Many restaurants have learned they need to focus on selling their food online. But it’s one thing to offer online ordering and a whole other thing to draw people to your website.

The key? Yup—attractive, sales-optimized landing pages. Using compelling copy, mouth-watering images, irresistible call-to-action buttons, and special promotions, you too can grow your online ordering sales.

With this blog post, you’ll learn how to optimize your restaurant landing pages to:

• Get visitors to spend more time on your page.
• Generate more leads.
• Build a valuable email list.
• Increase click-through rate.
• Increase the average online order value.
• Send users to pages that match their search intent.

What’s on the Menu: Anatomy of a Successful Restaurant Landing Page

1. The appetizer: mouth-watering photos of food

It’s no surprise that images play a decisive role in the success of your landing pages. 

What makes images so compelling? Humans process images 60,000 times faster than text, so when a potential customer lands on your site, they will most likely look at the pictures first. That is your chance to make an excellent first impression.

High-quality, well-positioned, beautiful images directly affect conversion rates and decrease bounce rates (the percentage of website visitors entering your site and leaving without viewing any other pages).

As for the images you should use on your landing pages, nothing speaks better of your brand than actual photos of your delicious food.

While you can also use stock photos, and they’ll still look good, there’s a downside to that. Customers might expect their food to look like that when they visit your restaurant and end up being disappointed.

There’s nothing wrong with slightly editing your photos to make them look good. However, make sure the contrast between the pictures and the actual products isn’t too stark. It’s better to invest in a quality photoshoot with a professional who knows how to make the most of your dishes without digitally altering the photos.

2. The main course: compelling copy

The cornerstone of your landing page is carefully chosen, emotion-evoking words. And in the restaurant industry, there’s no shortage of words that will make customers hungry. First of all, you should know that words that evoke joy and anticipation help food and beverage pages perform better.

However, you’ll want to go for quality over quantity. The goal of a landing page is to sell. It’s not a buffet: You can’t treat your landing page like a blog post because customers won’t know what to focus on and leave.

These are a few things to keep in mind when writing copy for a landing page:

• Use the active voice as much as possible.
• Stay away from too many adverbs, modifiers, and determiners.
• Go back and edit your text more than once—you will find unnecessary words every time.

But more to the point, what kind of words should you use on your landing pages, and especially when presenting your menu? Let’s take a look at these two food descriptions:

• Tomato soup made with tomatoes, garlic, and basil
• Zesty tomato soup made with roasted tomatoes, wild garlic, and basil

Instinctively, you know the second option has more flavor. You don’t have to overdo it with adjectives to craft a story that will draw people to your dishes. Take a look at this list of delicious restaurant menu descriptions for more creative food-related words.

3. Dessert: well-placed call-to-action buttons

For a restaurant website, the two most important call-to-action buttons are the “menu” and “order” button (and the “table reservation” button, if applicable). Look at online ordering systems that make it easy for you to place the order button wherever you want on the page.

Typically, a button placed above the fold (the part of the website you see when you first land on it, without having to scroll down) attracts attention faster and converts better. The explanation is simple: Visitors will see it right away instead of having to look for it.

If someone visits your website with the intention to order food, then that’s the only button they’ll want to click. On the other hand, if a visitor stumbles upon your website and doesn’t know that you deliver, they will find out as soon as they land on the page.

It’s even better to make the call-to-action buttons sticky (and sweet). That way, they’ll be in your customers’ line of sight at all times, even if they decide to browse through the website first.

4. The after-meal mint: attractive promotions

According to a study by Dr. Paul J. Zak, Professor of Neuroeconomics at Claremont Graduate University, receiving discounts leads to a 38% spike in oxytocin (the chemical responsible for happiness) and an 11% increase in overall happiness.

And that’s not all. There’s a reason why limited offers work so well, and that is that they cater to people’s impulse purchases. Telling your customers they only have a day to claim an offer might convince them to splurge on a night out when they would’ve otherwise stayed home.

Food promotions should be an integral part of your landing pages. Dedicate an entire section of the homepage to promotions and integrate them into your online menu as well. That will make them impossible to miss when people order food online.

Although you might think offering discounts and promotions will make a dent in your profits, it’s actually the other way around. If done correctly, promotions can increase your order value.

Tactics like cross-selling (selling complementary extras) and up-selling (selling add-ons) will make users spend more without realizing it.

Here are some of the most popular restaurant promotions you can use:

• Lunch specials (build your own lunch for $9.95)
• Family meal bundles (appetizer, main course, and dessert for the entire family at a special price)
• Food holidays (all pizzas 50% off on National Pizza Day)
• Limited-time discount codes (the first 15 people who show it to their waiter get a 15% discount)
• Free delivery (the delivery is free for all orders over $30)

5. Coming back for more: irresistible sign-up benefits

Building an email list is another goal of a quality landing page. Learning information about your customers can help you improve customer service, fine-tune your menu, and generally provide a better experience at your restaurant.

To increase sign-ups on your restaurant website, come up with an irresistible sign-up benefit for customers. Here, copy plays a significant role again. You have to give people something to look forward to when they sign up, such as free recipes or monthly discounts.

Get inspired by the following email sign-up copy and CTA examples:

• Sign up to receive our monthly recipes -> Get free recipes
• Subscribe for tasty recipes, new menu item notifications, and exclusive promotions -> Become a [restaurant name] insider
• Be the first to get notified when we release new menu items -> Sign up
• Do you want a special offer delivered to your inbox every month? -> Yes, give me my special offer!
• Subscribe to our newsletter for a $50 gift card redeemable instantly -> Subscribe

Hungry for Conversions? Get Started on Your Restaurant Landing Page Today

You might be getting a headache right now (or maybe you’re just hangry). Luckily, you’re not in this alone.

Get started by browsing these Unbounce restaurant landing page templates. Then customize the one you like until it meets your needs. You can create responsive landing pages without any IT or web design knowledge. You also get access to a gallery of over 850,000 professional images.

And that’s not even the best part: Smart Traffic can help you create different variants of a landing page. Then, it “automagically” points your visitors to the page that best suits their tastes and where they are more likely to convert.

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