How a Website CMS Will Benefit Your Restaurant

Owning and operating a successful restaurant comes with its own set of challenges. From planning your menu to executing your marketing strategy, there are plenty of things that happen to help turn your recipes all the way into a satisfied diner and recurring customer. However, when restaurateurs are looking for new website to better attract eaters online, using a Content Management System (CMS) is a vital ingredient.

The use of a CMS for a website should come as no shock. As of May 2016, nearly 26.4% of all websites use WordPress as their CMS, while others, such as SquareSpace, Joomla, and Wix, continue to make up a part of the market share. The popularity of a CMS like WordPress should come as no surprise. It’s an agile content management system with a host of plugins that offer the benefits of a custom built site, often using out-of-the-box solutions. Additionally, themes, templates, and designs can often be easily constructed, modified, and replicated without extensive technical know-how. This keeps your chefs and restaurateurs close to the kitchen rather than researching web-design.

By using a CMS, restaurants have the ability to modify key menu items, prices, specials, or other features by simply logging in and making an update. Often equipped with rich-text editors and the ability to preview any changes before you post, CMSs take guesswork out of the equation, and reduce the need for a full-time developer on-staff to make simple updates. Instead, menu items can be changed ad-hoc, specials can be updated simply, and even additional things like changes to opening hours or happy hours can be managed with the click of a button.

Using a CMS also has other benefits. Some developers may not even think to use microdata or markup around certain items–but most CMSs will take care of that for you. By leveraging microdata like Schema.org and RDFa, Google can better understand the content on your webpage and turn this into a more dynamic display whenever your site shows up in search. Many CMSs are designed to automatically incorporate this information into key places on your site. Opening hours, address and phone number help the site to perform better for local search. Marking up menu items, recipes, and reviews can also lead to more visibility on Google’s SERPs.

A final advantage of using a CMS to make your new website is that most Content Management Systems will produce a mobile-friendly site or responsive design. With many users searching for restaurants nearby while on-the-go, it’s critical that your site is optimized for mobile. In fact, mobile usage has overtaken desktop, including search! By using a CMS with a responsive theme, you can rest assured that users will be able to better access your site on their mobile and tablet devices, without requiring any heavy-lifting from developers for a mobile-specific solution.

A CMS is among the chief ingredients for a successful restaurant website, and can help ensure that your key stakeholders are invested in the restaurant’s food, decor, design, and more–without having to stress about your site. Contact us for more information on how to get the best out of your restaurant’s website today.