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Whether you’re in the early stages of creating an online food business or you’re bringing your existing restaurant online, a professional website is key for attracting potential customers. A great food business website usually includes:
Basic business information, like the type of food you’re selling
An easy-to-find menu
Online ordering options
A reservation link, if you offer them
Contact and address information
To start your website, decide what your goals are, then get a few basics together to create a compelling design and copy before you launch.
1. Choose your website goals
Before you start to develop your website, make sure you’re clear on the primary goal of your online presence. A website for an in-person restaurant will look and work differently than an online-only operation that primarily does in-person pickup or shipping.
Ask yourself what areas of your business you’re trying to grow. If you want more in-person dining reservations and to-go orders, you’ll want a restaurant website that focuses on selling your atmosphere, food or drink, and online food ordering options.
If your goal is to grow your ecommerce business, then your website should focus on your products and function more like an online store.
It’s possible to do both depending on the size of your business. Be realistic about what your top priorities and goals are and what your team can handle. You can introduce a new part of your business slowly or seasonally instead if you can’t do both year-round.
For example, a cheese shop might have regular reservations for in-person charcuterie tastings and sell pre-packaged tastings of their most popular cheeses during the holidays. Getting clear on your most important goals will help you understand what to include on your website.
2. Design your restaurant website
Starting your website can feel like a big task, But once you know which pages to include, choosing a template and customizing your pages can happen quickly.
What to include on your restaurant website
Before you start building, make a list of the essential pages your website needs to accomplish your goals. Typically, website design for a restaurant or food business starts with a:
Homepage
About Us page
Menu and/or online shop
News and updates page
Contact and/or reservations page
This way, you’ll introduce visitors to your vision, food, and team. Having a page for news or a blog page will help your SEO, so more diners and shoppers can find you through search engines.
Not every restaurant is set up to handle an online ordering system right away, so you can add that page when you launch your website or wait until you’re ready.
Make sure each page of your website has all the information someone needs to become a customer. Restaurants should share their menu items and hours of operation and allow customers to schedule reservations or place takeout orders all from the same page. In this instance, integrating a service like Tock makes it easy to include all of these on your website so customers don’t need to leave your page to get what they need.
Websites for selling food online
Selling food online requires different features. Since your focus is on selling through an online store, make sure you have:
An FAQ page
Shipping and refund policies
Detailed product pages
Your website will need to have the functionality of an ecommerce platform. You should be able to:
Prioritize adding pictures of your food items or subscription boxes that you sell online. Product images—especially when combined with strong product descriptions—show your customers exactly what to expect and can impact whether they decide to buy.
How to choose and customize a website template
A website template is the foundation of your site design. Depending on the main goal of your website, you can choose a restaurant or ecommerce store template. Both are customizable, so you can add an online shop to a restaurant template and restaurant pages to an ecommerce template. Or build a custom template from scratch with Squarespace Blueprint AI, so you have all the pages and draft copy you need from the very start.
Once you’ve picked a template, get started with a few small steps:
Set your color palette based on the colors you use for your restaurant branding
Choose a font that’s similar or the same as your branding
Add your logo to your header navigation
If your website is easy to read and navigate and fits your branding, customers will have a better user experience and trust your business.
From there, simply start adding information to your pages. Keep your homepage simple and use it to direct visitors where you most want to send them. For example, a brick-and-mortar restaurant will likely want to include prominent buttons to lead visitors to its menu page and food delivery page. An online food shop should feature its products.
Decide what belongs on each page on your website, then split it into small sections that can be easily scanned and understood. Bite-sized bits of information help your customers find what they need quickly on a desktop or mobile device.
Since there are different elements to look at, customers will want to see what comes next as they continue scrolling and learning. Creating sections is as simple as dragging and dropping new site blocks, and choosing the content and layout that best suits your needs. To continue visually breaking up the page, each site block can be customized with different background colors from your template or photos.
Not sure how to start? Follow our guide to building a homepage.
Adding online ordering to your website
You’ll want to customize your online ordering page to how the system works at your restaurant. If you do a lot of dine-in, you may be able to link out to just one ordering page and system that’s built into your POS system. The benefit of these is that you can often set up a loyalty program to reward repeat customers and they may charge lower fees.
For restaurants that do much more delivery and work with multiple delivery services, create an online ordering page to host links to each service you use. That way, customers can quickly click into whichever ordering website they prefer to use.
In both cases, you won’t need to have any ecommerce functionality on your website, since your online ordering partners will handle the online payments and order forms.
3. Add your website copy
Once you’ve nailed down the focus, look, and flow of your site, it’s time to put together your messaging. While your business’s tone may be unique to your restaurant, make sure your website copy tells customers what you do well and why they should spend their money with you.
The messaging on your site is an extension of your business’s vision, mission, and values. It creates the narrative flow that nurtures customers from first discovering you, through making regular purchases or reservations. Think of it as a guide that tells them which action to take next.
For example, if you’re interested in booking more reservations online, keep those prompts for reservations at the top of the page—and sprinkle them frequently throughout the rest of your website.
If you’re feeling stuck, you can use Squarespace AI to start a draft for you right from the text editing box. Just feed the tool a prompt, and it’ll give you copy to start with.
4. Set yourself up for SEO success
Learning how to improve search engine optimization ultimately comes down to understanding the full range of factors that influence your site’s ranking. Search engines value and prioritize websites that are:
Regularly updated: Consistently update your site with news, events, or fresh menus to signal that the content is being maintained.
Relevant to the search topic: Work common search terms for your type of food business into your website copy.
Easy to use and navigate: Keep navigation clear and simple and make sure your site meets accessibility standards like adding page titles and descriptions and alt text for images.
Functional on every type of device: Customers should be able to find the information they need—or place an online order—from your website on any device.
All of the above can improve or maintain your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Squarespace templates already leverage key aspects of design and user experience that will benefit your site’s overall SEO. Our sites also include features like a built-in sitemap, structured analytics, and automatic redirects that are key to search ranking.
It’s important to note that it can take search engines two weeks or more to crawl a website—if you make improvements to your site’s SEO today, you should wait to see the full return of your efforts weeks and months down the line.
Get more tips for optimizing your site for search engines
5. Get a custom domain
Your domain name is the unique URL associated with your website. Get a custom domain name for your website so it’s easy for customers to find and identify your site when they see it online. Especially for a small business, easy recognition is key.
Clear is usually better than clever in this case. Most people choose a domain name that matches their business name. Plug your business name into a free domain search to confirm that it’s available before trying to buy it. During the process, you can also set up a business email address under your domain name to keep your communications organized.
Follow these steps to get your own domain
Promote your new website
Launching your website is an occasion worth celebrating. There are no limits to the promotional avenues available at your fingertips. For example, you can leverage your in-person restaurant and gain momentum for your online website by listing your new website URL on your menus or receipts. This way, customers can keep engaging, even after they’ve left your restaurant.
Email campaigns are another powerful way to tell your audience about your online launch. Even if there aren’t many people on your email list yet, allowing people to sign up via your website, social media, or in-store promotions creates a clear line of communication between your company and the customers who want to hear from you.
Social media engagement is also incredibly useful for spreading your message. Depending on your industry and ideal audience, different social channels may work better than others for promoting your products. For example, a food subscription box service may benefit from a visual platform that lets them showcase videos of customer unboxings and each care package being packed.
Choose to focus on the channel where you currently have the largest audience to leverage, and work outwards to other platforms as you feel the need. It’s not necessary to be everywhere at once. Instead, focus on developing strong momentum behind one or two social accounts.
Ready to bring your food business online?
This post was updated on June 15, 2023.