How to Build a Restaurant Website
Websites are essential for restaurants, providing customers with critical information, such as menus, hours, and locations. They can also streamline the reservation process, simplifying the experience for both customers and restaurant staff. And since many customers discover restaurants online, websites present prime opportunities to create impactful, lasting brand associations.
Websites are hubs for marketing, keeping email, social media, and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts in one place. On top of all that—with Squarespace’s integrations and add-ons—restaurants can even use websites to automate swaths of their business.
Restaurants are sensory places, and their websites can be too. A well-constructed website should match the restaurant’s feel, evoking its level of formality and ambiance. Its design should reflect and enhance the restaurant’s brand image. Most importantly, the website should help the restaurant achieve its goals—enticing diners with appetizing visuals, securing bookings, and everything in between.
Include the basics
The first step in designing a great restaurant website for your client? Cover all the bases. Make it simple for customers to preview menus, look up locations and hours of operation, discover the restaurant’s story, and get a mouth-watering preview of the food and ambiance. If you want to take things a step further, you can upgrade to a paid service to unlock features like menu blocks and product sales for your client’s website.
No matter the plan you and your client choose, provide a clear way for site visitors to make reservations—either via the website, or by phone and email. And if the restaurant offers delivery and takeout, that information should be readily accessible too. With Tock, Squarespace's all-in-one restaurant and hospitality management tool, you can streamline and automate these website functions and more. (We’ll cover how to integrate Tock later in this article.)
Optimize for mobile
A number of customers will access restaurant websites from their phones, so it is vital to consider the mobile appearance of your site. Squarespace sites feature responsive designs that detect mobile browsers and stack content vertically, but there are dozens of ways to further customize the mobile experience and appearance of your client’s website.
Use the device view tool to see what the website looks like on mobile. Additionally, you should always preview your designs on mobile devices to ensure the user experience is as you intended it to be.
As a bonus, mobile-friendly websites won’t just delight your clients and their customers. They also tend to rank higher in organic searches, since search engines usually give mobile-optimized websites an SEO boost.
Learn tips for keeping your client’s site mobile-friendly.
Improve SEO
As a web professional, SEO is an area where you can deliver significant value to your client. After all, SEO is more cost-effective than paid advertising in the long run. Squarespace provides many built-in SEO capabilities that can help your client’s website get discovered.
As for actions you can take to boost your client’s search engine ranking, start by developing a keyword strategy that makes sense for your client. Where is the restaurant, and what kind of food does it serve? Think about the terms prospective diners will search when looking for a restaurant like your client’s (e.g. “Best Indian food in Cincinnati”). This will help you identify the keywords that you’ll want to include in titles and headers. Furthermore, if the restaurant offers other services—like delivery and takeout, events, catering, or private dining rooms—consider working those terms into your keyword strategy as well.
Since restaurants are location-based, you’ll want to make it easy for customers and search engines to confirm the restaurant’s location. Add a contact page that includes the restaurant’s address and consider using map blocks and business information settings to help the site perform locally. Signing up for Google My Business can also boost local search rankings. The Location Management panel, available with premium Squarespace subscriptions, will automatically update Google My Business information.
For best practices, refer to our SEO checklist.
Leverage social
Social media is one of the main ways that customers discover where to eat. And restaurants, with their dedicated fans, beautiful spaces, and vibrant food, are perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. Food and restaurants are highly visual—making social an ideal way to entice repeat customers by sharing appetizing photos and videos of new dishes, specials, and seasonal menus. Integrating social icons can give your client’s site an extra level of polish and provide them with more avenues to connect with customers. You can further style the icons to better match the restaurant’s brand aesthetic.
Additionally, you can connect your client’s Instagram to their website, automatically pulling content into an Instagram block, to give prospective customers a sense of the restaurant’s look and feel. It’s also possible to automate the pushing and pulling of content from Squarespace websites to Facebook and other social media accounts.
Integrate Tock for all-in-one restaurant management
You can do a lot to upgrade your client’s site with Squarespace’s comprehensive restaurant management tool, Tock. With Tock, your client’s restaurant(s) can seamlessly manage reservations, waitlists, takeout and delivery order systems, and more, all in one place. Tock also enables contactless payments and ordering, automated pre-dining questionnaires, and real-time floor plan management.
The tool is a great way for diners to discover restaurants nearby—potentially giving your client an immediate boost in bookings. If your client is in-demand on special occasions like New Years or Valentine’s Day, they can even promote and sell tickets to their special events through Tock.
Tock’s integrated menu blocks look great on Squarespace websites, and usually have an edge over embedded .pdf menus, due to the increased searchability of direct website text. You can customize the blocks to incorporate the site’s overall design.
Add Tock booking to any page by using a reservation block. Then, diners can select their party size, desired date and time, and book a table. Depending on your client and their customer base, it may make sense to also allow diners to also make bookings by phone or email, allowing for a more personal touch and increased accessibility. What’s more, Tock’s reservation system reduces no-shows via automated reminders. The waitlist feature helps your client automatically fill last-minute cancellations.
While Tock requires a separate subscription, clients can use its integrations with Squarespace regardless of their specific website plan.
Learn more about available Tock's plans.
Set up email marketing
Email marketing is one of the best ways for businesses of all stripes to stay in contact with customers. Squarespace Email Campaigns make it possible for your restaurant clients to highlight new menus and specials, promotional offers, and special events. You can even design the emails to be as beautiful as the website itself.
Most restaurants will want to utilize a combination of one-off blast campaigns, for special events and offers, as well as automated campaigns, to turn those occasional diners into loyal customers. You can automate email campaigns to respond to subscriber activity (like signing up for emails) or customer activity (like a recent visit). This is a great way to set your clients for long-term success.
Of course, you’ll want to include email opt-ins in several locations and, where appropriate, use promotional pop-ups and newsletter blocks to increase email capture. Squarespace Email Campaigns come with built-in analytics tools so clients can track success and identify opportunities for improvement.
Learn more about how to create an email campaign for your client.
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from all across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
