Your restaurant website is the digital gateway to your business.
The appearance of your online restaurant can have a big impact on your bottom line, but evaluating your website on your own can be difficult, especially if you are inexperienced in website optimization. In fact, 89% of customers search for a restaurant online before going out to dinner.
There are several common website errors that you may not even know about. We’ve outlined a few of the main ones to open your eyes to some of the more common mistakes on a restaurant website that, if corrected, can help make your business stand out.
Mistake number 1: your website is not mobile friendly
After evaluating thousands of restaurant websites, it was found that more than 50% of customers search for restaurants through their mobile devices.
This means that at least half of your customers come to your website, either through a phone or tablet. A website that is not mobile friendly, where it is not easy to find important information such as your contact information, location or reservation options, worsens the experience of your visitors.
Without a mobile-friendly website, you may be missing 50% of the potential customers who visit your website.
Another common mistake on restaurant websites is the use of PDF menus.
You may find it more comfortable to do them like this; but it is a poor quality viewing experience. Since PDF files are unresponsive on a mobile device, which means they don’t resize to fit the dimensions of a mobile device screen, they can be difficult to read and leave your customers frustrated.
Menus in PDF are also not SEO optimized, which means that search engines cannot “read” them, creating a lost opportunity for your menu items to rank in search results.
To avoid all the inconveniences of PDF menus, publish your menus in text format. They will load much faster and improve your search ranking. It also offers your customers an infinitely better user experience, giving them more reasons to come to lunch or dinner with you.
Mistake number 3: important information is hard to find
Location and contact information are two of the top five reasons restaurant websites are visited, and their design and approach must not only exist, but be present in a highly visual way. This includes key information such as the address of the hospitality establishment, the contact telephone number and if a better mobile is added, and the opening and closing hours of the premises.
If you are not providing this information for users to find on your website, you are making another serious mistake.
Location and contact information should be one click away or less as they should appear on your website’s home page or on your website’s navigation bar so they can be found quickly and easily.
If you have more than one location, you can go a step further by providing a store locator with an intuitive map view of all your locations.
Mistake number 4: There are no online reservations
Although not all restaurants accept reservations, if yours does, you should include that information clearly and prominently.
Reservations are another of the top 5 reasons guests visit a restaurant website, so not making it available or easy to find online means missing out on opportunities to get customers.
In fact, 83% of diners say that online reservations are very important to their dining experience.
Mistake number 5: Incorrectly formatted or missing query forms
If your restaurant offers catering or private events, not having inquiry forms on the website for those areas of your business is another common mistake.
Guests are no longer just looking for restaurants to eat.
The National Restaurant Association of USA says that approximately 70% of all restaurant transactions will be made from off-site sales by 2020; Plus, you’ve seen catering restaurant sales triple over the holidays. By having an inquiry form on your website, customers can contact you directly about their catering or event needs.
If you currently have inquiry forms available on your restaurant’s website, make sure they are formatted correctly so that you can efficiently collect the most valuable information. Along with the standard fields like name, email, and phone number, event and catering inquiry forms should ask for the date, time, number of people, and the type of event you want.