5 Maintenance Tips for Your Restaurant’s Website


5 Maintenance Tips for Your Restaurant’s Website

Update your content regularly to encourage repeat website visits.

According to experts, nearly 80% of people will visit a restaurant’s website before dining in or taking out food. That’s a large majority of your customers. 

This is one of the many reasons your website is the centerpiece of your marketing efforts. Because of this, it’s basically the open door to your restaurant and your menu. You can see how important it is to keep your restaurant’s website functioning, fast, current, and secure. 

You want to put a great deal of thought into making a good first impression, and with that goes ongoing maintenance. In this article, we look at five maintenance tips for your restaurant’s website.

#1: Regularly Manage Page Load Speed

Patience shouldn’t have to be a virtue regarding your restaurant’s website load times. According to one source, the average website load speed is around 10-15 seconds. Make sure this isn’t yours. Your restaurant’s website should load in under five seconds, preferably in just one second or two. 

If your website doesn’t load for users within that magic mark, you risk losing potential customers. They will leave and find a restaurant whose website loads faster than yours.

So, you want to optimize your website’s speed on a regular basis. Doing this helps improve the overall user experience. It also increases your chances of online orders, which ultimately increases your revenue. (tweet this)

What’s more, Google measures your website by its speed, so it’s essential to heed the warnings. You can use tools like PingdomGMetrix, and Google Page Speed to check your speed regularly.

This is one of your web developer’s maintenance duties, as this person is the most well-suited to improve your website’s speed. 

#2: Update Your Content

Another maintenance tip is to update your content regularly. This gives frequent visitors something to come back for. 

This isn’t hard to do at all. Here are a few steps you can take:

  • Maintain your social media presence by bringing in your social media feeds on your website. This also adds new content to your website every day. 
  • Create a regular blog posting schedule. Try to post at least once a week and sometimes more often. This helps attract new customers and retain current ones while also providing new content for search engines. Ultimately it increases your search engine ranking. 
  • Add new landing pages. For example, if you’re having an event, create a landing page for it with details, images, videos, and a call to action. This might even be an RSVP form.

As you update content, and especially as you write your blogs, don’t forget to pay attention to your keywords so you can optimize for SEO (search engine optimization). Link to other content on your website, too.

Maintenance Tips

Regular maintenance is key to a successful restaurant website.

#3: Attend to the Security of Your Website

A secure website is one that customers are safe visiting. This is an integral step in your web maintenance and another developer maintenance duty for your website. This involves attending to the functionality and security of your website by updating your backend. This refers to your CMS platform/WordPress updates, plugin updates, theme updates, patches, and bug fixes.

You want to ensure that your WordPress or Joomla restaurant website and your plugins and themes stay updated weekly. 

This ensures that your website will continue to function as you expect it to. In addition, it solves some security issues. When pieces of your website are out of date, they leave the door wide open to hackers and bugs. Once your restaurant has a problem, it’s too late for everyone who has come in contact with it. 

Security is a key piece of your website, and you need to make sure you take care of it often. Do any recommended updates to all of the above as well as any requested by your web server, database, and any other apps or extensions.

You want to stay proactive when it comes to site updates. The last thing you want to do is try and fix a website that’s down or has been hacked.

Finally, you also want to manage your uptime. This means regularly knowing if your website goes down. You can then take steps to fix any issues.

These jobs are all best done by an experienced web developer.

#4: Check Your Website’s Analytics

Another thing you want to do is take a look at your Google Analytics on a monthly or at least quarterly basis. This helps you benchmark progress and performance on your website. (tweet this)

This helps you see how your website is performing overall. You can also gauge how each of your pages is doing, as well as your individual blog posts. 

You can tell if something on your website needs to be changed through Google Analytics. You can also see what’s working well so you can repeat it elsewhere on your site. 

Finally, by viewing your Google Analytics, you can see errors so you can fix them. 

#5: Backup Your Website

Regular backup is another web developer’s duty. While your web hosting company usually takes care of this, it’s a good idea to have a double backup. 

Websites can fail, but if you have a recent backup, you avoid a catastrophe. You simply back up to the last good date. 

Your web developer can add a plugin to your website to do this for you regularly.

Final Thoughts

You build your restaurant website to be the center point of your digital marketing. All of your social media, email marketing, and paid ads point back to it. Hopefully, you’ve managed your SEO well, and your website lands high on search engine results pages. 

But you can’t just create a website and leave it. You want to maintain it on an ongoing basis, taking care to heed the maintenance tips in this article. 

By doing this, you ensure your website moves quickly, is user-friendly, runs smoothly, is safe and secure, has fresh content, and is well backed up.

If you need regular maintenance, which we recommend, we are here to help!

At Restaurant Engine, not only do we create great, responsive websites, but you can count on us to create a website that works in tandem with your social media platforms. Let us help you make the perfect site that draws customers in, improves your conversion rate, and enables you to grow your business! Ready to take the plunge and create a new website? Get your free website consultation today! 

Images: Marvin Meyer and Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *