How To Make A Restaurant Website That Sells For You

Do you have that one wait staff member who is always on point?

You don’t need to train them twice because they can understand and serve exactly  the way you imagined it. They are great at upselling and that one person is literally your sales superstar.

Whether you have one or not, today I am going to show you how you can literally make one out of thin air without recruiting or taking risks on new hires.

Your Website Should Be Your Best Salesperson

Even better than you.

Why? Think of your website as a sales robot. It is a customer-facing entity that you can program to say the right things at the right time to anyone that appears in front of it.

If you want it to sell your food and beverages, you can program it to help each of your customers select what they are craving for that day.

It can upsell your customers on complementary items such as appetizers, sides and desserts.

If you want it to sell catering and events packages, it can do that too.

Basically, whatever you need your website to sell, it can sell for you.

What Can Your Website Sell?

Before we start listing what your restaurant website can possibly sell, you have to know that selling is involved in every customer stage of every transaction.

This means that even if your website can’t collect money for a franchise partnership, it can still help your franchise applicants get closer to the partnership transaction such as:

1. Review franchise terms
2. Apply for franchise
3. Sign franchise nda and other pre-legal docs
4. Get in touch with franchise sales rep

So at the end of the process, the people that get in touch with your franchise sales reps are fully qualified and ready to partner with you without any legal terms or unknown expectations.

So now that we know our website can sell, how do we make that not only looks good but can sell.

There are two ways to make a website:

The first way is to custom code a website and upload the file of code to your website.

The second way is to use a drag and drop builder that lets you build a website by dragging text, pictures, images into any space you’d like without needing to know how to code.

Not only is the first way more complicated, but the method is now only used for less structured websites. For example,

[this site or this site]

In this writeup, we won’t be covering how you can make a restaurant website with custom code, as that requires an actual coding class or hiring of a web developer to complete.

In the future, we can tell you how one of our developers made a custom website or how we hired that person to do it for us.

If you don’t need something that advanced or mature, then you can go with the 2nd option which not only still fulfills the functions of a high-return website, but also fulfills the salespeople qualities that you are looking for.

There are many website platforms that let you build a website in the second way.

The most popular out there are:

1. Squarespace
2. Wix
3. Weebly
4. WordPress
5. Clickfunnels
6. Kajabi
7. Shopify

There are nothing but good things to say about all of these platforms.

Your choice between these platforms is solely based on the easy of use and what you want to accomplish.

You may be wondering why I put some of these platforms on here, like Clickfunnels which is actually a funnel builder, Kajabi which is a course builder, and Shopfiy which is an eCommerce store builder.

To give you really good context behind these mentions, it is because all of these build websites. Website are just a bunch of pages that make up an online properly, and all of these can do that.

So, in essence, these platforms that are known for being a certain time of page builder, are just marketing themselves towards a specific market and gaint hat market share, not really that they can ONLY do that one thing they are known for.

If you want an objective based website, I would say that Clickfunnels is your best bet. It helps you set up a website in the fashion of helping get your visitors to a specific page or result.

If you want a

Cost of a restaurant website

The cost of a restsaurant website depends on the platform you go with. Here are the prices of each platform:

Shopify

Clickfunnels

Kajabi

WordPress (Hosting): $5-10/mo

Squarespace

Wix

Weebly

Domain: $9-30/year

Build Your Restaurant Website

No matter which method of website-making you decide on, making your restaurant website all have the same rules.

Let me explain.

The way all websites are built, 

How To Make A Restaurant Website With WordPress

WordPress is one of the highest value website platforms out there. When I say value, I mean calculating the value for the cost.

WordPress is an open source platform, which means that people can add on to the functionality of WordPress through use of additional programming.

You may know of these addons as apps, for your iPhone or Android phone.

On WordPress, they are called plugins.

I personally develop most of my restaurant websites on WordPress because of the plugin factor.

What pages do you need on your restaurant website? – website planning

Your restaurant website can do two things – it can display information and it can take information.

Usually, you want to display information if you want to answer any frequently asked questions.

For example, if people often call you and ask you what’s on your menu before they order for takeout, you can implement a menu display on your website so people only call you when they’re ready to order.

Usually, you want to take information if you want to collect leads on your website.

For example, if you run a catering operation in your restaurant and you want more catering business, you can generate a catering interest form and have people leave their information with you so you can contact them back.

Based on these two functionalities, you can then decide on what pages you want on your website.

When deciding on which pages you need to show on your website, you should begin your decision with the end in mind.

For example, if you one main goal is to get diners through the door, then your website needs to have all the pages possible to answer all your diners’ questions so they can confidently make their way to your restaurant.

However, if you already have a good flow of customers and instead want to focus on catering orders, you should add a catering page to answer questions about catering and collect leads about catering.

When you decide on your main goal, you can then create pages to help attribute to getting you more of that goal.

With the end goal in mind, now you have to think about where the customer starts, on your website, and then think about how they can get to that end goal.

If most of your customers start on your homepage, then you need to think about how you can get them to your catering page and ultimately get them to inquire about catering.

You can do this with the power of design and attention.

Here’s a great example of moving people towards your catering section:

You can feature your catering as the main Hero of your website.

You can also feature buttons on your menu page that say “we cater this! Ask about it!”

You can feature similar buttons on your location page to say “picking up catering? Come to this back lot!”

Basically mention catering on every page of your website so that no matter where the customer starts or is on your website, they have some way to click and get to your catering area.

For most restaurant websites, the pages that serve as a foundation are:

1. Homepage – the main page where all of your website visitors start. This page should immediately communicate what exactly you do.
2. About – the page that explains a little more indepth about your restaurant such as its history, operators, niche, cuisine, etc.
3. Menu – the page with your list of food, beverages and services.
4. Location – the page with your location or multiple location details. 
5. Hiring – the page where you can generate interest for new staff.
6. Contact – the page with all the contact information for your restaurant.

I’ve also seen these other pages based on restaurant product and service offerings:

1. Merchandise
2. Catering & Events
3. Franchising/Licensing
4. Events Calendar

The general rule of thumb is that you should create a page on your website for every essential question that you get about your restaurant.

Website Layout

Now that you have your pages decided on, you should create a layout for your website.

A layout is typically a framework for how your website would look.

For example most websites have a:

1. Main menu – the main navigation of your website. 
2. Main hero
3. Body content
4. Footer menu
5. Footer links

And they usually have it in the format of

[website format]

If you want a standard website that does its job, you can follow that format as well.

If you want something a little more customized and unique to your brand, then you can format it different. Here are some websites that are formatted differently from the norm:

[non-standard framework websites]

When your layout is done, then you can start to implement the pages and body content:

After you implement your pages and body content, you can probably publish your website and make it live.

Those are the steps I take to make a restaurant website.

In review, the first step you need to take is to choose a platform.

I highly recommend going with WordPress not only because it is the most scalable and benefit-rich, but also it is the lowest starting cost.