It’s a known fact that people prefer using restaurant websites for ordering food online or reserving seats in restaurants. It’s been researched that 77% of customers tend to visit websites before ordering food or booking tables. Having an official website isn’t enough because it doesn’t appeal audience if it has an outdated look.

So, having a social media presence is important but it is more essential for websites to be appealing enough with great features to generate sales and revenue. A website will not be able to fetch the target audience no matter how excellent your services are. You need to have a well-designed website with great functionality and a better user interface.

As we know, having websites makes your business visible to your target audience. Besides this, it also gives the owners a facility to promote whatever their brand is.

The benefits of a Restaurant website:

• Developing a website for your restaurant is one way to strengthen your brand. The website showcases to your customers who you are and what offerings you have to provide them.

• One facility it provides to your customers is the integration of reservation and ordering online. The customers don’t have to call, they can simply reserve tables and for take-outs, they can directly order through your website.

• With the help of your website, you can also promote your other services or events that you hold at your restaurant. It helps the customers get all this essential information.

• Website is one way of marketing your venture. It gives you an opportunity to do marketing which is very cost-effective and an important part of the times of digitalization.

You can also build your own food delivery apps with the help of online app development. For example, apps like UberEats clone app and Swiggy clone app. These are on-demand food delivery applications and complete apps which are ready for use for your own food delivery business.

Here are some features that must be added to the restaurant’s website:

• One of the most important features is Images. The website must have a detailed menu with good images. Picture representation plays a very important role in attracting customers. It helps in showing the restaurants’ status. So, make sure to have appealing photography on your menu. It helps in increasing sales as customers are more likable to get attracted by images.

• Make promotional videos about your services. Videos give a better overview of your restaurants’ services. Promotional videos make you stand out from your competitors. Make a video that explains everything about the restaurant.

• One of the features is having an online ordering system. It helps you take orders for customers who place orders for take-outs while streamlining the day-to-day operations of restaurants.

• Make an ‘About U section. This is the section where you explain to the customers about your venture and your story about who you are and why did you think of having the restaurant. Also include all the important information about your restaurant like address, contact number, location and E-mail.

• With adding location, integrate the Google map so that customers can easily click on the directions.

• Another feature is Social Media Integration. Nowadays people rely on social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter in search of a good restaurant. Social media integration is one way of keeping customers engaged. Keep updating about the happenings in your restaurant on social media platforms. For this, generate a large customer reach on your social media platform and link them with your website too.

• Get your website a better ranking on search engines by using SEO features. People search a restaurant for a specific dish then it should show your website on top as a result. This happens with the help of the Search Engine Optimization feature.

• Lastly, put sections of customer feedback on your website. It gives an idea to customers when they check the feedback and rankings of your website. You can also get reviews from different platforms by using advanced APIs.

We saw the features that a successful restaurant website should have to bring in more revenue and profit. Now after looking at the features, the next thing is the development cost for such websites. There are many factors that add to the cost of Restaurant website development.

Let’s have a look at the factors that add to the cost of website development

• There are many Restaurant web development services of the websites such as domain, hosting, marketing, templates & themes and the content on the website that add to the website cost development.

1. The hosting can cost up to $600
   1. The Domain services can cost up to $60
   1. The templates and themes can cost up to $200
   1. The website content can cost up to $5000
   1. And marketing can cost up to $500
   1. In addition to this, the cost also depends on the website design platform that you choose.

• The cost that comes with hiring the developers for building the website. There are so ways you can hire dedicated web developers-

1. You can hire freelancers to build the website for you. It depends on the design, layouts and functions that a freelancer will charge. For example, they can charge from $2000 to $5000 for a simple website and $10,000 to $20,000 for an advanced website.
   1. Another way is of hiring a professional web development agency. If your main focus is to handle the business only and you want developers to design and handle the website then you can hire agencies that provide web development services. The team can handle all the technical work if you have a large business. So, this factor also adds to the cost.

• The cost that comes with buying a domain, hosting, and SSL certificate. To buy a domain, you have to pay the registration fee. The cost is different for different companies from which you buy domain services and the same goes for hosting services too.

SSL is an abbreviation of Secure Socket Layer. It is used for the security purposes of websites. SSL certificates are bought for the encryption of all the sensitive information of the customers such as Emails, passwords, credit card numbers etc. The cost for SSL can cost up to $200.

A well-designed website is what helps you to achieve profit in the long run. For that, you must have an updated website with the best layout and theme and one which provides the best features and user experience to appeal to your target audience. A well-designed website has its cost for different features which have been explained above.