For thousands of years, restaurants have served meals in shared dining rooms to hungry patrons. For about two decades, restaurants have been able to post websites online and take remote delivery orders. Today, the delivery reality has finally taken the forefront and restaurants across the world with a plan to stay in business are adopting online menu ordering. But where do you start in updating your restaurant website?
If you have a WordPress-built website, you’re in luck. The process of adding a live menu and online meal ordering takes only a plugin and a little bit of your time. A menu plugin automatically adds a menu page functionality to your website. Many include a food order cart and check out while others focus primarily on showing off your food with descriptions and pictures to best inform your customers.
Restaurants in need of an online menu read onward for the top 15 WP plugins that can add a live menu to your website.
1) Food and Drink Menu
Food and Drink Menu is a free WordPress plugin that gives it a great deal of credit for small businesses in need of a quick menu solution. It is designed to show off your menu items beautifully, each with a displayed image and a short description of the dish. You can customize the look and feel in a limited way, with two modes that allow you to choose between one-column menu pages or two-column menu pages.
Installing the pro version with a paid subscription, you can add more features. These features include specials, dietary indication icons, and more.
2) Restolabs
Restolabs is a combination word of Restaurant and labs – they design innovative restaurant tech that the modern restaurant owner needs. The Restolabs WordPress plugin has a rewarding variety of features that focuses primarily on ordering pickup, delivery, or even pre-made dine-in meals. The platform is ready to adapt to your business model and can be used to deliver special service and policy messages.
Even more than just a menu, Restolabs also includes an interactive map so that customers can confirm that their address is inside your delivery zone before completing their order. Restolabs helps you to process payments and also makes it possible for phone calls and cash on delivery.
3) Restaurant Menu by MotoPress
Another great selling plugin for restaurants, Restaurant Menu by MotoPress is essential for building a menu that also allows customers to check out after building their order online. The plugin is also e-Commerce enabled like the listing before so that you can process payments through your website and sell orders for delivery.
The cool thing about Restaurant Menu by MotoPress besides being a fully functioning online menu with selling capabilities is that it includes paneled hosting of your menu content on other pages. You can insert items of your menu into your blog sidebar or your About page – don’t just limit the enticing photos and descriptions to the pages of users specifically on your menu.
4) Responsive Menu
The Responsive Menu is designed to give you as many options as possible, starting with over 150 customizable feature options to choose from. Unlike other menus that are limited in their appearance adaptability, the Responsive Menu allows you to adapt text, borders, and background – and even use your own background photos. You can create menus that are triggered by special events or choices, and adapt the opacity of your page layers.
For a beautiful menu, there is no substitute for a Responsive Menu. If you buy the premium version, you even have the option to animate or had an animation for every menu item. Responsive menu will give your guests a unique and created online experience.
5) Quick Restaurant Menu
If you don’t want to spend a lot of time creating a beautiful custom menu, Quick Restaurant Menu is the WordPress plugin for you. This simplified menu plugin makes it easy to build your menu with the assets and details that you already have. You can design your menu with an easy drag-and-drop experience.
One of the best things about Quick Restaurant Menu is the multi-menu design. Ou can design each of your sub-menus, daily menus, or holiday menus individually, then arrange them together or separately based on what is most persuasive in the day.
6) Menu Drive
Menu Drive is honed for the customer’s mobile experience. Assuming that most people order food from their phones either at home or on their way home, it’s only natural to streamline your online menu for mobile ordering.
This system comes fully equipped with e-Commerce features so you can have customers build a cart and check out online using their credit cards. You can then set up your delivery areas marked by a radius of how far out you will deliver and finally indicate your operating hours.
Menu Drive enables group orders and can help you manage notifications sent automatically to customers during their order and delivery. You can even use Menu Drive to set up a customer loyalty reward system.
7) Gloria Food Restaurant Menu Ordering System
Gloria Food tries an all-in-one approach with their menu ordering system. Gloria Food offers a drag-and-drop menu editor system to quickly put together the menu design that works best for you. There is infrastructure for beautiful item images and detailed dish information for your customer’s benefit. You can even customize unique aspects of the dish like size and half-orders, ingredient and side choices, and add-ons with multiple selection options.
Gloria Food also goes out of their way to provide a great user experience for new and returning customers. There is single-page checkout and auto-fill provided for returning customers. The plugin will work well in both Android and iOS mobile access and can help you manage payments for both pickup and delivery orders. There is also support for online driver tips.
8) WP Pizza
WP Pizza is one of the most popular restaurant menu plugins because it is considered the basic of custom menu software. Through the WordPress team, you can make a website for a lot more than pizza. You don’t have to sell pizza pies to build a custom menu with the WP pizza customization menu design. Like a pizza with custom toppings, you can use WP Pizza menu builder for custom dishes in anything from gyros to frosted party cakes.
WP Pizza is also well-known for being multi-lingual and is fully compatible with WPML. The plugin makes it easy to instantly create new menus, sort your menu items into categories, and add detailed information on every menu item for the benefit of your customers.
9) WP Mobile Menu
As the name might lead you to believe, WP Mobile Menu is a plugin designed for a sleek mobile ordering experience. Mobile Menu goes pro fast, but the features are worth it. A sliding menu, copyright section, and header banner are among the spotlight features that make your mobile online menu stand out over the competition.
The shopping cart slides out from the side, always available for users curating their order. You can add your own unique background images for the menu pages or customize a branded background color. Premium tools give you over 2000 icons to choose from and handy header, footer, and banner graphics to enhance the look and feel of your online menu.
10) WordPress Mega Menu
The Mega Menu gets a big reputation for a reason – there is a lot of it. There are several plugins bearing the Mega Menu because a mega-menu is actually a feature type. A mega menu creates a very large menu made up of many smaller menus. The Max Mega Menu works well directly alongside the WP editor with a handy drag-and-drop design. The QuadMenu Mega Menu plugin features a carousel – an unusual ad in the menu market. The Main Mega Menu works with a series of drop-down menus which may be more your style.
Each offers a comprehensive way to build a live menu from many other menus, creating a mega-menu experience.
11) UpMenu
If you plan to build your own restaurant ordering app that should integrate with your WordPress website, then UpMenu is the right plugin for you. Using this menu, you can hook in your WordPress website’s features and information while also creating a baseline to create your own IOS or Android mobile app for online ordering.
UpMenu will help you handle payments through Stripe and Paypal in addition to traditional debit and credit cards. You can even set your own options in terms of pricing for packaging, minimum orders, and add-ons that most menu systems do not include. UpMenu comes with a cost, but for some brands, that cost is profoundly worth it.
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Upgrading your restaurant website for online ordering is a must. With these 11 restaurant menu plugins, you have more than a few options to choose from to build the perfect online menu for your clientele. From a quick glance at the items to an interactive order-building platform, WordPress makes it possible to upgrade your restaurant website in a snap. Contact us for more valuable insights on building your restaurant business in the new digital ordering era.