A restaurant website can help attract new customers and grow your business. It can also provide a better experience for your existing customers and keep them coming back to your restaurant, cafe, takeaway, or similar business.

In this article, we will show you how to create a restaurant website with WordPress.

Why Create a Restaurant Website?

A website is one of the best ways to market your restaurant to new customers and provide a better experience for your existing clients.

By creating an online presence for your restaurant, you can introduce your business to people who are looking for venues and food just like yours.

After a potential customer discovers your business, a professionally-designed and helpful restaurant website will tell them everything they need to know about your business. They can then decide whether your restaurant is right for them.

Even if you have lots of loyal customers and a positive reputation in the local area, a restaurant website can help you improve the customer experience.

For example, it can allow customers to book a table online, send you questions using a convenient contact form, check out the latest menu, and much more.

In this way, a restaurant website can keep your customers happy, so they carry on visiting you for months, or even years to come.

That said, let’s see how you can easily create a restaurant website with WordPress.

Which Is the Best Website Builder for Your Restaurant?

There are many website builders that can help you create a restaurant website but we recommend using WordPress.

According to our blogging research statistics, WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world. It powers nearly 43% of all websites on the internet including many top restaurant websites.

WordPress is also open-source and free. For more on this topic, see our article on why WordPress is free.

However, it’s important to realize that there are two types of WordPress software, so you don’t choose the wrong one.

First, there is WordPress.com, which is a blog hosting platform. Then, there is WordPress.org which is also known as self-hosted WordPress.

For a detailed comparison, you can see our guide on the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

For a restaurant website, we recommend using WordPress.org because it gives you complete ownership of your site and allows you to install third-party plugins, including plenty that are designed specifically for restaurant owners.

To learn more about why we recommend WordPress to all our readers, please see our complete WordPress review with pros and cons.

Step 1. Setting Up Your Restaurant Website

To create a WordPress website you’ll need a domain name and web hosting.

A domain name is your website’s address on the internet. This is what customers will type into their browsers to reach your website, such as justeat.com or tacobell.com.

Web hosting is where your website lives online. To help you out, we’ve hand-picked some of the best WordPress hosting that you can buy for a restaurant website.  

Although the WordPress software is free, hosting and domain names are where the costs can really start to add up.

A domain name typically costs $14.99/year and hosting costs start from $7.99/month. This is a lot for restaurants that already have bills and expenses to pay.

Thankfully, Bluehost has offers a free domain name, and our readers can get 60% off on web hosting. Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world, and an official WordPress-recommended hosting partner.

They’re also offering our readers a free SSL certificate. If you want to accept payments online, then an SSL certificate will help keep the customer’s credit and debit card information safe.

You can click the button below to get started for as little as $2.75 per month.

Once there, you will need to go to the Bluehost website in a new tab and click on the green ‘Get Started Now’ button.

This will bring you to a pricing page where you can choose a hosting plan for your website.

We recommend choosing a Basic or Plus plan, as they’re the most popular web hosting plans among our readers.

After selecting a plan, click on ‘Continue.’

On the next screen, you’ll need to choose a domain name.

Ideally, the domain name will be easy to pronounce and spell, easy to remember, and related to your business. The name of your restaurant is a great place to start, but sometimes that domain may already be taken by another business.

In that case, you can try extending the domain name by adding your restaurant’s location, your own name, or the type of food you serve.

Need help choosing a domain name for your restaurant website? See these tips and tools on how to choose the best domain name.

After choosing a name, click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.

Now you’ll need to provide your account information such as your name and email address. After that, you’ll also see optional extras that you can purchase.

We generally don’t recommend purchasing these extras straight away, as you can always add them later on if you need them.

After that, simply type in your payment information to complete the purchase.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get an email with instructions on how to login to your web hosting control panel. This is your hosting account dashboard where you can manage your restaurant website, including setting up email notifications and asking for WordPress support.

It’s also where you’ll install the WordPress software.

Step 2. Create a New WordPress Website

When you signup with Bluehost using our link, Bluehost installs WordPress on your domain name automatically.

If you want to create a different WordPress website, then you can simply click on the ‘My Sites’ tab in the Bluehost dashboard.

Next, just click on the ‘Add Site’ button and select ‘Create New Site.’

The Bluehost wizard will now guide you through the setup process.

First, you’ll need to type in a site title and optional tagline.

Click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.

After that, Bluehost will ask you to select a domain name and path for your restaurant website. If you’ve already purchased a domain name, then you can simply select it from the dropdown menu.

If you don’t have a domain name then you can buy one by visiting the ‘Domains’ page inside the Bluehost dashboard.

After choosing a domain name, you can leave the directory path blank and let Bluehost fill it in for you. The installer will also show a few must-have WordPress plugins that you may want to install on your restaurant website including OptinMonster.

After that, click on the ‘Next’ button and the installer will set up your restaurant site.

Once it’s finished, you’ll see a ‘WordPress installed successfully’ message with information about your new website. You can now go ahead and click on the ‘Log into WordPress’ button.

This will take you to your site’s admin area.

You can also log in to the WordPress dashboard by simply going to yoursite.com/wp-admin/ directly from your browser.

If you’re using a different WordPress website host such as SiteGround, Hostinger, HostGator, or WP Engine, then you can see our complete guide on how to install WordPress for all the top hosting providers.

Once WordPress is setup, you’re ready to start building a five-star restaurant website.

Step 3. Select a Restaurant Theme

WordPress themes are professionally designed templates that change how your restaurant site looks and acts.

By default, each WordPress site comes with a basic theme. If you visit your website, then it will look something like this:

This is not very appealing for most customers, so you’ll usually want to replace the default WordPress theme.

There are lots of different premium and free WordPress business themes to choose from. You can generally categorize these as multipurpose WordPress themes, or niche industry themes.

Your typical restaurant website needs special features, like the ability to show a menu, photos, location information, business hours, and more.

With that in mind, it makes sense to look for a theme that’s designed for the food or hospitality industry. To help you out, we’ve collected the best WordPress restaurant themes.

You can also use a website and landing page builder plugin such as SeedProd.

SeedProd is the best drag and drop WordPress page builder and comes with built-in templates that you can use to build a professionally-designed restaurant website.

These templates include a menu, food photos, pricing, recipes, and more.

Once you’ve chosen a restaurant theme, please see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress theme.

After installing your theme, you may want to customize it by going to Appearance » Customize in the WordPress dashboard.

This will launch the theme customizer where you can fine-tune the theme settings and see your changes in the live preview.

If you’re using one of the newer full site editing themes, then you’ll see the option for Appearance » Editor, which uses blocks similar to the content editor to customize your site.

Pro Tip: No matter what theme you’re using, neither the default WordPress customizer nor the full site editing offers a user-friendly drag and drop customization experience. For that reason, we recommend using a page builder like SeedProd to customize your theme.

Just remember that you can always return to this screen and continue customizing your theme. You can even completely change your WordPress theme at any point.

Step 4. Create a Custom Home Page

WordPress has two two default content types called posts and pages.

You’ll typically use posts to create articles and blogs. By default, the home page shows these posts in reverse chronological order, so the newest content appears at the top of the list.

You might use a blog to build a stronger relationship with their customers, improve your WordPress SEO, and get more traffic to your restaurant website. For example, you could write about recipes, share cooking tips, or blog about the latest restaurant industry news.

However, even if you plan to publish blog posts, you typically won’t show these on the home page. Instead, we recommend creating a custom home page that introduces your business to new visitors.

For step-by-step instructions on how to create an attention-grabbing restaurant home page, please see our guide on how to create a custom home page in WordPress.

Once you’re happy with the page’s design, it’s time to set it as your home page. To do this, go to Settings » Reading in the WordPress dashboard.

Here, scroll to ‘Your homepage settings’ and select ‘A static page.’

Next, open the ‘Homepage’ dropdown and choose the page that you want to use.

Then, simply scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Save Changes.’ Now, if you visit your website you’ll see the new home page in action.

If you are going to write blogs, then make sure you create a separate blog page to display your posts. If you don’t, then customers will struggle to find your latest WordPress blogs.

Step 5. Create an Online Restaurant Menu

Even long-term, loyal customers may want to look at your menu from time to time. By publishing your menu online, customers can look at it any time of day or night.

Publishing a menu can also help convince new customers to visit your restaurant.

It is possible to upload PDF files to your WordPress website. However, downloading a PDF menu can be difficult depending on the customer’s data plan and internet connection, and they’re non-responsive so they can be hard to read on some devices.

Plus, if you add new dishes or change your pricing, then you’ll also need to upload a completely new PDF.

For that reason, we recommend using SeedProd to add an online menu to your WordPress website. SeedProd also allows you to create a mobile responsive menu that looks great on every device.

You can also easily update the menu as you add new dishes, change the prices, remove dishes, and more.

SeedProd even comes with a ‘Menu Sales Page’ template that’s perfect for creating a menu.

For detailed instructions, please see our guide on how to create an online restaurant menu.

Step 6. Set Up Online Food Ordering

Many restaurants allow customers to order food online. For example, you might give customers the option to pre-order their meal or place an order for delivery.

It may sound technical, but you can easily add online food ordering to your website using the WPForms plugin.

WPForms is the best WordPress form builder that allows you to create online order forms for all kinds of products and services.

It even comes with a ready-made ‘Takeout Order Form’ that you can customize to suit your restaurant website.

Every time someone completes the form, WPForms will notify you automatically so you can start working on that order straight away.

If you don’t want to accept cash on delivery, then WPForms supports all of the best payment gateways including PayPal and Stripe. This allows you to accept payments securely online, which is quick and convenient for your customers.

For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to set up food ordering for restaurants in WordPress.

Step 7. Add a Restaurant Booking Form

Today, most people expect to be able to book appointments through an automated system.

By adding a booking form to your restaurant website, you can accept reservations at any time of the day or night. You’ll never lose another customer just because you weren’t around to answer the phone. 

Booking forms can also automate a lot of the booking process. This includes collecting payments and emailing your customers to remind them about their upcoming booking.

You can easily add a restaurant booking form to your website using WPForms. This plugin has a ready-made dinner reservation form template that you can customize for your restaurant.

WPForms also integrates with all of the top email marketing providers. This makes it easy to send reservation confirmation emails to your customers.

As their booking approaches, you can even send the customer a reminder email, ask them to share any dietary requirements, send a pre-order form, and more.

To learn more about adding a reservation form to your WordPress website, please see our guide on how to create a booking form in WordPress.

Step 8. Add a Contact Us Form

Even if you use a WordPress appointment and booking plugin, some customers may still need to talk to you directly.

While visitors could ring your phone number or send a message to your business email address, we always recommend adding a contact form to your website.

Most of the best contact form plugins come with built-in spam protection, so you won’t get any contact form spam. A form will also collect consistent information from visitors, so you’ll have all the data you need to write a helpful reply.

The easiest way to add a contact form to your WordPress website is by using the free WPForms plugin.

This free plugin comes with a built-in Simple Contact Form template that you can quickly customize using the drag and drop editor.

Then, simply add the form to any page, post, or widget-ready area using the ready-made WPForms block.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to create a contact form in WordPress.

Step 9. Add a Navigation Menu

Once you’ve added some content to your restaurant website, you’ll want to help visitors find their way around those pages and posts by adding a navigation menu.

No matter what theme you’re using, WordPress makes it really easy to add menus and sub-menus to your restaurant website.  

For a complete guide, please see our post on how to add a navigation menu.

Step 10. Add Social Proof to Your Restaurant Website

Social proof is one of the best ways to earn customer trust, and convince new people to visit your restaurant. After all, we’re more likely to try things that we see other people buying, using, or recommending.

People love sharing food photos on sites like Instagram and Facebook. With that in mind, we recommend adding social media feeds to your WordPress website.

Smash Balloon Instagram Feed is one of the best Instagram plugins for WordPress, and it allows you to easily show other people’s photos on your site.

Using this plugin, you can create a hashtag feed and show photos that customers have tagged your account in. This includes photos of your food, venue, and shots of customers having fun at your restaurant.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to create a custom Instagram feed in WordPress.

If your customers regularly tweet about your restaurant, then Smash Balloon Twitter Feed also lets you create hashtag and mention feeds.

For more instructions on adding a Twitter feed to WordPress, see our guide on how to embed tweets in WordPress.

Step 11. Show Customer Reviews

Customer reviews and testimonials can provide visitors with more information, and may even solve any question or worries customers have about visiting your restaurant.

If you already have a Facebook page, then it’s easy to display your Facebook reviews in WordPress using Smash Balloon Facebook Feed.

If you want to show reviews from other platforms like Yelp or Google My Business, then there’s also plenty of customer review plugins for WordPress that you can use.

These plugins will collect reviews automatically and then organize them into a nice layout on your restaurant website.

If you do add a customer review page in WordPress, then don’t forget to add it to your navigation menu too.

Don’t have any reviews to feature on your website? Then it’s time to start asking for them.

WPForms has a a ready-made Restaurant Review Form template that you can add to your website.

Bonus Tips to Grow Your Restaurant Website

Now that you have setup your restaurant website, here are some top tips that you can use to grow your online business:

• Setup AIOSEO plugin to improve your website’s SEO ranking. There’s a free version available as well.
• Follow our ultimate WordPress SEO guide for more tips to outrank your competitor.
• See our proven tips to boost your website’s traffic.
• Setup a business phone number to increase your bookings and create a business email address to make your business look more professional.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to create a restaurant website with WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress security guide and our expert pick of the must have WordPress plugins that you should install on all business sites.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Easily Create a Restaurant Website with WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

Showing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram feeds on WordPress can get you more followers and engagement on social media. It’s also a great way to keep your website fresh and interesting.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to add custom social media feeds to WordPress and even create a social wall that brings all your social content together in one place.

Why Add Social Media Feeds to Your WordPress Site?

Billions of people use social media every day to connect with family, friends, and even brands. According to our marketing statistics research, people spend around 2 hours and 29 minutes on social media every day. That’s plenty of time to promote your content to existing followers and connect with new people.

If you have one or more social media accounts, then you’re already off to a good start. However, it’s also smart to add these social feeds to your WordPress website.

By embedding social media posts in WordPress, you can promote your different accounts to the people who visit your website. This can get you more likes, shares, and engagement.

If visitors like what they see, they might even decide to start following you on different social networks.

Once you’ve embedded a social feed, new posts will appear on your website automatically. This can be a great way to keep your website fresh and interesting, even for regular visitors.

If you run an online store, then a social media feed can even help you get more sales. In fact, 43% of people use social media to make purchasing decisions.

With the right plugin, you can display your Facebook page reviews in WordPress, or add shoppable Instagram images to your website.

With that being said, let’s see how you can add different social media feeds to WordPress.

How to Add Social Media Feeds to WordPress

The best way to add social media feeds to your WordPress blog is by using Smash Balloon.

It’s the best social media feed plugin for WordPress and it’s trusted by over 1.5 million users. With this plugin, you don’t have to spend time dealing with jQuery code, APIs, or trying to arrange your social posts in a nice layout. Everything just works.

Smash Balloon has separate plugins for all the major social networks including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. It even allows you to combine multiple social networks and show all of your posts in a single feed.

With that being said, let’s see how you can add different social feeds to your WordPress website. Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the social network that you want to add.

Adding a Facebook Social Media Feed in WordPress

Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the world, with 2.9 billion monthly active users. No matter whether you have a small business website, a personal blog, a WordPress membership website, or something else, it’s very likely that your target audience are familiar with Facebook.

When you add a Facebook feed to WordPress, new posts will appear on your website in real-time. Visitors can also like, share, and comment on your WordPress posts, so this is a great way to get more engagement on Facebook.

The Smash Balloon Custom Facebook Feed plugin allows you to embed Facebook videos in WordPress, show photos and videos, and more.

You can even create a custom lightbox popup so visitors can see your full-sized images and watch your Facebook videos, without having to leave your WordPress website.

If you host regular in-person or online events, then it’s a good idea to create them as Facebook events on your page or group. Visitors can then mark themselves as interested or going to the event, invite other people, and share the event on their own Facebook page.

Once you’ve added these events to Facebook, you can easily promote them to the people who visit your website. Simply create a feed of your upcoming Facebook events and then add it to your WordPress website.

To learn more, please see our guide on how to add a Facebook event calendar in WordPress.

No matter what kind of Facebook feed you create, you can fine-tune how that feed looks and acts using the intuitive Smash Balloon editor.

Here, you can change the feed’s color scheme, design a custom header, add ‘like’ and ‘load more’ buttons, and much more.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to create a custom Facebook feed in WordPress.

Adding an Instagram Social Media Feed in WordPress

With more than 2 billion monthly active users, Instagram is a great place to promote your website, products, and services.

Depending on your industry, Instagram may even be the most important part of your social media strategy. For example, Instagram is particularly popular among top fashion blogs, lifestyle, cooking, and photography websites.

If you’re posting beautiful photos and engaging videos to Instagram, then it makes sense to post that content to WordPress too.

By adding your Instagram social feed to WordPress, you can offer visitors a highly engaging and visual experience directly on your website. This can increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate in WordPress.

You can add images in WordPress manually, but you’ll need to keep adding new photos as you post them to Instagram. This can take a lot of time and effort.

Since there’s no link between your WordPress website and your Instagram account, visitors can’t easily like or share these photos on Instagram. As a result, you may miss out on lots of social media engagement.

The easiest way to add an Instagram feed to WordPress is by using the Smash Balloon Instagram Feed plugin. This plugin allows you to embed a beautiful and professionally-designed Instagram feed on your website.

The feed updates automatically every time you post to Instagram, so visitors always see the latest photos.

You can even show other people’s photos on your site by creating a hashtag feed or displaying the posts that other people have tagged your account in. This can be a powerful form of social proof that encourages people to trust your website or business.

In the following image you can see an example of an online store that uses a custom Instagram feed to show user-generated content.

In this way, you can use a custom Instagram feed to create customer trust and make more money online.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to create a custom Instagram feed in WordPress.

Adding a Twitter Social Media Feed in WordPress

WordPress lets you manually embed tweets in WordPress blog posts and pages using the built-in Twitter block.

However, this block only lets you embed a single tweet at a time. This is a quick and easy method if you just want to show a small number of tweets. However, if you want to embed multiple tweets then we recommend using Smash Balloon Twitter Feed.

This plugin allows you to create a Twitter feed that updates automatically as you post new tweets. You can then add this feed to any page, post, or widget-ready area.

Smash Balloon Twitter Feed also lets you create hashtag feeds.

This is useful for adding context and third-party content to your blog posts. For example, if you’re starting a fashion blog then you might create feeds for popular fashion-related hashtags such as #lookbook or #OOTD.

You can even use Smash Balloon to show the Twitter feed from a third-party account. This is perfect if you have a relationship with an influencer or affiliate marketer, and want to show their tweets on your website.

For more instructions on adding a Twitter feed to WordPress, see our guide on how to embed tweets in WordPress.

Adding a YouTube Social Media Feed in WordPress

Blog posts with videos get 83% more traffic than those without videos. With that in mind, we recommend adding your YouTube videos to WordPress, too.

If you run an online store using a plugin such as WooCommerce, then videos can even get you more sales. In fact, 88% of people have bought a product or service after watching a video.

If you’ve created any YouTube videos showing your products or services, then adding them to your website could boost your profits.

If you only want to add a small number of videos to your site, then it’s easy to embed YouTube videos in WordPress blog posts. However, if you want to show more than one video, then it’s difficult to create a nice gallery layout using the built-in blocks and tools alone.

That’s why we recommend embedding your YouTube channel feed using Feeds for YouTube by Smash Balloon.

For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to show the latest videos from your YouTube channel in WordPress.

After connecting WordPress to your YouTube channel, you can customize how the videos look with Smash Balloon’s user-friendly editor.

When you’re happy with how the feed looks, you can easily add it to any page, post, or widget-ready area using shortcode.

The Smash Balloon plugin also comes with a ready-made Feeds for YouTube block.

The free plugin has everything you need to create a YouTube video gallery in WordPress, but if you want more advanced features, then there’s also a premium Smash Balloon YouTube Feed plugin that you can use.

This plugin allows you to show videos from your favorites list, embed live streams, and more.

Adding a Combined Social Wall in WordPress

So far, you’ve seen how to add individual feeds from different social media platforms. However, many websites have multiple social media accounts, such as a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, and a Twitter profile.

If you create unique content for each platform, then you may want to combine all of that content into a single social media feed. This kind of social wall can convince visitors that you have a big presence on social media, and that you’re creating all kinds of interesting and varied content across the different platforms.

This single feed can get you followers and engagement across multiple platforms. It’s also a good choice if you have limited space, and don’t want to fill up your website with lots of separate social media feeds.

If you want to combine several social media accounts into a single feed, then we recommend the Smash Balloon Social Wall plugin.

It’s the best social stream plugin for WordPress and allows you to combine Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube social content into a single feed.

Already used the Smash Balloon plugins to create separate Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube feeds? Then you can add these feeds to your social wall with a few clicks.

Social Wall will then take your settings and automatically create a shortcode that you can add to any page, post, or widget-ready area. Simply publish your changes, and the social wall will appear on your website.

Note: To use this plugin, you’ll need to install and activate at least one of the Pro Smash Balloon plugins mentioned above. For example, if you wanted to show Facebook and Instagram content on your social wall, then you’ll need both the Social Post Feed and the Social Photo Feed plugins.

To get started, you’ll need to install and activate the Smash Balloon Social Wall plugin. For more information, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, go to Social Feeds » Create a Social Wall.

Simply select each feed that you want to add to the social wall.

For example, you can combine posts from your Instagram and Facebook accounts.

On this screen you can also connect any extra social accounts that you want to use.

Simply click on a ‘Connect…’ button and then follow the onscreen instructions to connect the social media account.

After that, click on the ‘Customize’ tab.

Here, you can change the number of posts to show in the social wall, the feed layout, how often it updates, and more.

There are other settings you can use to change the wall’s color scheme, background color, button text, and more. Most of these settings are fairly self-explanatory, so it’s worth looking through them to see what changes you want to make.

When you’re finished, click on ‘Save Changes’ to store your settings.

Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Configure Wall’ tab. Here, you’ll see a shortcode that allows you to add the social wall to any page, post, or widget-ready area.

For more information about working with shortcodes, please see our guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress.

After that, simply publish the page or post, or update the widget-ready area to make your social wall live.

We hope this article has helped you add social media feeds to WordPress. You may want to see our guide on how to create an email newsletter, or our expert pick of the best live chat software for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add Your Social Media Feeds to WordPress (Step by Step) first appeared on WPBeginner.