WordPress is the world’s most popular website management tool, it’s used by millions of websites and by multinationals and bloggers alike, but does WordPress make a good option for your restaurant’s website?
In this blog, we’ll look at some of the reasons that we think you should use WordPress to power the website for your restaurant.
1. WordPress is free.
The core WordPress software is 100% free. This means that out of the box, you get an enterprise-level CMS at no cost to you (so you don’t actually pay anything for the software.
WordPress is supported by 1000s of developers around the world who contribute to WordPress on a voluntary basis to keep improving it.
2. It’s very flexible.
One of the amazing things about using WordPress for food-related businesses is the ability to customise the admin section of the site to suit your content needs.
So, as a restaurant, you might have content for weekly specials, our chefs, our suppliers, menus and so on.
WordPress can be built on the back-end to have all these sections in place for you, which makes managing the content easy.
What’s more, the content for these different sections can be mapped out in advance so you only see the aspects of the page content you need to – no messing around with HTML or other code, just easy-to-manage content.
For your menus, a separate section of the site can also be built so you can either upload PDF versions of your table menus or have a custom set of menu elements that you can switch on and off on the front-end as your menu changes.
Get a WP site for your Restaurant
3. You can use it to sell online.
WordPress is famously easy to use to sell online, so if you want to sell gift vouchers or offer other promotions on your site, you can do so easily.
Whether you use PayPal, Stripe or another payment gateway, it can all be hooked up with your accounting package to make everything seamless and easy.
4. It is secure.
There’s often a lot of talk about WordPress not being secure, but it is in fact far more secure than hosted platforms like Squarespace and Shopify.
Two-factor authentication and security plugins like WordFence keep your site safe and automatically block potential hackers from accessing your site.
5. It scales.
Running a small restaurant today, but have big plans for tomorrow? WordPress can scale with you.
As your business grows, your WordPress site can grow too, so if you open restaurants in other locations, you can add locations to your website.
If you are not selling online today, but might want to in the future, it has that covered too.
6. It’s great for SEO
One of the amazing things about WP is the ability to get your SEO correct.
Plugins like Yoast or Rank Math can walk you through the basics of SEO if you want to DIY, and SEO experts love it because WP makes it easy to add links, categories and images to improve your on-page SEO.
There are also extra plugins like Internal Link Finder for WordPress that make sorting your internal linking a breeze.
Website structure is also crucial to SEO, and WordPress has this covered too – you can have your URL structure organised to best suit your SEO and make your site more likely to rank in the search results.
The ease of posting blogs on WordPress also means that you can keep your site up-to-date and post information about events, news and promotions easily and without any hassle.
7. It’s quick.
Unlike some other hosted platforms, WordPress is fast.
It’s quick and intuitive to manage the content on the back end and WordPress sites are fast when it comes to viewing them.
This decreases the chance of potential customers getting frustrated with a slow site and going elsewhere.
8. You can have the design your way.
There is no connection between the content and the code in WordPress, so your content can be designed however you want it to look.
We design and build bespoke websites in line with our client’s corporate identity design, and for restaurants, this is an important factor: you don’t want your restaurant website to look overly similar to your competitors.
Everything we design is 100% custom and on-brand for the clients we work with.
9. It’s easy to manage and update content.
Not overly technical? No problem – managing text and image content in WP is really, really simple and quick.
When editing your site, simply navigate to the page, click edit (when logged in) and you will be taken to the admin page where you can edit content just like you do in Microsoft Word.
Together with a bespoke admin build, this makes your site manageable even by the least techy person on your team.
An easy-to-update site means you’ll keep it up-to-date, and that’s good for business.
10. It can be optimised.
You can pull WordPress apart and optimise every single line of code on your website.
This makes your site super-fast for visitors on different devices and will increase the time they spend on your site and reduce the number of people leaving it.
It also means that when you are competing in local searches with other restaurants, you are more likely to out-rank them in the search results as Google knows you have a lightning-fast website, and that’s what it wants to show its users (yes, Google has customers too that it needs to impress).
10. It can integrate with social media.
Did you know that you can link your WordPress site directly to your social media accounts so not only can people share your site content easily, but you can also automatically post your new content directly to your social accounts – this saves no end of time when you a busy on prep for the restaurant and keeps your social channels full with great content.
11. You can easily build a mailing list.
Whether directly in WP or via something like MailChimp, it’s easy to build sign-up forms into your site to build your mailing list for email marketing.
Visitors can also subscribe directly to your website to receive notifications via email about new posts and content.
This is a powerful way of getting people back to you your site.
WordPress is simply the best CMS for Restaurant websites.
There are lots of options when considering the design and build of a website for your restaurant, but we suggest that WP should be a serious contender on your list.
We can help with every aspect of your restaurant website build, marketing and SEO, so if you have a current website you would like to improve, an old site you’d like to move or if you are looking for a brand new website, get in touch, we can explain the process and the benefits of working with WordPress.
