way, you can make your website more functional and faster for visitors to use across various devices so that visitors stay on your site for extended periods and leave less frequently.
Additionally, if you want to appear on local search results, it’ll help you outrank your competitors because Google wants its users to see a lightning-fast website.
8. Building an Email List Is Easy with WordPress
Whether you use WordPress directly or an email marketing software, MailChimp, it’s simple to integrate opt-in forms into your website to build an email marketing list.
Also, your website can allow visitors to subscribe directly by email to receive notifications about new posts and updates. You can build a fantastic customer base by engaging them with your content more frequently.
9. Social Media Integration
WordPress makes it super easy for you to integrate social media into your website, allowing visitors to share your content as their social media posts and also enabling you to publish new content to your social profiles automatically.
This saves you time while you are busy with other business activities, such as preparing meals at your restaurant, and helps you grow your customer base passively.
10. Highly Scalable
Today, you might operate a restaurant of a small size, but you have plans to expand in the future. No worries; WordPress has the capacity to grow with your business.
Let’s say you want to expand to other cities and open new restaurant locations. All you need to do is simply add a new location to your WordPress site with all the functionalities and features your primary location has.
Whether you sell online today or not, WordPress has everything you need.
Wrapping Up
Many options are available when building your restaurant website, and WordPress must be at the top. Because WordPress gives you the freedom to develop your restaurant website with great design and functionality without breaking the bank.
Lastly, we believe that all the reasons above make a solid reason for you to build your restaurant’s website with WordPress.
