4 Rules to Follow for Digital Restaurant Menus

How much time does your restaurant spend designing and updating your online menu? It’s probably not enough.

77 percent of diners visit a restaurant’s website before making a purchase from the venue. And of those, 70 percent have been discouraged from making those purchases based on the site itself, ability to navigate the site, readability, or the menu.

Your fast casual or casual dining restaurant’s digital menu is creating a first impression for prospective customers, so make sure it’s a good one. Here are four rules to follow for digital menus.

1. Do not use a PDF

This is one of my biggest pet peeves as a restaurant customer. I hate a PDF menu. 

Why?

They are difficult to read on a mobile phone. That’s because a PDF menu isn’t made for a mobile phone. It’s made for the print shop that prints your paper menus. The PDF document is not mobile-responsive, and viewers have to pinch and zoom in on the text to view it.

Also — a PDF isn’t doing your restaurant any favors for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The text on a PDF cannot be scanned and indexed by Google and other search engines, so your menu and the menu items aren’t going to come up in a Google search.

2. Create a mobile-responsive menu for dining and delivery

Mobile-responsive websites are websites that change and adapt to the screen size of the devices used by viewers. Since more than 80 percent of customers use smartphones to search for restaurants, you should strongly consider making your menu and your website a mobile-responsive one.

Your website management software may already have features that allow you to create a mobile-responsive menu page. Or you can invest in software and tools to build a mobile-responsive landing page just for your menu.

In addition to being easily accessible to and readable by your customers, mobile-responsive websites are indexed by Google and other search engines, so your menu items and content will help you get found in a search for those keywords.

3. Use TripleseatDirect for your catering menu 

Do you know what restaurant customers hate more than an unreadable menu? Talking on the phone. This is especially true for customers who want to order catering but don’t want to spend time on the phone working out all of the details.

TripleseatDirect solves that problem. 

TripleseatDirect enables any venue to offer their customers a zero-touch, frictionless and easy way to book, order, and pay for any off-premise catering event, on-premise event, or take out/delivery catering.

It also has features that make your catering menu easy to read and navigate so catering customers can make decisions quickly.

• Showcase your menu items by adding food photos
• Create menu items and packages that are priced per person
• Adjust the order of your menus to put seasonal or holiday items at the top

4. Post it everywhere

Because your menu is one of the top pages your customers are looking at, make it easily available in the digital spaces they use to access information about you, such as your website, Google business profile, Yelp profile, Facebook page, or Instagram profile.

Don’t forget about on-site. QR codes are an easy, contactless way to give customers access to your digital menu. Place the QR codes on restaurant tables using table tents or secure the code to tabletops. Hang them in your window or door so customers can start looking at the menu before they enter your venue.

Invest in the right software for your restaurant

TripleseatDirect enables restaurants and hotels to offer on-premise and off-premise events and catering to be booked by their clients, directly from their website, social media platforms, or EventUp. TripleseatDirect provides your customers with a simple online booking solution where they can book, plan, and pay for in-house private events, off-site catering, pickup, and delivery with zero friction.

If your venue isn’t using TripleseatDirect yet, head on over to our TripleseatDirect page for more information or to book a demo.