Create Your Own Free WordPress Restaurant Website
There are some essential ingredients to create a successful restaurant business. Along with great food, attractive decoration and plenty of advertisement, you need a beautiful website too. In this age of internet, people want to check your website before they visit your restaurant. Therefore, if you don’t have a website, you are already one step behind your competitors. Now, how do you define a good restaurant website? There are several elements to consider.
First of all, you need to make sure you are providing all the necessary information to your potential customers. Your menu, available items, your address, social media links etc. should be clearly visible to the visitor.
You also need to offer a fully functional reservation system so your customers can book in advance. If you are selling food online, you should have a shopping cart and the necessary payment methods available on your website. If all this is making you a bit confused, let’s go through an example.
Restaurant True North
If you take a close look at the image right (click to enlarge) you will find out that the True North website includes everything you should need for a restaurant website. It provides clearly visible links to the menu and reservation pages, food images, opening hours, physical address, social media links etc. Your aim should be to create a website which meets all the requirements of your visitors. Let’s see how to do this.
Getting Started
Creating a restaurant website using WordPress isn’t rocket science. Having access to a large number of themes and plugins is a major reason why people love WordPress, and there is no shortage of themes and plugins for creating restaurant websites too. But how do you know which ones are useful? It’s hard to determine that unless you try each one yourself. Of course you don’t have to do that as we have done already the hard work for you. After countless hours of research, we have found out the best themes and plugins for creating your own WordPress based restaurant website. In this article, I will try to introduce you to these themes and plugins.
Before we start, let me take a moment to make sure you have got the basics right. The first two steps of creating a website are to get a domain and hosting. I am assuming you have that covered already, if not checkout providers like Bluehost or HostGator.
Next, you need to install WordPress. There are two ways to do that – you can do it manually, or use a simple one-click installer provided by your hosting provider. On the other hand, if you want to install WordPress on your own you can follow this official tutorial. After you have taken care of the basics, let’s get started with finding some good themes and plugins.
Free WordPress Restaurant Plugins
Let’s start with a list of the best free plugins for creating a restaurant website. The first plugin we’re mentioning is a reservation plugin for WordPress.
Restaurant Reservations
Restaurant Reservations is an excellent free plugin for managing table booking and reservations of your restaurant website. The plugin includes a dedicated shortcode for displaying the booking form on any post or page.
As the plugin comes with mobile-friendly date and time pickers, your customers can quickly make the booking from any device. Bookings should be approved by an admin, and your customer will be notified by email if the booking is accepted or rejected. You are able to customize the subject and body for the notification emails.
Restaurant Reservations enables you to accept booking for several locations. What’s more, you can set the time when you accept booking and disable booking during the holidays. The plugin also allows you to choose the early booking and late booking time-frames.
Food and Drink Menu
You can use Food and Drink Menu to create an interactive menu for your café, restaurant or any other kind of eatery. It is possible to display the menu in any post, page or widget. Once you install and activate the plugin, it will create two custom post types – Menus and Menu Items.
First of all, you have to add the available items and then organize them into the menus. You can create as many menu items and menus as you want. Each item can have a description and a featured image. There is an option to provide special notes on the menus.
You can add conditions or legal verbose at the footer. As the plugin is compatible with the WPML multilingual plugin you can display the menu in other languages as well.
Open Table Widget
If you want to display your restaurant booking form on a sidebar the Open Table Widget can be an excellent choice. This plugin comes with several layouts, and you can choose any layout which suits your existing design. It is also possible to customize your reservation form.
Open Table Widget comes with step-by-step video tutorials and documentation to get you started. While the free plugin supports restaurants located inside the US you can buy the Pro version to use it for restaurants located in other countries. It provides several attractive widget themes and also allows you to display the widget on other places in your website by using a shortcode.
Quick Restaurant Menu
This is another popular WordPress plugin for creating and displaying menus in your restaurant website. It helps you to display different menus for different hours and days of the week, which means you can show the appropriate menus for breakfast, dinner, lunch, and other special occasions.
The integrated custom shortcode will be useful to display the menu on any post or page you want. You can add extensive menus and menu items. As the plugin enables you to add header and footer to your menus you can easily display additional information for your customers.
The fully responsive plugin makes sure your menu and menu items look great on all screen resolutions. The plugin also support custom CSS for additional customization.
Free WordPress Restaurant Themes
Now you know more about some of the best free plugins for creating a restaurant website, so let’s take a look at the best free restaurant themes.
Auberge
Auberge is a feature-rich WordPress theme for creating your café, restaurant, or any other food-related website. The theme works with WebMan Amplifier and Jetpack to help you create fully functioning menus and recipes.
The theme is fully compatible with Beaver Builder, which means you can easily create custom layouts for your posts and pages using this page builder. Features like full Schema.org compliance and Google Recipe View support will complement your SEO efforts.
The built-in header slideshow will be helpful to share some amazing pictures of your restaurant. As the theme is based on the Underscores starter theme, you won’t have to worry about the quality or the performance of your website as well.
Bistro
Bistro is a child theme of the popular Sydney theme. This fully responsive theme comes with full support for the Restaurant plugin for creating custom menus. Thanks to the powerful theme options section, you can easily control the display options from one central location.
The front page is divided into several blocks. You can organize the blocks yourself to personalize the home page of your restaurant website. Another nice thing is the built-in parallax background, which will surely draw the attention of your visitors. As the theme supports Google Fonts, you can choose any of the 600+ fonts to spice up the typography.
If you are looking for a multi-lingual theme, Bistro can be a great choice. The theme package includes all the necessary files for converting it into other languages.
Brasserie
Brasserie is a full-width WordPress theme for creating an attractive restaurant website. Brasserie’s smart use of white space and clean layouts will make your website look appealing for visitors. The simple theme customization options allow you to use your logo, featured text, and social media links.
The theme comes with full WooCommerce support. Therefore, you can sell cake, wine, and other food items right from your website. This multi-lingual theme comes also with complete Google Fonts support. You are free to use any color you want, and the theme package also includes a featured slider.
Foodeez Lite
Foodeez Lite is an uniquely designed WordPress theme for creating any food, hotel, or restaurant business. The responsive liquid layout makes sure that your website looks great on any screen size. The sticky header is another excellent feature, which allows you to keep the logo and navigation always visible. As the menu supports multi-level navigation, you can include all the necessary links in the menu.
The theme comes with a fully widgetized footer, which means you can add a secondary navigation, contact information, or social media links to your footer. Thanks to the built-in threaded comments, you will find it a lot easier to keep up with your visitor comments.
Restaurante
As the name suggests, Restaurante is a specialized WordPress theme for creating restaurant websites. It is also possible to use this theme for creating café, pizzeria, or fast-food shop websites. The theme is based on the Bootstrap framework, so Restaurante will look great on any screen resolution.
Restaurante comes fully integrated with Microdata, Open Graph, and Twitter Cards, which means your restaurant website will enjoy better visibility in social media and search engines. The theme also supports shortcodes, which means you are able to create custom elements without having to create them from scratch.
Along with the default color skins, you can choose custom colors too. There are more customization options available at the theme customizer section.
Premium WordPress Restaurant Plugins
So far, I have discussed the free themes and plugins to build your WordPress restaurant website. But what if you need more than that? If you want reliable support, eye-catching design, professional coding, and other advanced features, you should go for the premium ones. Below you’ll find a few of the most popular premium WordPress plugins to create a restaurant website.
Pinpoint Booking System PRO
Pinpoint Booking System PRO provides a fully featured booking system for your restaurant website. The plugin displays a responsive calendar so users can check out your restaurant availability from any device. You can allow the customers to book specific hours or the whole day. The AJAX-powered calendar displays results without page reloading.
It is possible to create an unlimited number of booking calendars and display them in various locations on your website. You can enable or disable the booking system any time you want. The plugin comes also with all the necessary templates for email notifications.
Pinpoint is fully compatible with WooCommerce. Therefore, you can use all the payment gateways, coupons, discounts, and other facilities offered by the e-commerce platform. The Pinpoint Booking System PRO plugin is priced at $50.
FoodPress
FoodPress is a handy plugin which provides a complete solution for adding menus and managing reservations of your website. You can set the menu for different times and occasions. There are lots of designs available for displaying your menu. It is also possible to show menus as boxed categories with background images.
The trendy full-screen reservation form allows your visitors to make bookings in advance. You can view reservation statistics and control booking requests from the admin section. Other options enable you to set time restrictions, party size limits, booking confirmations etc. for your reservations. The plugin comes also with lots of custom font icons you can use. The FoodPress plugin is priced at $34.
Foodify
If your restaurant website uses WooCommerce, Foodify is one of the best plugins available for adding a menu to your website. It allows you to display the available menu items, and for each item you can provide the name, image(s), price, description, quantity etc.
Customers can purchase their desired items and pay without leaving the website. The plugin comes with custom shortcodes for displaying menu categories in any place you want. As the plugin is fully responsive, your menu items will look great on any device.
The plugin management options are located in the admin section. You can choose the text, border, menu, sub-menu, and button background colors. It is also possible to use any of the nine available templates. The Foodify plugin is priced at $25.
Book a Place Pro
Book a Place Pro provides a total booking solution for your restaurant website. It offers an easy way for your customers to book places in your restaurant. You can enable email notifications for new bookings. The detailed booking information will be available in the orders section.
The plugin comes with full PayPal integration, which means you can easily accept payments for your bookings. And if you want to offer coupons or discounts on various occasions, Book a Place has got you covered too. It is also possible to add a gallery so your customers can check out your interior or food images. The Book a Place Pro plugin is priced at $18.
Premium WordPress Restaurant Themes
Let’s check out the best premium restaurant themes for WordPress to create your restaurant website, we’ll will start the list with ROSA, one of our favorites!
ROSA
ROSA is a professionally designed WordPress theme for developing attractive restaurant websites. Powered by impressive parallax effects, the theme comes with all the necessary options for creating a modern restaurant website.
You can create extensive menus and manage reservations without purchasing any additional plugin. Thanks to the built-in shortcodes you can display the menus anywhere you want. The theme also works perfectly with WooCommerce, so your customers can purchase products and make the payment without leaving your website.
The live customizer section will be very useful in personalizing the look and feel of your website. With a 98% score in Google’s PageSpeed grade, ROSA will make sure that your website enjoys a fast loading speed. The theme package also comes with the original PhotoShop PSD files. The ROSA theme is priced at $75.
Linguini
Linguini is another popular restaurant theme for WordPress. You can use this theme to create a café, bar, bistro, winery, or any other foodie website. The feature-rich theme customizer section will be useful in configuring display options for your website.
Being a premium restaurant theme, Linguini naturally comes with the menu and reservations features built-in. However, they have taken it further by adding support for events. It is also possible to display your opening hours in the footer of your website.
The adaptive layout of Linguini will make sure that your website looks great on any screen size. The translation-ready theme comes with full support for all the common social media networks. The Linguini theme is priced at $49.
LemonChili
LemonChili is another WordPress theme for creating a restaurant, bar, café, or fast food shop website. Along with the regular menu items, the theme allows you to create dedicated pages for your team, events, gallery etc.
It comes with seven custom widgets, which will be useful in decorating a fully widgetized home page. You can choose any of the five custom post types and seven page templates.
LemonChili enables you to display your restaurant location on Google Maps. You can easily personalize the branding options like your logo, favicon, primary color, and slideshow from the theme options panel. As the theme supports all 600+ Google Fonts, you can choose a unique font for your website. The LemonChili theme is priced at $54.
Pluto
If you are looking for a full-screen theme for creating your restaurant website, Pluto can be also an excellent choice. The unique theme design will absolutely draw the attention of your visitors.
There are seven attractive effects for the home page slideshow. You can choose any of the three different color skins. Thanks to the drag and drop interface, you can easily create the best layout for your home page.
The AJAX-powered theme is capable of displaying filtered information without reloading the page, and works on all the major browsers. As the theme package includes the po and mo files, you can easily translate the theme into another language. The Pluto theme is priced at $49.
Grand Restaurant
Grand Restaurant is another feature-rich WordPress theme for creating a top-class café, restaurant, or any eatery website. The handy content builder will be useful in creating custom page layouts, it is possible to check out the responsive preview while you design the layout or add content. Built-in parallax effects will make your content and images a lot more interesting.
As you can guess, the theme comes with integrated menus and reservation systems. Thanks to full WooCommerce support it is possible to accept payments from your customers. If you have run out of ideas, you can get inspiration from the six demo designs. The Grand Restaurant theme is priced at $64.
Final Words
These days, having a website has become a must for any business, especially for businesses which have to deal with customers directly like restaurants, cafés or coffee shops. Businesses like this need professional websites which provide all necessary information for their potential customers. We hope this post gave you some insight into the free and premium themes and plugins to create your own WordPress restaurant website. If you have any suggestions, please let us know in the comments!
you made some great points! I’d also extend the list of free WP plugins with more alternatives that help build a restaurant. Some of the available tools are even more rich in functionality than Food and Drink or Quick Restaurant plugins (though they are also reliable). I’m talking about WP Restaurant Manager, MotoPress restaurant menu, WP Pizza, etc.
Thanks for your suggestions Ann, very appreciated!