Create Local Restaurant Website without a Developer
Posted on July 2nd, 2019
Nowadays, managing a restaurant is one of the most difficult businesses with high competition. In this modern world, its good to publish the details or information about your restaurant firm online to stay on top of the competition and to find new customers on the Internet. The details should include a Gallery section, top menus, a contact page, business hours and the address of your restaurant firm.
Are you a restaurant owner looking to have a website for your business? Are you the person having a confusion of where to start or what to do? or the person with no coding knowledge to build your own website? If so, don’t worry about it as you are in the right place to add the enhancement to your business. Here in this article, we will show you how you can build a standard website for your restaurant business.
Before creating the actual website, here is the outline of what you will go through while creating a website in next 1 hour:
1) Selecting a domain name for your restaurant website.
2) Choosing a web hosting service.
3) Installing WordPress to start building site.
4) Choosing the right template or a theme for the site’s design.
5) Enhancing features by adding plugins.
There are many other platforms to start building a website, but here we are going to choose WordPress because it is the most popular website builder powering over 32% of all websites on the internet. The best thing is, it provides thousands of themes and plugins to enhance the features of a website. You can create any type of website easily without any coding knowledge using the WordPress platform.
Step 1: Purchase suitable domain name and hosting service
The first thing you need to do is purchase a suitable domain name and hosting package to host your website online. These two are must-have things to start a website. We, InterServer, offers both domain registration and hosting services for reasonable prices that you can purchase to start building your website. InterServer offers Standard WebHosting Service with unlimited SSD storage and email addresses, with a great content caching for better website performance, InterShield protection to prevent online website attacks and the free SSL Certificates. You can find more information about the web hosting plans here – https://www.interserver.net/webhosting/
The first step is to choose the domain name that suits your business, let’s take a moment to select the domain name. It is the best practice to include the restaurant name with .com TLD extension for better SEO performance and your visitors will definitely find it easy to remember. InterServer offers a domain name for just 1.99$ for the first year along with matching hosting order for three month billing cycle. Visit our website here – https://www.interserver.net/domains/ and put your suitable domain name (for eg: myrestaurant.com) in the search box and click ‘Search’ button to check if the domain name is available. If it’s available, register it before anyone else does.
If it’s available, then click the button ‘Order Domain + Web Hosting‘ next to it to proceed, and click on the ‘Continue’ button on next page. It will then ask for your InterServer account login credentials, enter the login details by switching to ‘Log-In Existing’ tab if you already have an account or enter the details and click ‘Create Account and Continue’ button at the bottom to create a new InterServer account.
In the last page, it will show you an overview of the order where you can select the billing cycle (select minimum 3 Months to have a domain name for 1.99$) and place the order.
You will receive an email with the information to log in to your hosting cPanel control panel. Or read this article https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/how-do-i-access-the-cpanel/ on how to access cPanel from your InterServer client area.
Step 2: Installing WordPress
Once the first step is completed and or when you have access to the hosting cPanel control panel, its time to install the WordPress on your domain name. You can install WordPress with few clicks via our Softaculous AppInstaller interface, we already have an article on how to install WordPress using Softaculous – https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/install-wordpress-using-softaculous-in-cpanel/
In case if you find difficulty in setting up a WordPress site, please feel free to open a support request to install WordPress on your domain name and our 24*7 experts will do the rest within minutes on your behalf.
Step 3: Customize the website
Now its time to customize your newly installed WordPress website to suit for your restaurant website. To customize the website, you have to log in to the WordPress admin dashboard by using the link http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin (replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name), enter the username and password you have entered while installing WordPress. Once you have entered the dashboard, go to “Settings” > General” from the left sidebar and alter the details such as Title, tagline and email address as you wish.
Next move over to “Settings” > “Discussion” and make sure you have unchecked the option “Allow people to post comments” as restaurant sites do not require this functionality and then hit save button at the bottom. Once done, go to “Settings” > “Permalinks” and select ‘Post name’ from the list to make the URLs clean and easy to read.
Now it’s time to install a template or theme to make your website look good and this should also help to gain visitor’s attention. WordPress provides tons of themes and it’s very easy to install. You can find a list of restaurant themes (select a well maintained one) on their website here – https://wordpress.org/themes/search/restaurant/. InterServer also offers a theme for free named ‘Interserver Platinum‘. To find instructions on how to install a WordPress theme, please check out the article here – https://www.interserver.net/tips/kb/how-to-install-a-theme-on-your-wordpress-blog/
Since you are new to WordPress, here we are going to use a free WordPress restaurant theme called – “FoodHunt”. We are using this theme because it’s free and also supports one-click demo content installation. So you can set up and customize your site within minutes using this theme and everything will be pre-installed.
So, when you are ready, go to Appearance>>Themes>>Add new
You can search for WordPress themes here and every theme listing here is free to use! As mentioned, we are going to install a theme called “FoodHunt”. So search for it and install when you find it.
After installation, make sure to activate the theme “FoodHunt” by clicking on the “Activate” button given on the theme card.
After the theme is activated, you will see the following dialog box. Click on “Begin installing plugins”. ( These are the plugins needed for this theme to work properly or for the theme to have full functionalities. )
Select and install all the plugins listed there.
Once installed, go back to the same page and activate all installed plugins.
After activating all the plugins, click on “Appearance >> Demo Importer >> FoodHunt >> Import”
Please click on the Import button only once and wait, it can take a couple of minutes.
NOTE: Only import the demo content to new websites without content. This is to avoid filling the website with new pages and posts that could create confusion with existing content.
That’s all you need to do! Your site is 80% ready. Go to your home page and you will see your site exactly like this: https://demo.themegrill.com/foodhunt/
It’ll have a slider, contact form, dish menu, services, hours, dish gallery and everything needed for a restaurant website.
This has almost everything you need on a restaurant website. But the main menu, widgets, and some parts of the theme (like the site logo) must be set manually. That is also very easy to do. Go to “Appearance >> About FoodHunt >> Theme Customizer”. From there, You can change contents or customize everything you are seeing in the demo page. If you have any doubts, you can refer the FoodHunt Documentation here: https://docs.themegrill.com/foodhunt/
See, it’s that easy to set up a restaurant website with InterServer!
Some of the must-have plugins for your WordPress site are the following:
– Yoast SEO – It improves your website SEO and will get more visitors from google.
– WP Super Cache – This plugin Improves the website’s speed by adding cache.
– Ithemes security plugins – It is a security plugin to enhance website protection.
That’s all! You just built a restaurant website like a pro! For more instruction about WordPress, please visit – https://www.interserver.net/tips/knb-category/wordpress/ . If you require any assistance and or you have any queries with the above, feel free to get in touch with our support team either via LiveChat or support tickets.