The National Restaurant Association published their Industry Forecast that reported a growth in local and health food options, revenue and the use of technology in the industry. From those findings it turns out that one-quarter of consumers said that technology options are important features when factoring in where to eat. If that’s the case then why are so many restaurant websites still neglecting the menu?
70% of smartphone users view restaurant menus on their phones at least a few times per year.
We viewed local restaurant websites on our smart phones and found nearly half of them made us download their PDF to view the menu. What’s worse was a few had images for menus.
What’s Wrong with PDFs or Images?
First, you don’t get any SEO traffic from either. Search engines, such as Google, cannot crawl PDFs or Images so any dishes you serve go unseen by search engines bots.
Second, you’re forcing the user to use more of their data plan and adding a potentially unwanted file to their device. This can aggravate your future customers. If I’m looking for your happy hour menu then why do I need to download the entire menu?
Lastly, it takes a staff member or a freelance designer to make changes to that file and re-upload it to your server. This can equal additional costs to your business that may not be needed.
Do Your Restaurant Websites Uses PDFs?
If you’re using WordPress to power your restaurant website we can help solve this issue by building a menu that is responsive for all devices and easy for you to update. Doing this will allow you to edit, update and add menu content on the fly. Contact us to start your project discussion.
