Opening and owning a restaurant is exciting. However, these days it’s critical to have a BIG local web presence in the search engines – especially for the type of food you serve and the locations you serve.
It’s also expensive opening and running a restaurant – it’s a high overhead business. Ideally you want to keep your marketing expenses to a minimum – yet still get tons of traffic to your restaurant site who is impressed with your website.
A restaurant website is one that absolutely MUST look great. People looking to dine will automatically judge the quality of your restaurant (food, service, atmosphere) by your website. An ugly website will turn away diners.
Your restaurant website must also properly inform your visitors about the food you offer and present many photographs of your establishment. Obviously not all restaurant websites will look identical, but there are common features you want to have to properly inform your visitors.
Save a Fortune Using a Restaurant WordPress Theme
In my early days as an entrepreneur I hired web designers and paid a fortune (thousands of dollars). Since then, I discovered WordPress and now use WordPress for most of my on and offline businesses. Innovative WordPress theme developers are releasing WP themes that cater to specific types of businesses – including restaurants.
What this means is you can get a great restaurant WordPress theme that is pre-formatted for use as a restaurant website. All you have to do is put in your content – articles, menus, contact information, and photographs.
Going with a WordPress restaurant theme can save you thousands of dollars – not only up front, but also in the long run. Restaurants need to update their websites regularly. If you don’t know how to update your website, you have to pay a webmaster to do it. This ongoing expense is completely avoidable if you take a day or two and learn how to use a restaurant WordPress Theme.
Your Diners Can Even Make Reservations Online Through WordPress
The Diner theme by Woo Themes has an online reservations function. See number 5 below.
Where can you find restaurant WordPress themes?
I like the restaurant WordPress themes by iThemes and Templatic. Here are my top picks:
1. MyCuisine by ElegantThemes
In my view, ElegantThemes delivered an excellent restaurant WordPress theme with MyCuisine. I base my opinion on 3 reasons: First, with MyCuisine you get a preformatted “menu” page. This isn’t any ordinary menu website page. The theme is set up so our visitors click into an item and it brings them to a full web page giving more information.
Second, MyCuisine includes a preformatted map/location page. This makes it very easy for you to display a Google Map of your restaurant location along with your pertinent contact and location information.
Third, and this is purely subjective, I like the design. In fact, I like most of the designs by ElegantThemes. They have a distinct style which I can’t help but describe as elegant and stylish. Moreover, their attention to detail is impressive. What I mean by this is look closely at the font, textures, gradients … all these style elements are executed beautifully resulting in well-designed WordPress themes.
Click here to see a MyCuisine theme demo. Or, click here to read my in-depth MyCuisine review.
2. iThemes Entree Restaurant Theme
The Entree Theme by iThemes operates on the Builder Platform. Builder is a WordPress platform that gives you an incredible amount of customization and flexibility.
Builder is the parent theme (install it first), then you install the Entree child theme. When you buy Builder, you get the Entree restaurant theme included. You can read my Builder Theme review here .
The Entree Theme demo isn’t the nicest looking display – but don’t worry about that because with Builder’s easy-to-use style options, you can completely overhaul the look and feel in no time without knowing any coding at all.
Click here to see a demo of the Entree Restaurant theme.
3. Foodilicious Restaurant WordPress Theme by Templatic
Foodilicious has a nice slideshow where you can quickly feature your most popular dishes.
This is, in my view, Templatic’s best restaurant theme. It offers a fully customizable front page along with menu configuration panels that enables you to create various menu pages, a menu gallery, and menu item description pages.
If you aren’t into creating your own color scheme, the Foodilicious theme offers 5 pre-set color schemes.
Click here to see a demo of the Foodilicious theme.
4. Gourmet Restaurant Theme by Templatic WordPress Themes
The Gourmet restaurant theme is a good-looking theme out-of-the box that is suitable for most restaurants. You can customize the home page using a custom control panel. It comes with 3 color schemes as well.
You get support simply by completing a support ticket.
Templatic themes include built-in SEO configuration panels. As you can see in this list, Templatic has several themes catering to restaurants.
Click here to see a demo of the Gourmet theme.
5. Restaurant Theme by Templatic
As the name implies, this WP theme was designed for restaurants specifically. It has a clean look and can be fully customized to suit your restaurant. Click here to see a demo of the Restaurant WP theme.
What makes using WordPress themes for your restaurant website so great is that they are pre-configured for restaurant sites PLUS it is so easy to go in daily and update your site.
You can also add as much content as you like any time.
6. Diner Theme by Woo Themes
Woo Themes created the Diner theme for restaurants. This theme has the bold and stylish Woo Themes look and feel. There is a great deal of functionality that restaurants will appreciate in order to properly inform their customers and prospective diners.
It even comes with a reservations function which makes it easy for people to reserve a table and getting you and your staff out of that time-consuming process. Click here to view a demo of the Diner theme.
If you’re just starting a restaurant, using WordPress is an opportunity to keep your start up and ongoing expenses to a minimum.
There’s no need to spend a fortune to get a great restaurant website going. Any of these five will do nicely. My top pick is either Entree by iThemes because it’s on the Builder platform or Diner by Woo Themes because of the built-in reservation functionality.
7. LeGourmet at Mojo Themes
LeGourmet is a WordPress theme designed specifically for restaurants. It’s color scheme is easily customizable. But what’s really cool is it offers the following 4 features:
- Built-in reservation system;
- An easy menu updating system in the backend; and
- A testimonials widget that makes it easy to add testimonials through the dashboard. Never underestimate the power of testimonials on a website, including restaurants.
- Event page template.
LeGourmet is built for restaurants and comes with the tools to create a dynamic restaurant website quickly.
Click here to view a demo of the LeGourmet WordPress theme for restaurants.
I also like the design, especially the shadow slider on the home page.
8. Foxy by Organized Themes
Foxy is one of the prettiest and stylish restaurant themes available. It’s ideal for a bistro, cafe or fine dining restaurant.
What makes this theme particularly striking is the emphasis on the background. Usually sites that are designed with a large prominent background are striking.
However, it’s less intuitive for users because of the noise that the background image makes. If stunning and striking are your restaurant website objectives, check out Foxy theme here.
Just so you know, there’s a built-in menu creator for this site so it works for any restaurant website.
Don’t forget about creating a Mobile-Friendly Version of your WordPress Website
Read my Handheld plugin review to learn how to create a mobile friendly version of your website in minutes (I use this for all my business mobile websites) .
Turn your Website into an iPhone App
Reach the massive and growing iPhone app market with your website. Learn about a WordPress iPhone app plugin here (again, I use this for my business websites).
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