WooCommerce restaurant delivery website

The management of restaurants are now being significantly impacted by the world of technological improvements. Given that the majority of people spend a significant portion of their days online, restaurants have enormous market potential. In fact, customers who frequent restaurants are more interested in buying food online. Restaurant managers and owners are constantly looking for ways to make it easier for consumers to order meals online and have it delivered quickly.

Most restaurant owners are setting up a restaurant delivery website to stay in business and give a neck to neck competition to others owners. The good news is that you can create a food delivery website in WordPress in a few simple steps.

One of the key benefits of setting up your own restaurant delivery website is that you don’t have to rely on third-party food delivery service providers and food delivery apps like Grubhub, Uber Eats, Postmates, or Doordash. Instead, you can start taking online orders for your own local restaurant and keep 100% of your profits.

In this tutorial, we’ll explain how you can create a restaurant delivery website using the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin. You can also watch this video to see how it's done.

How to create a restaurant delivery website in WooCommerce

To create a food delivery website, you’ll need a WordPress website with the WooCommerce plugin installed. You’ll also need the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin to set up your online menu and take orders online.

If you don’t already have a WordPress website set up, check out our in-depth tutorial on how to create a WooCommerce restaurant online ordering system for step-by-step instructions.

It's much more cost-effective than signing up with a third-party food delivery service provider like Grubhub, Uber Eats, Doordash, or Postmates.

Step #1: Add food items as WooCommerce products

The first thing you need to do is to add menu items to your restaurant delivery website as WooCommerce products.

We recommend organizing food items into different categories the way you would if you were creating a menu for your physical restaurant.

WooCommerce add new product

For example, your categories might be:

  • Starters
  • Main Courses
  • Desserts
  • Drinks

Once you’ve created the categories, simply add each food item as an individual WooCommerce product. Enter its title, description, category, and image, and then fill out the Product data section to set the price and (optionally) variations and other options.

Step #2: Install WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering on your WordPress website

The WooCommerce plugin automatically creates shop pages with its own layout for displaying products or, in this case, food items. However, this isn’t ideal for a restaurant delivery website. Instead, you can use the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin to list your online menu in a one-page order form.

Get the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin and install it on your WordPress website. You’ll get the plugin’s files and license key in the confirmation email.

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering Plugin settings

Head over to WooCommerceSettingsRestaurant from the WordPress admin panel and enter your license key. You can choose the default settings for your restaurant food ordering forms from the same screen. Also add opening dates and times if you want to prevent people from placing orders while you're closed.

Here's how it works:

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin automatically creates a food order form for you. If you preview your food delivery website on the front-end, it should look something like this (depending on your settings):

Food order form with sidebar

The food items are listed in a menu-style format with images, descriptions, and pricing information.

Optionally, you can create separate food order forms for different categories instead of listing all of them on one page. You can also create a section for Special Offers.

The easiest way to do this is by adding the [restaurant_ordering] shortcode to a page and using the shortcode options to choose which categories to include on that page.

Customers can simply place their order online and then proceed to the checkout page.

Step #3: Set up delivery and collection

One of the biggest advantages to using WooCommerce to power your restaurant delivery website is that it has options built-in for delivery and collection. To configure these settings, simply head over to the WooCommerceSettingsShipping section of the WordPress admin.

For example, you can create shipping zones for the areas you offer deliveries to. Let’s say you want to offer free shipping to areas close to your restaurant and charge for areas further away. You can set up two shipping zones in WooCommerce. And, if you want to offer collection or takeout option, all you have to do is set up a third shipping zone that gives customers the option to collect their orders from the restaurant.

WooCommerce restaurant delivery options

The WooCommerce plugin also lets you offer delivery options for each shipping zone you create. You can use these options to set up free home deliveries if the order value is above the minimum spend, charge for deliveries on orders less than the minimum spend, and offer local pickup.

If you like, then you can also add a plugin to allow customers to choose an exact delivery or collection time slot.

Step #4: Printing orders in the kitchen

To keep things simple, you can integrate a GPRS printer with your restaurant delivery website to automatically print orders in the kitchen in real-time. For this, we recommend using the WooCommerce Automatic Order Printing plugin. It offers seamless integration with WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering.

Alternatively, you can receive an SMS notification of new orders instead of printing orders to the kitchen. Our best advice is to use the SMS Alert Order Notifications plugin. You can also use the Twilio SMS Notifications plugin to send customers an SMS when their order is ready. This is especially useful if you want to offer local pickup options. Keep in mind that you’ll need to ask for the customer’s phone number at checkout if you want to offer this service.

Step #5: Offer online or offline payments

The WooCommerce plugin lets you set up various payment options. If you’re just getting started and want to offer online payment options, choose PayPal Payments Standard and enter your PayPal email address. In addition to this, you can also accept credit or debit card payments without using PayPal. For this, you would simply select Stripe and follow the setup instructions.

You can also offer offline payments (such as Cash on delivery) which are particularly useful for restaurant delivery websites. This way, your delivery drivers can collect payments from customers. This way, you can rival online food delivery service providers like Grubhub, Uber Eats, Doordash, and Postmates.

Start accepting online orders today

By setting up your own restaurant delivery website in WordPress you can start accepting online orders and keep 100% of the profits. This is much better than going with an online food delivery service provider like Grubhub, Uber Eats, or Postmates. The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin makes it easy to get started with a step in the right direction.

Once you’ve set up your restaurant delivery website, there are plenty of ways to enhance the customer’s shopping experience, for example, by setting up delivery and collection and offering online payment options in your online ordering system.

Ready to set up your restaurant delivery website and make it easier for customers to order food? Get the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin today.

Order food PayPal

By the time you’ve read this article, you’ll know exactly how to set up PayPal for food orders. Your customers will be able to order food using PayPal, just like with hosted services such as Grubhub, Just Eat and UberEats - but with you in control.

Over the past few years, mobile payments have been very popular, and this trend is anticipated to continue as more businesses use this technology. This implies that more restaurants have started accepting cash-less food orders in coming years. Restaurants that set up online food ordering systems have seen a huge increase in takeaway orders! Restaurants are now having to make permanent changes to stay in business longer-term. Online food orders are an important part of this.

Of course, customers LOVE PayPal because it's so easy and they can pay for food orders from their mobiles.

So, how can a restaurant like yours set up online ordering with easy PayPal payments?

By the end of this FREE guide, you’ll walk away knowing EXACTLY:

  • What you need to set up online orders for your restaurant with PayPal payments just like Grubhub, Just Eat or Uber Eats.
  • How to set up all of the components without any technical knowledge or experience.
  • How to do all of this EVEN if you don’t have a website yet!

And the best part? We’ll show you how to automate the whole process.

Why PayPal alone is a terrible way to sell food online

If you’ve used PayPal to accept payments for your products or services, you probably already know that it’s not the best way to sell food online.

The problem with using PayPal for food orders is that you have to log into your PayPal account to create each PayPal payment button individually. After creating the buttons, you paste them on your website. This doesn’t look professional and makes for a terrible user experience.

Further, PayPal doesn't provide a shopping cart system that lets customers order multiple food items at once. This is a major problem since most people need to order more than one food item at a time!

From a back-end perspective, you won’t receive any sort of ‘new order’ notification or customer emails if you use PayPal alone for food orders. You will only receive basic payment notifications from PayPal which may get mixed up with other PayPal emails.

You also miss out on analytics and sales reporting features (like Google Analytics) as well as the ability to integrate with other systems, such as opening hours, delivery slots or the printer in your restaurant’s kitchen.

But what if you could set up PayPal for food orders just like Grubhub - without any of these problems?

The solution – Build a WordPress WooCommerce website for selling food online

WooCommerce restaurant plugin

A WordPress website with the free WooCommerce plugin is a far better way to sell food online and accept payments via PayPal. The best part is that you can enhance your site’s core functionality using specialized plugins, like WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering. This makes it even easier to showcase your food items and allow customers to place orders.

The WooCommerce plugin offers seamless integration with PayPal as standard, in a much better way than if you were to use PayPal alone to let customers place orders as we described earlier.

It’s incredibly easy to set up. As a result, you can start letting customers order food with PayPal today!

Plus, this is mobile-responsive, which means it will work seamlessly on iOS and Android devices without requiring customers to download a mobile app first.

Setting up PayPal payments for food orders

If you don’t already have a WordPress website set up with the WooCommerce plugin installed, check out this complete guide on how to get started.

Once you’ve set it up and added some food items as WooCommerce products, come back to this tutorial to learn how to set up PayPal payment options for food orders.

Step #1: Get the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin

Purchase the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin and install and activate it on your WordPress website. You'll receive a license key with the plugin files.

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering license key

Go to WooCommerceSettingsRestaurant and enter the license key in the License key field.

Click the Save changes button at the bottom of the screen to continue.

Step #2: Customize your restaurant food order form

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin automatically creates a front-end food order form for you once you activate the license key. However, you can customize the food ordering page in a variety of different ways.

For example, you can set the restaurant order page, select which product categories to showcase in the food ordering form, set the number of columns, choose an order method, and much more. You can also add your opening hours and prevent PayPal food orders from coming in while you're closed.

Check out the plugin's documentation for step-by-step instructions.

Based on your configuration settings, your food order form might look something like this:

WooCommerce food order form preview

Customers can click the (+) icon to add food items to their shopping cart and proceed to checkout.

Step #3: Set up PayPal payments

Now that your restaurant food ordering form is set up, the final step is to start accepting payments for food orders via PayPal. For this, head over to WooCommerceSettingsRestaurant from the admin area.

Enable PayPal payment method

Next, enable the PayPal payment method option and click the Set up button to start setting it up. Enter your PayPal email address in the PayPal email field. You can also configure other settings on the same screen based on your preferences.

Click the Save changes button to proceed.

When customers proceed to checkout, they'll be able to make pay for food orders with PayPal:

Order food using PayPal

That's it! Now, you can let customers place food orders and accept payments through PayPal.

Adding extra features to your PayPal-powered food ordering system

The great thing about using WordPress and WooCommerce to set up your PayPal-powered food ordering system is that you can add extra features to it using plugins. For example, you can set up food delivery slots and printing solutions that print orders straight to your restaurant’s kitchen.

Popup cart and checkout

WooCommerce restaurant floating cart

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin lets customers add their food items to the cart from one page. However, WooCommerce itself still takes customers through multiple pages in order to complete their order.

To speed up the cart and checkout, install WooCommerce Fast Cart. This adds an instant floating cart to the page as soon as the customer adds products to their cart. They can then review their selections, enter their details and pay from directly in the popup.

WooCommerce Fast Cart is fully compatible with the WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Payment Gateway. This lets you add PayPal Checkout buttons to the popup cart, making it even easier for customers to 'Buy Now' and place a PayPal food order.

Delivery time slots

The WooCommerce Delivery Slots plugin lets customers choose a delivery time slot for their food delivery orders similar to Eat24 Food Delivery. This makes it easy to manage food orders, especially on high-traffic days.

For example, the WooCommerce delivery slots plugin gives you the option to restrict the number of food order bookings in each time slot. In addition to this, you can set how far in advance customers should place their food orders before their delivery or takeout time slot. You can also decide how many food orders to accept within each food delivery time slot so that the kitchen doesn’t exceed capacity.

The plugin also lets customers book a delivery time slot before they add food items to their cart in order to avoid disappointment at the checkout page. This is especially useful for local restaurants that want to let customers order online and offer food delivery services.

Print orders to the kitchen

There are a variety of WordPress plugins available that let you send new food orders straight to the kitchen and print them for staff. This is possible with the WooCommerce Automatic Order Printing plugin.

Want to set up online ordering for your restaurant with PayPal payments in 30 minutes?

This plug-and-play solution was specially designed to help stop restaurants from going out of business during the Coronavirus pandemic. PayPal food orders are now essential as part of the ongoing order management of any restaurant.

You can use the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin to set up your online food ordering system and accept payments via PayPal, credit card, or debit card just like Grubhub or Dominos. No technical knowledge is required:

  • Plug-&-play setup for the plugin.
  • FREE tutorial showing you every step and every click you need to do (absolutely no way to get it wrong).
  • Technical support is available if you need any help
  • 30-day money-back guarantee. Love it or get a full refund, 0 risks.

Get the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin here and start getting orders TODAY!

Restaurant mobile ordering to table

The complete guide to dine-in restaurant ordering - let customers use their phones to order food straight from their table.

As restaurants adapt to the new requirements around social distancing, it's essential to minimize direct contact with customers. An increasingly common way is to allow customers to order food from their mobile phones from their table while they dine-in. This is safer and more convenient than taking orders in person.

This tutorial will teach you how to set up food ordering for dining-in at your restaurant. The system can be hosted on any WordPress website. You can use it to allow customers to order food for dinging in from the table and have their orders sent straight to the kitchen. Staff can also use it to take online POS orders on behalf of your customers.

What you need

WooCommerce restaurant order food to table

For this tutorial you will need:

  • A website powered by WordPress. If your restaurant already uses WordPress for your main website, then you can add the mobile food ordering system to your existing site.
  • The free WooCommerce plugin to add e-commerce features to your website. This includes the ability to add your food menu, and for customers to place their orders.
  • The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin. This plugin lists your food products on a page for customers to order from. It looks similar to your traditional printed menu, making it easy for customers to select their foods while they dine-in.
  • The Checkout Field Editor plugin. This allows you to simplify the WooCommerce checkout, removing irrelevant fields such as the food delivery address, and adding extra fields for table number and dietary requirements or allergies.

Before you start, make sure you have the WooCommerce, WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering, and Checkout Field Editor plugins installed and activated.

How it works

Once you've set up the food ordering system in this tutorial, customers can use their cellphones to order food from the table like this:

  1. Your customers arrive at the restaurant and sit at the table.
  2. One member of the party uses their phone or tablet to order food for the table. They do this by viewing the dining in food ordering page on your website. They select their food and drink from a quick one-page order form, and then proceed to the checkout.
  3. They enter some basic information on the checkout and choose whether to pay online or at the end of their meal. Finally, they enter any extra information such as their table number or allergies.
  4. The order is sent to the kitchen via email or you can add a plugin to automatically print to the kitchen.
  5. Once the food is ready, the waiting staff bring it to the table or leave it in a safe place for the customer to pick up.
  6. At the end of the meal, if the customer hasn't paid online then you can give them a bill in the usual way.

1. Add products to WooCommerce

The first step is to add each food item from your printed menu as a WooCommerce product. To do this, go to Products → Add New and add all the required information. This would typically include the product name, a short description, a price, and possibly an image.

If you offer a choice of options for particular items, you can add these as product variations or product add-ons:

  • Use variations for dishes that come with a fixed set of options, such as Small, Medium, Large.
  • Use the Product Options extension for dishes where the customer can select from a list of several options. This might include pizza toppings where the customer can add multiple options, each of which will add to the price.
WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin integration
Customers can choose extra options from a lightbox

Structure your menu into categories

Go to Products → Categories and create the categories that you'd like to structure the mobile food order form into. This should generally be the same as the categories on your printed menu - e.g. Starters, Main Courses, Desserts, etc. Then add each food product to the correct category.

2. Create a one-page food order form

To create your order form page:

  • Go to Pages -> Add New in the WordPress admin dashboard. Give your page a title, then click Publish.
  • Next, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Restaurant. Under the Restaurant order page option, select the page you just created.
  • Under Categories, select the product categories to show on your restaurant order page.

restaurant ordering settings page

You can drag and drop the categories to change the order. The settings page also includes options to show or hide certain information in the menu, select the number of columns to display, etc.

  • Save the settings, then open your Restaurant Ordering page on your website to se if everything looks correct. It should look something like the following:
Compare WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering with WooCommerce Product Table
An example of a food order form

3. Customize the WooCommerce checkout

The WooCommerce checkout is generic and not designed specifically for taking food orders. To make it perfect for ordering restaurant food at the table, I recommend adding some extra fields and hiding others. You can easily do this with the Checkout Field Editor plugin.

Install the plugin and use it to hide any fields that aren't needed. I'd recommend hiding fields such as the customer address. Since customers are ordering from their cellphones, make the checkout as simple as possible.

You may also want to add some extra fields. The most important ones for ordering food to be delivered to the table are:

  • Table number or location (e.g. inside or outside).
  • Any dietary requirements or allergies.

WooCommerce mobile restaurant checkout

Payment methods

You also need to choose how customers who order food on cellphone will pay for their order. There are two main options:

  • Pay online when they place their orderYou can use any of the payment gateways supported by WooCommerce to let customers pay when they place their order. This is good for social distancing, while saving you time taking payment at the end of the meal. The easiest payment option to set up is PayPal - it's great for customers as there's less information to enter. For credit card payments, I recommend Stripe which supports all major credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, etc. Set up your payment gateway under WooCommerce → Settings → Payments.
  • Pay at the end of the mealYou can keep it simple and give customers a printed bill at the end of their meal. They can then pay using your restaurant's existing payment methods (e.g. cash or using your credit card machine). Alternatively, if you want the payment to go through to the website ordering system then you can use a card reader that links with the website. There are 2 main options for this:

Let your customers know

Finally, you need to communicate how to order food from the table to your customers.

There are various options here. One way is to print an instructions sheet and put it on each table, telling customers how to order. This should include the URL (web address) of the food ordering page, for example www.myrestaurant.com/dine-in.

QR code
An example QR code

You could also include a QR code which customers scan from their phone. The QR code links directly to your order page, so gives access without having to type in URLs.

You can easily generate a QR code using QR Code Monkey.

The easy way to take food and drink orders from the table

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering cropped

As you can see, it's surprisingly easy to set up your own online food ordering system so that customers can use their cellphone to send food orders straight to the kitchen. It promotes social distancing by minimizing direct contact between waiting staff and hungry customers.

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin is perfect for creating a one-page food order form.

  • Quick 10-minute setup
  • Flexible display options
  • Works on any mobile or tablet
  • 30-day money back guarantee

Sell food online from home

By the end of this article, you’ll walk away knowing exactly how to sell food online from home.

It’s no secret that the online food industry is booming. You might be thinking of starting your own food business to sell food online from home. For this, you’ll need a website that lets customers browse your menu and place their orders.

If you’re in a similar situation, then don’t worry! This in-depth guide will teach you how to sell food online from home in a few simple steps:

  • Set up your small startup food business website using WordPress and WooCommerce.
  • Use the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin to sell food online.
  • Offer your customers home delivery options.

And the best part? We’ll show you step-by-step how to sell food online from home. It’s incredibly quick and easy and there is absolutely no technical knowledge required to follow this tutorial. This means that you can set everything up and start selling food online from home today!

Introducing WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy for small food businesses and mom and pop style shops to start selling food online from home. The plugin lets you create an intuitive, front-end food order system complete with a food order form. It’s the easiest way to start selling food online from home.

Products from two categories restaurant ordering

You can add simple food products or add variations and extra product options to your food ordering system. For example, if you sell pizzas, you might want to give customers the option to select the size or extra toppings. You can also add text boxes for dietary requirements or allergens, or for letting customers add notes like Hold the pickles!.

In addition to this, you can add a sidebar to your food ordering page that contains information about the customer’s cart. This is a great way to give patrons and customers a quick overview of their order before they proceed to the checkout page.

Selling food online from home

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin is designed to help small food businesses deliver an exceptional user experience through their website and better manage customer orders in WooCommerce.

How to sell food online from home using WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering

Here, we’ll walk you through a step-by-step tutorial on how to sell food online from home. You might also like to sign up to our free online course, which has even more advice and tips:

Step #1: Set up WordPress and WooCommerce

If you’re just getting started then chances are you don’t already have a website set up. So, the first step is to choose a hosting provider for your food business website. Our best advice is to go with Kinsta, but you can use any hosting provider.

Next, you’ll need to install WordPress and WooCommerce (an e-commerce platform to set up your online store) on your website. If you choose to go with Kinsta, the team will install the WordPress content management system for you. However, if you’d like to take the DIY approach, we recommend checking out these helpful articles:

Once you’ve set up your basic WooCommerce-powered food business website, you can set up your basic food ordering website by installing a WordPress theme. And once your basic website is set up, come back to this tutorial for details on how to start selling food online from home.

Step #2: Add food items as WooCommerce products

Now that your WordPress site is set up, it’s time to add food items to it as WooCommerce products. To do this, head over to Products → All Products from the WordPress admin panel and click the Add New button.

Next, enter the following information for each food item you want to sell through your food business website:

Add food items as WooCommerce products
  • Name of the food item
  • A product image
  • Brief description
  • Product categories (e.g. desserts, cupcakes, snack bars, sweets)
  • Price

Click the Publish button to proceed. Add all of the food items to your food website in the same way. You can also add food variations and extra options.

Step #3: Get the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin

Get the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin and install and activate it on your WordPress website. You’ll receive the plugin’s license key in an order confirmation email.

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering license key

From the WordPress dashboard, head over to WooCommerce Settings Restaurant and enter the license key in the License key field. Click the Save changes button at the bottom of the screen to continue.

Once you activate the license key, the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin automatically creates a Restaurant Order page for you. You can access this by going to Pages All Pages from the WordPress dashboard.

If you preview the page on the front-end of your website, it should look something like this:

One-page food order form

Next, we’ll show you how you can configure the plugin’s settings to customize the food ordering page.

Step #4: Configure the plugin’s settings

To configure the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin’s settings, head over to WooCommerce Settings Restaurant from the admin area.

Food order page

The Restaurant order page dropdown lets you choose the page to display the food order form on.

Food order page settings

You can leave it as is or select a new page if required. The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin adds the shortcode [restaurant_ordering] to whichever page you select.

Categories

By default, the food ordering plugin lists products from all of your product categories on the food ordering form. You can use the Categories option to add the product categories you’d like to include in your food order form.

You can organize different types of food under a separate category. If you have multiple product categories selected, you can drag and drop them to change the order in which they’re listed on the front-end.

The Order form options setting lets you select the information you’d like to display in your food order forms. You can choose to display:

  • Category titles
  • Category descriptions
  • Product images
  • Product descriptions
  • Buy button

Order form options

If you’re selling products from a single category (e.g. only Cakes), you can untick the checkbox next to the Show category titles and Show category descriptions option.

Food order form display options

However, if you’re selling products from multiple product categories, we recommend leaving all of the checkboxes ticked.

Number of columns

The Number of columns option lets you choose how many columns to display food items in on the front-end. This is particularly useful for online food businesses that sell a variety of food items.

Number of columns settings

It’s also a great way to enhance the look and feel of your food order form and make it more like a real-world menu.

Order method

We recommend going with the Quick order method option to let customers quickly add food items to their cart and place their order.

Order method settings

If you’re selling food items with variations or extra product options, the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin will automatically display a lightbox to let customers select options.

Lightbox options

Ideally, you want to display both the product image and full product description in the lightbox. We recommend leaving both checkboxes ticked.

Step #5: Preview the food ordering system

Once you’ve configured the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin’s settings, you can preview the food ordering system on the front-end. It should look something like this:

Food order form to sell food online from home

To further enhance the customer’s shopping experience, we’ve added the WooCommerce cart widget to the sidebar. This way, customers can preview their orders before proceeding to the checkout page.

Step #6: Set up home delivery options (optional)

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin lets you list products in a quick, one-page food ordering form. The rest of the checkout process is provided by WooCommerce. This means that you can use WooCommerce’s built-in options to let customers order food for home delivery.

We recommend setting up WooCommerce delivery zones to offer food delivery options within a specific area only. This is much easier to manage (especially when you’re just getting started) than offering country-wide shipping options.

To take things further, you can set up a free delivery area and multiple paid delivery areas. All of this is possible with WooCommerce Shipping Zones.

Selling food gifts

Lots of small food businesses sell foods that are also perfect as gifts. Some examples of food gifts include chocolate brownies, food hampers, or gourmet marshmallows.

These are equally perfect for special occasions like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and birthdays as well as for situations where you’re looking for a gift that isn’t too personal, for example, for a coworker.

To sell food gifts through your small food business website, you can use the WooCommerce Opening Hours & Chosen Times plugin to allow customers to choose an exact delivery date. This helps them rest assured that the food gift arrives at the exact right time!

You can also use the Checkout Field Editor plugin to add a Gift message field to the WooCommerce checkout. To take things further, you can create any additional fields such as a checkbox to let customers mark the order as a gift so that you don’t include any price information with their order.

Bonus tips

As a new food business owner, there are many things you’ll need to think about before you can start selling food from home.

For example, it’s a good idea to check out your local legislation (e.g. the FDA) and cottage food laws to see whether you need to apply for a business license, food licensing, or a food hygiene certificate. Food safety and kitchen inspection laws vary from state to state. You should be able to find out most of this information through Google.

In addition, we recommend checking out shipping rules (e.g. labeling requirements) for perishable items. For example, let’s say you’re based in New York, United States, and want to accept cross-border orders. You might want to check to see if you’re allowed to send gourmet marshmallows to your patrons and customers in Toronto, Canada.

Sell food online from home in less than 30 minutes!

Selling food online from your home kitchen or commercial kitchen is a great way to launch a small business and generate income through food sales. All you have to do is set up your small food business website, create a menu, and start accepting orders!

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin can help you sell food online from home by creating a one-page food order form. You can then promote your food store on social media to spread the word. We encourage you to try it out for yourself!

You get a:

  • Plug-and-play setup for the plugin.
  • In-depth documentation (absolutely no way to get it wrong).
  • Technical support is available if you need any help.
  • 30-day money-back guarantee. Love it or get a full refund, 0 risk!

Get the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin today to start selling food online!

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering, the ultimate food order system for WordPress, is now available. We’ve built it during the coronavirus lockdown to help restaurants make the switch to taking orders online. Keep reading to discover how the plugin can help your restaurant, and where to get it.

Across the world, the COVID-19 pandemic forced thousands of restaurants and food outlets to close their doors. Suddenly, they were only allowed to sell takeaway food or offer home delivery. Dining in and ordering at the table, bar or counter were no longer an option.

Since then, restaurants have been trying to adapt to a new way of life. To meet social distancing guidelines, tables must be spaced further apart, and fewer customers can receive table service. This has a big impact on restaurants’ profit margins, as it reduces capacity while running costs remain the same.

But the good news is that there is a way to stay profitable. The solution is to set up online ordering for your restaurant so that customers can order food remotely for home delivery and/or collection.

Why we built a WooCommerce restaurant plugin

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering cropped

Ever since we launched our WooCommerce Product Table plugin in 2016, it has been hugely popular with restaurants wanting to sell food online. It lists restaurant foods in a space-saving table layout, with quick ‘add to cart’ boxes that are ideal for ordering food. However, we didn't design it specifically for selling food, and it has many features that restaurants don’t need.

We’ve looked at how restaurants use WooCommerce Product Table to sell food online, and have used this information to design the perfect WooCommerce restaurant plugin. The result is WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering, released today!

We designed WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering specifically for restaurants. It has all the features you need, with no unnecessary complexity. As a result, it loads ultra fast and is incredibly easy to set up.

WooCommerce restaurant plugin

As well as being the best WooCommerce restaurant plugin on the market, it's much better than any other way of selling food online:

  • Unlike building a bespoke system, it's quick to set up and you don't need to hire a developer.
  • Unlike using third party food ordering systems such as Deliveroo or Uber Eats, you keep 100% of your profits while owning your data and staying in control.

How it works

Before you install WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering, you should have a WordPress website with WooCommerce installed. Add the foods from your restaurant menu as products (either as simple products, or products with variations or add-on option fields). Structure your menu into product categories, e.g. Starters, Mains, and Desserts.

When you install the WooCommerce restaurant plugin, it automatically creates a 'Restaurant Ordering' page which lists all your foods, divided by category:

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering WordPress plugin

You can either start taking restaurant orders online straight away, or you can customize your food order forms on the plugins settings page. For example, you can choose which food information to display, re-order the categories, and change the layout.

Add your opening hours so that customers can only order food while you're open.

The WooCommerce restaurant plugin also comes with a shortcode for listing foods in other locations on your website. This is useful if you want to list different categories on different pages or tabs.

What about delivery and collection?

As a WooCommerce restaurant plugin, WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering works with the delivery options that are built into WooCommerce itself. These make it easy to create delivery areas and add delivery and collection options, with or without costs.

The plugin is also designed to work with the WooCommerce Delivery Slots plugin. This is ideal if you want customers to be able to pick an exact time slot for home delivery or collection.

Start taking food orders online today!

We hope the new WooCommerce restaurant plugin helps restaurants and other food businesses to connect with their customers online.

  • Quick plug-and-play setup.
  • Full documentation, with guidance on every aspect of selling food online.
  • FREE video tutorial showing you every step (there's absolutely no way to get it wrong!).
  • Technical support is available if you need any help.
  • 30 day money back guarantee. Love it or get a full refund, zero risk.

The possibility for virtual eateries or "ghost kitchens" has dramatically grown as internet usage has increased. Fortunately, you can set up and run a virtual restaurant in WordPress quickly and easily.

In this complete guide, you will learn how to build your own virtual restaurant website, which you will own 100%. This will save you lots of money compared to using a hosted restaurant ordering system such as Uber Eats, Grubhub, or DoorDash.

We’ll show you how to set up a virtual restaurant in WordPress using the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin. It only takes 10 minutes and by the time you're done, your virtual restaurant site will look something like this:

WooCommerce restaurant plugin

What is a virtual restaurant?

Most people place an emphasis on both quality and convenience. These are services that a virtual restaurant can easily offer if it is set up on the appropriate principles and adheres to the suggested procedures for serving its customers. At times, this has been the only way to keep their business running and continue trading.

A virtual restaurant (also called a ghost kitchen, ghost restaurant, or cloud kitchen) is a restaurant that offers delivery options only. Generally speaking, virtual restaurant services are facilitated through web apps and third-party delivery companies like the Postmates food delivery app. However, you can also create a virtual restaurant website with WordPress and WooCommerce.

This restaurant concept is hugely popular in most large cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Kitchen United, for example, is a popular virtual kitchen and restaurant brand.

This foodservice business model allows restaurateurs to cut down on traditional expenses that come with offering a dine-in experience. In fact, adapting the virtual restaurant or ghost kitchen approach helped several restaurant businesses stay operational during the global coronavirus crisis. Now it's here to stay.

How does a virtual restaurant work?

Customers can go to the restaurant’s website to view menus and place their orders online. Once a customer places their order, the virtual restaurant kitchen is immediately notified, and kitchen staff begins preparing the order.

The establishment then delivers the food directly to the customer or uses a third-party food delivery service to deliver the meal to the customer’s location. Some virtual restaurants offer both online payment options and cash on delivery. Once the food is delivered, patrons can enjoy it in their own dining room.

Benefits of online-only restaurants

As compared to the traditional restaurant business model, virtual restaurants have their own set of benefits.

For starters, restaurant owners can mitigate the costs associated with finding an ample restaurant space with room for dining in and instead use that budget to create a kitchen that focuses on improving food preparation processes. Additionally, you can also opt for a shared kitchen setup.

In addition to this, virtual restaurant owners can change their menu items whenever they’d like. This is especially useful if a particular ingredient becomes unavailable or is temporarily inaccessible. This also means that you can experiment with your menu and swap out dishes that aren’t popular with your customer base.

Not to mention, studies indicate that customers favor home-delivery dining options, which makes a strong case for setting up a virtual restaurant.

Types of food that sell best from virtual restaurants

One of the key benefits of running a virtual restaurant is that you can use the wealth of dynamic customer data available to you to your advantage. For example, you might search for the different types of foods and meals that sell best from virtual restaurants and pizzerias in your area on Google.

Best takeout food

Here are some popular examples:

  • Chinese and Japanese food – sushi, noodles, spring rolls
  • Indian food – BBQ, chicken tikka masala, naan
  • Mexican food – tacos, burritos, nachos, taco salad
  • Pizza – make your own pizza with different toppings and crust sizes
  • Mediterranean food – shawarmas and Greek salad
  • Fast-casual food – burgers, sliders, wraps, fried chicken, and fries

How to set up and run a virtual restaurant

The first thing you need to do is set up an attractive, easy-to-use website for your virtual restaurant complete with an order form and delivery slots.

For this, we recommend using WordPress and WooCommerce, so you have full ownership of your virtual restaurant website. This isn’t possible with a hosted solution like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and Just Eat.

If you don’t already have a WordPress website, you’ll need to choose a hosting company to make your website available to patrons. We recommend going with a reliable web hosting provider like Kinsta.

Once that’s done, we’ll show you how to set up a virtual restaurant using the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering and WooCommerce Delivery Slots plugins. Together, these fantastic plugins provide everything you need to build a WooCommerce virtual restaurant.

Here’s a complete video tutorial you can follow:

Step #1: Create your virtual restaurant website

If you don’t already have a WordPress website set up, you’ll need to create one on a hosting account. We recommend Kinsta as they’re a managed WordPress host that’s perfect for running a website for your virtual restaurant.

The best part is that you can install WordPress directly from your Kinsta account. Once you’ve entered your domain name, location, and site title, you can configure your login credentials and install WooCommerce to enable e-commerce features.

The WooCommerce Setup Wizard is incredibly intuitive and walks you through the process of setting up e-commerce features for your virtual restaurant website. Since you’ll be offering food delivery options, it’s important to configure your shipping zones and delivery areas carefully.

If you deliver food to a single area and charge the same delivery costs then you only need to create one shipping zone. However, if you’re going to deliver food to multiple areas and charge different costs depending on the area, you’ll need to create multiple shipping zones.

WooCommerce lets you choose from three different delivery options including flat rate, free shipping, and local pickup.

Later, I'll also show you how to add delivery slots and opening hours for your virtual restaurant.

Step #2: Add a food menu

The next step is to add each food item as an individual WooCommerce product. To keep things organized, start by creating different categories for your menu items similar to how you’d do it on a paper menu. For example, your categories might be Starters, Main Courses, and Desserts.

Once that’s done, head over to Products → Add New from the WordPress admin panel to add each food as a product. At the bare minimum, you should enter a title, brief description, image, and price of the food item. Select the appropriate category for the food item. Consider adding nutritional information and allergens to the product description.

If you’re thinking of selling make your own pizzas or need a way to offer a choice of options for a dish, you’ll need to create a variable product or add-on fields. Variations let customers choose from a dropdown, whereas add-ons are great for selling optional extras such as pizza toppings or sandwich fillings.

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin integration
Customers can choose variations and add-ons from a lightbox

Step #3: Create a food order form using WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering

To let customers place orders, you’ll need to create an order form using the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin. You’ll receive the plugin files and license key in an email.

  1. Install the plugin to your WordPress website and activate it.
  2. Next, head over to WooCommerce Settings Products Product table from the WordPress dashboard and activate the plugin license.
  3. Now, go through the different settings available with the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin to configure your food order form. This includes adding opening hours. You can ignore these if your virtual WooCommerce restaurant is open 24/7. But if you only want to accept orders while you're open, then this is a must.
WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin settings
Control your virtual restaurant order system on the plugin settings page

Finally, go to the list of Pages in the WordPress admin and find the page called 'Restaurant Ordering'. Rename this to whatever you like, e.g. 'Order Food Online'. This page lists all the food products that you added in step 2, divided by category:

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering WordPress plugin

Your main restaurant ordering page is created automatically

If you'd rather list different categories on different pages, then you can do that using the restaurant ordering shortcode.

WooCommerce resturant plugin flexible food order forms
Use the shortcode if you need different settings for each category

Add a cart

Most virtual restaurants display a cart on the food ordering page. This shows the items in your order and makes it easy to click through to the checkout.

The easiest way to do this is to add a sidebar to the restaurant ordering page. Most themes come with page templates that include a sidebar. You can then go to Appearance → Widgets and add the 'Cart' widget to the sidebar.

WooCommerce restaurant widget

If you don't want a sidebar and prefer to keep your page full-width, then you can add a floating popup cart using the WooCommerce Fast Cart plugin.

WooCommerce restaurant floating cart
Add a floating side cart with WooCommerce Fast Cart

Step #4: Set opening hours and delivery times

If you’re offering food delivery options at your virtual restaurant, you’ll need an easy way to manage customer expectations and delivery orders. You can do this with the WooCommerce Delivery Slots plugin.

Once you have the plugin installed and activated on your website, go to WooCommerce → Opening Hours to configure your opening hours, delivery dates and time slots. Here are some of the main features you’ll want to use for your virtual restaurant site:

  • Delivery dates and time slots – You can add delivery slots based on the way you choose to structure food deliveries.
  • Maximum number of deliveries per time slot – This option lets you better manage kitchen capacity by adding a limit to the number of delivery orders per slot.

Set up your virtual restaurant today

If you’re looking for ways to keep your restaurant running with minimal costs, consider setting up a virtual restaurant (or ghost restaurant) that serves solely as a delivery base or offers takeout. You can do this whether you have a physical restaurant or not. Virtual restaurants are hugely popular in the restaurant industry.

Start by installing the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress website. Next, add food items as individual products in WooCommerce. Finally, use the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering and WooCommerce Delivery Slots plugins to create a front-end order form with a table of available delivery time slots.

Ready to set up your virtual restaurant and grow your bottom line? Get WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering today!

WooCommerce restaurant ordering system for online takeaway delivery

Don't pay hefty commission fees to Uber Eats or Just Eat! Instead, learn how to create an online restaurant ordering system with WordPress.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many restaurants were forced to close their doors or switch to delivery and takeout orders only. This led to a surge in demand for online ordering systems, which allowed restaurants to continue to serve their customers while maintaining social distancing and other safety protocols. However, even as the pandemic comes to an end, the benefits of an online restaurant ordering system remain clear.

In this article, we'll explore why every restaurant should have an online ordering system and how to get started. From expanding your customer base to streamlining your operations, an online ordering system can help take your restaurant business to the next level. So, whether you're a small mom-and-pop eatery or a large restaurant chain, read on to discover how an online ordering system can benefit your business and how to implement one today.

It will look something like this:

WooCommerce restaurant plugin

We'll do it using WordPress, the world's leading open source content management system. This gives you full control over your food ordering system. Don't worry if you have never set up a website before. You don't need any technical know-how - I'll provide step-by-step written instructions, plus a video tutorial where you can watch me setting it all up.

What you'll need to set up restaurant online ordering

We'll build the online takeaway ordering system with some of the best tools available:

  • WordPress (free) The world's leading content management system. This gives you full control over the content of your website. You can create pages, add images and more - all without writing a single line of code.
  • WooCommerce (free) The world's most popular e-commerce platform. Adding WooCommerce converts your WordPress site into a fully featured restaurant e-commerce website. You can add products, set delivery areas and costs, take payment online, and more.
  • Kinsta (paid) All websites need to be made available on the website. Kinsta is our recommended web hosting company, and will keep your website online and running smoothly. (If you'd rather choose your own hosting company, that's fine - everything in this tutorial works with any web host.)
  • WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering (paid) An online restaurant ordering system works best when your menu is listed in a quick one-page food order form. You need the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin for that.

Why WordPress?

WooCommerce restaurant website ordering

There are many reasons why WordPress - used alongside the plugins I've mentioned - is the best restaurant online ordering platform:

  • Save money - If you use a hosted third party takeaway ordering system such as Uber Eats and Just Eat, you're charged a hefty percentage in commission from EVERY food oder. This adds up to many thousands of dollars before long. By hosting your own WordPress food delivery website, you pay a small amount in hosting and software costs. However, this is far less than hosted solutions, and the base software remains free forever.
  • You're in control - Unlike Uber Eats and Just Eat, you own your restaurant ordering platform. The solution described in this tutorial is an open source food ordering system, making it flexible and future-proof. You can tailor the design to suit your restaurant's branding, and you own your data - forever.
  • Fully featured - As the world's leading e-commerce platform, WooCommerce comes pre-built with nearly everything you need including online payment (either by PayPal, credit card, or cash on delivery), stock management, sales taxes, delivery costs, and more. If that's not enough, there are literally thousands of plugins available to add extra features.
  • Beginner-friendly - Creating an online ordering system for restaurants sounds scary, but it's really not! All the tools in this tutorial are ideal for beginners.

As you can see, it's the perfect way to set up electronic ordering for any restaurant. Next, I'll tell you how to create an online food ordering system.

Can I add food ordering to my existing restaurant website?

If you already have a WordPress restaurant website and simply want to add a food ordering system, that's fine. Just install the free WooCommerce plugin via Plugins → Add New and skip straight to section 2.

If your main website doesn't run on WordPress, then you need to set up a WordPress site for the food ordering system. You can easily link the two sites together so that customers can move between them. Or even better, switch your entire restaurant website to WordPress!

1. Set up web hosting and install WordPress

First, you need to create the basic website on a hosting account.

If you don't already have web hosting sorted out, then I highly recommend Kinsta. They're a managed WordPress host that makes it incredibly easy to create and maintain your restaurant website. Your food ordering system will be secure and quick to load - essential when you're selling online.

If you wish to use a different hosting company for your restaurant website, that's fine. Just use their documentation to create the basic website and install the free WordPress and WooCommerce plugins.

In your Kinsta account, click the 'Add site' button and fill in the information as required:

  • First, select 'Install WordPress'.
  • Enter the domain name that you plan to use for the website. If you haven't chosen one yet, just leave this blank. You can set up your restaurant ordering website with Kinsta's temporary domain name, and I'll tell you how to get a permanent website address in section 7.
  • Name of this site - this will appear in your list of sites on Kinsta.
  • Location - choose a location close to you. Your website will load fastest for visitors near to this.
  • WordPress site title - this will appear in the top right corner of your website (unless you choose to upload an image logo).
  • WordPress admin username, password and email - choose the information that you will use to log into the WordPress Dashboard where you will edit your restaurant website.
  • Finally, tick the boxes to install WooCommerce and Yoast SEO, but not multisite.

After that, wait a few minutes for the site to finish completing. You can then click on the 'Domains' tab in Kinsta and click on the link to the WordPress Dashboard.

Set up Kinsta

Now your basic website is set up, and it's time to add the automated restaurant ordering system!

Read on, or watch this video to see how to set everything up.

2. Add e-commerce to your restaurant website

Setup WooCommerce

Next, it's time to set up WooCommerce. This is the e-commerce part of your online restaurant ordering system and provides the shopping cart features. For example, the ability to add each item on your food menu as products; take payment online; and charge for shipping and tax.

Click on the 'Plugins' link on the left hand side of the WordPress admin. Find the 'WooCommerce' plugin and click 'Activate'.

Next, you'll be taken into the WooCommerce Setup Wizard. Follow the onscreen instructions to set up the essential parts of your e-commerce facility. Here are some tips on which settings to choose for an online restaurant ordering system?

    • Storefront or Delicio theme - a WordPress theme controls the design and styling of your website, i.e. how it looks. You can use any WordPress theme that supports WooCommerce. If you want to get up and running as quickly as possible and will be happy with a clean, modern and simple design, then I recommend ticking the box to install the Storefront theme. This free WordPress theme is easy to use and will keep your food ordering website lightweight and easy to maintain. Alternatively, the Delicio restaurant theme is purpose-built for restaurants and designed to work with WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering (view demo).
  • Payment methods - as a minimum, I recommend PayPal. Simply enter the email address you use to log into PayPal, and you can take payments online! If you want to take credit card payments without PayPal, then set up a Stripe account and enable the Stripe payment option. For takeaway food ordering, you might also want to enable the 'Cash on delivery' option.
  • Shipping options - if you'll be charging for shipping, then enable the Flat Rate shipping and add a shipping cost. Don't spend too long on this, because we'll configure this in more detail in step 6, below.

Once you're finished, click the button to return to the WordPress Dashboard.

3. Add your food menu

The next step is to each food from your paper menu as a WooCommerce product. We'll do this in 2 stages:

3a. Create categories for your online restaurant menu

You can list the foods in each category separately on your food order form. Most restaurants create a category for each section of their paper menu, for example Starters, Main Courses, Desserts, Kids, Side Dishes, Drinks, etc.

Go to Products → Categories and create as many categories as you like.

Add WooCommerce product category

3b. Add your foods as WooCommerce products

Next, it's time to add each food as a product. Go to Products → Add New and complete the information on the Add New Product screen:

Add restaurant menu items as WooCommerce products

Some tips:

  • Keep it as simple as possible. The title and price are compulsory, and everything else is optional. I also recommend selecting a category so that you can structure your restaurant ordering system logically. You can add an image, short and long description if you wish to display these in your online food order form.
  • You can the product description fields to record useful information about your foods. This is useful for displaying health or dietary information such as 'Gluten Free', 'Healthy', 'Dairy Free', 'Contains Nuts', 'Vegan' or 'Vegetarian'.
  • If you offer a choice of options for a dish - for example, small and large options for a pizza - then you can do this with product variations:
    1. Instead of 'Simple product' (the default), select 'Variable product' from the dropdown at the top of the 'Product Data' section.
    2. Now click onto the 'Variations' tab. Open the 'Add variation' dropdown, select 'Create variations from all attributes', and click Ok (ignore the warning that appears). This will create a variation for each combination of attributes that you created in the previous step.
    3. Open up each variation and add a price.
  • Variations appear in a lightbox when someone clicks on a food item in the online food order form. If you'd rather set a base price for each dish and let customers select one or more extras, then you should add these with the Product Options plugin instead. This lets you add checkboxes to your food order form. For example, if you offer extra sauces or pizza toppings then customers can tick as many as they like. Each option will add to the price of the pizza.
WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering Variations & Add-Ons lightbox
This online pizza order form uses a combination of product variations and add-ons to offer a range of options.

Repeat the process until you've finished adding all your foods as products.

Create variations

4. Create a food ordering page with WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering cropped

Now comes the exciting bit! It's time to see your online restaurant ordering system come to life on the front end of your food delivery website. We'll need the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin for that, so get it now:

4a. Set up WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering

When you buy WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering, you'll receive an email containing a download link and license key.

  1. Download the zip file, then go to Plugins → Add New in the WordPress admin.
  2. Upload the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering zip file and activate it.
  3. Click on the 'Settings' link next to the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin in your list of plugins.
  4. Enter your license key and activate it.
  5. Now go through the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering settings and configure your food order forms. You can set it up however you like, including choosing the number of columns and the information to include. Also add your restaurant opening hours. That way, people will only be able to order while you're open.
  6. When you've finished, save your changes.

4b. View your restaurant ordering page

Now click on the 'Pages' link on the left of the WordPress admin, and find a new page called 'Restaurant Ordering'. (You can rename it to anything you like.)

View the page, and you will see a beautiful list of your food menu, divided by category:

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin
The plugin automatically creates a food ordering page

The exact styling depends on your WordPress theme, so the food order forms will fit perfectly with the rest of your site.

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin also comes with a shortcode that you can use to list specific categories in different locations on your site. That way, each order form can be different if you want it to be!

Flexible food order form WooCommerce plugin

4c. Structure your restaurant website

Now you've finished creating the food order form, it's time to incorporate it into the overall structure of the website. This helps customers to find it easily. There are two ways to do this:

  • Set it as the homepage - In the WordPress admin, go to Settings → Reading and select the food ordering page as the homepage.
  • Add it to the website menu - If you don't want to use the food ordering page as your homepage, that's fine. Instead, go to Appearance → Menus and create a navigation menu for your website. Add all the pages that you wish to appear in the menu, such as the food order form, cart, and any other pages you've created. Tick the appropriate box at the bottom of the page to set it as your primary menu. These links will appear across the top of the screen, so that visitors can find their way around easily.
Add to the website menu

5. Set up shipping zones and restaurant delivery areas

When we did the WooCommerce Setup Wizard earlier, we added some basic shipping settings. Let's build on these next, so that people can only order food for delivery within the correct area.

If you just deliver to a single area, and will charge the same delivery cost to each one, then you only need one shipping zone. If you want to change the delivery cost depending on the area, then you need multiple shipping zones.

  1. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping.
  2. Click 'Add Shipping Zone'.
  3. Add a 'Zone Name' and select your country under 'Zone regions', then click the 'Limit to specific ZIP/postcodes'.
  4. Now enter the postcodes or zip codes for this delivery area.
  5. Next, click 'Add shipping method' and add one or more delivery options for this zone. These will appear on the checkout page. The choices are:
    • Flat rate - Charge a fixed delivery fee for each order,
    • Free shipping - Offer free shipping. If you like, then you can set a minimum order value before free shipping becomes available.
    • Local pickup - Allow customers to collect their food order from your restaurant.
  6. Repeat these steps for each shipping zone.

Tip: As well as restricting the shipping area on the checkout page, avoid disappointing your users by clearly stating your delivery area elsewhere on the site. For example, mention it on the food ordering page. 

6. Get a restaurant website address

Now, your restaurant ordering website is complete! The final step is to give it a proper website address/domain name, for example myrestaurant.com.

If you don't already own a domain name, then you can buy one from any domain name registrar, for example Namecheap or 123-Reg. Once you've done that, you can link to your website to your domain name as follows:

  1. Log into your web hosting account (e.g. at Kinsta), and find the IP address for your website. In Kinsta, this is on the 'Info' tab - hover over 'Site IP address' and click 'Copy'.
    Kinsta IP address
  2. Now log into your domain name registrar, and find the Advanced DNS settings.
  3. Find the root A record (either indicated by a blank, an @ or *) and set it to the IP address where your website is located.
    Advanced DNS point domain name to website
  4. Back in your web hosting account (e.g. Kinsta), add the domain. The exact process depends on your host, and in Kinsta this is on the 'Domains' tab. Add the www and non-www versions of the domain.
    Add Kinsta domain
  5. Finally, wait a few hours and your website will go live on the domain! If you can get any problems, ask your web host for help.

7. Add a popup cart

WooCommerce restaurant floating cart

Restaurant customers expect to be able to place their orders really quickly, ideally from a single page. You can achieve this by using WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering alongside the WooCommerce Fast Cart plugin. It adds a popup cart and checkout to your food ordering page, making it quick and easy to complete the order.

8. Add delivery/collection times (optional)

All automated restaurant ordering systems need to manage their customers' expectations around delivery timescales. If you just want customers to receive their food orders as soon as they're ready, then you can ignore this step. Or if you'd like customers to be able to choose an exact delivery or time slot, then install the WooCommerce Delivery Slots plugin.

As well as adding delivery slots that reflect the way you structure your deliveries, you can set a maximum number of deliveries per slot. This helps to manage kitchen capacity by adding a limit of the number of orders per time slot.

9. Launch your finished food ordering website

Finally, it's time to go live and start taking food orders online. Follow the steps in our go-live checklist, and start promoting your new restaurant online system to the public!

When you receive an order, you'll receive an email so that you can start preparing the food and get it to the delivery driver. If you want to automate this, there are various WooCommerce SMS notification and WooCommerce cloud printing plugins that you can use to automatically send new food orders to the kitchen.

Create your own restaurant ordering system

Online restaurant order form

As you can see, it's surprisingly easy to create a restaurant ordering system. By building your own food ordering website, you get full control and ownership - and it costs a fraction of the price of third party platforms such as Uber Eats.

To get started, you'll need:

Follow the steps in this tutorial to set everything up, and start accepting online food delivery orders today.

Uber Eats is certainly a convenient way for restaurants to offer online delivery... but it also charges 20-30% of every order! In this post, you'll learn how to get the best of both worlds by using WordPress and WooCommerce to create your own restaurant ordering system to act as an Uber Eats alternative (or a Just Eat alternative, Gloriafood alternative, Deliveroo alternative, GrubHub alternative... it's up to you!).

The techniques in this article will let you create a seamless restaurant ordering system that you 100% own yourself. It will be user-friendly and work on any device (even smartphones), but you can cut out those pesky middlemen and stop letting your already thin margins get eaten up by commissions. Instead, your entire system can cost as little as ~$34 per month no matter how many orders you get.

Here's an example of what you'll be able to build without requiring any special technical knowledge:

WooCommerce restaurant plugin

Online food order system powered by the WooCommerce Product Table plugin instead of Uber Eats

Your customers will be able to browse your entire menu and order food for delivery or for takeout.

Ready to build your own Uber Eats alternative with WordPress and WooCommerce? Let's dig in…

Why WordPress + WooCommerce make a great restaurant ordering system

If you're not familiar with WordPress and WooCommerce, here's a quick introduction:

WordPress is 100% free, open-source software that's by far the most popular way to make a website. According to W3Techs, WordPress powers over a third of all websites.

WooCommerce is a free extension for WordPress that adds full-service eCommerce features to WordPress. WooCommerce is the most popular way to make an eCommerce store.

While you won't be using WooCommerce to create a "traditional" eCommerce store, all of the features that it adds are also what you need to create your own Uber Eats alternative for free online ordering. You can also use other extensions to customize it to meet your restaurant's needs.

The important thing about this combination is that you 100% own everything. As a restaurant owner, you're not beholden to someone else's audience and you won't have to pay any commissions.

You can run your own promotions, grow your own email and marketing lists...you get the idea - it's yours.

Additionally, your online ordering platform will work on any device - laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.

While the biggest benefit is avoiding those 20-30% commissions that other online ordering software charges, there's also a ton of value in owning your own platform.

For example, this New York Times article does a great job illustrating how Grubhub and other delivery companies can cannibalize existing local restaurants' own delivery business - so an order that would've been commission-free in the past suddenly comes with a commission.

What you need to use WordPress as an Uber Eats alternative

To create your own restaurant ordering system and Uber Eats alternative with WordPress, you won't need any technical knowledge, but you will need a few tools to help you get the job done:

  • Hosting + Domain Name - this is what powers your Uber Eats alternative. (We recommend Kinsta hosting.)
  • WordPress - the free open-source software that powers 34%+ of all the websites on the Internet.
  • WooCommerce - the free open-source eCommerce extension that's the most popular way to create an eCommerce store.
  • WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering - an easy-to-use plugin that extends WooCommerce to create a food menu and restaurant ordering system.

We'll also mention some other optional extensions that you might want to use to enhance your food ordering website.

How much does an Uber Eats Alternative cost?

Your online ordering system will not be free, but the important thing to remember is that it's a flat cost. Whether you have 100 orders or 500 orders, you're never going to pay any more.

Here's the bare minimum cost:

  • Hosting - ~$300 year (paid annually)
  • Domain name - ~$10 per year
  • WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering - $99 per year

So at the very low end, you can get by for ~$400 per year, or just ~$38 per month. Compared to Uber Eats' 20-30% service fee, that's incredibly cheap for your entire online food ordering system!

What about mobile ordering apps? Do you need a mobile app?

The restaurant ordering system that you'll build in this tutorial is 100% responsive. Essentially, that term means that your Uber Eats alternative will automatically adapt based on each visitor's device and allow for mobile ordering.

So whether your visitors are on their smartphone, tablet, desktop, or other mobile device, your restaurant ordering system will still work great. And it also means your visitors won't have to install yet another food delivery app just to order from your restaurant.

How to create your own Uber Eats alternative: Step-by-Step

In this video, watch Sam from Barn2 create a food ordering system in just 25 minutes. There are written instructions below, or you can sign up to our free e-course for even more advice and tips.

 

1. Purchase hosting/domain and install WordPress/WooCommerce

To power your restaurant ordering system and the WordPress software, you need web hosting and a domain name.

For web hosting, we recommend Kinsta, which offers affordable managed WordPress/WooCommerce hosting.

If you're only hosting a restaurant ordering system for a single restaurant, you should be fine with the cheapest Starter plan, which will cost you just $30 per month.

You'll also need a domain name, which you probably just want to make your restaurant name. Search for an easy-to-remember domain name that closely fits the name of your restaurant, such as myrestaurant.com. You can purchase your domain name from a domain registrar like Namecheap or Google Domains and follow Kinsta's instructions to point your domain name to your new Kinsta hosting.

Once you create your hosting account, Kinsta will help you automatically install both WordPress and WooCommerce to help you get up and running.

Once you've done that, you can log in to your WordPress dashboard by going to yoursite.com/wp-admin.

To control how the basic design of your site looks, we recommend that you use a WooCommerce restaurant in theme like Delicio.

Delicio theme uses Woocommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin by Barn2
The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin with the Delicio theme

2. Run WooCommerce setup wizard

Once you log in to WordPress for the first time, you should see a prompt to run the WooCommerce setup wizard, which helps you configure the basics for your online ordering system:

WooCOmmerce wizard

If you want to accept payments for online orders via credit card, you can set up a payment method like Stripe, PayPal, or Amazon Payments in the Payment tab. But if you want to handle payments in person, you can just choose Cash on delivery.

If you want to charge for delivery, you can add a flat-rate or percentage charge in the Shipping tab. We'll talk more about shipping in a second.

You don't need to install the recommended plugins - so feel free to skip those steps.

3. Add food menu items as WooCommerce products

To add your individual menu items, you'll use separate WooCommerce products for each menu item.

To get started, go to Products → Add New. There, you'll want to:

  • Enter the title of the dish.
  • Add a short description (optional). You can describe the dish here, and also add information such as calorie count, "Vegan" or "Gluten-free".
  • Upload an image to use on the menu page (optional).
  • Choose categories to organize menu items (optional). For example, a category might be "Sandwiches" or "Desserts".
Add food menu details

Then, find the Product data box and add basic details like price:

Product data box

For a simple dish, this might be all you need. But you'll also probably have menu items where people can customize the dish, like choosing the size and toppings of a pizza.

If that's the case, you can use either product variations or product add-ons:

  • Variation - use variations when a customer can only choose one option, like the size of a pizza. Choose Variable product from the Product data drop-down to set these up.
  • Add-on - use extra product option fields when a customer can choose multiple options, like the toppings on a pizza. You'll need the Product Options plugin to set these up.
WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering Variations & Add-Ons lightbox

For example, here's what it looks like to create a burger where people can choose between beef, chicken, or veggie, with each option getting a different price. For this situation, you would want to use variations:

A variable food menu item

Make sure to Publish your product. Then, repeat the process for all the menu items that you want to include in your online restaurant ordering system.

4. Restrict shipping areas

While an eCommerce store might ship nationwide or globally, your restaurant probably only delivers to a few specific zip codes.

To set this up, you can use WooCommerce's built-in shipping zones feature:

  1. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping.
  2. Click Add shipping zone.
  3. In the shipping zone interface, click the link to Limit to specific ZIP/postcodes
  4. Enter the postcodes that your restaurant delivers to
Create shipping zone

As long as you don't add any other methods, shoppers will only be able to ship to one of those zip codes.

You can also opt to charge a delivery fee or offer free delivery according to your preferences.

If you want to let visitors check if you deliver to their area, you can use the WooCommerce Delivery Area Pro plugin to add a "Check Delivery" feature.

5. Create your front-end restaurant ordering system

Once you've added all your menu items, you're ready to create the front-end ordering menu for your Uber Eats alternative.

To do this, you'll use the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin, which lets you list all of your menu items in a convenient food order form:

Once you install and activate the plugin, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Restaurant. Activate your license key, and customize the content and layout of your food order forms. Add your opening hours too.

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin settings
Control your food ordering system on the settings page

Once you've configured the plugin, find the page called 'Restaurant Ordering' from the Pages section of the WordPress admin. The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin has created this for you automatically. Rename it to whatever you like. View the page to see your foods listed in a neat order form, divided by category. This is the online menu for your Uber Eats alternative:

WooCommerce restaurant plugin with opening hours

Tip: Add a cart to the food ordering page by selecting a page layout that has a sidebar, going to Appearance → Widgets, and adding the 'Cart' widget. 

You can also create additional food order forms using the restaurant ordering shortcode. This lets you create more complex layouts, such as displaying each category within a different tab or toggle. You can also list different foods on different pages.

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering tabbed layout
An example of a food order form in a tabbed layout

6. Set up backend processes for order notifications

By default, WooCommerce will send real-time email notifications when a new takeout or delivery order comes in.

However, because of the importance of getting started on orders right away, you might prefer a different method that's more attention-grabbing so you can ensure fast delivery. Here are some good options:

    • Official WooCommerce apps - WooCommerce has free apps for iOS and Android that can send push notifications for new orders. If you use an iPad or other tablet for your POS, you can install the app directly on your restaurant POS system.
    • WooSMS - receive text messages when new orders come in. It also lets you send text messages to customers to let them know the status of their order (like when your delivery person is on the way).
    • WooCommerce Automatic Order Printing - lets you automatically print orders as they come in.
    • YITH Desktop Notifications for WooCommerce - get desktop notifications for new orders. This is great if you use a computer as your restaurant point of sale (POS) system.

7. Enhance your restaurant ordering system (delivery slots, popup cart, etc.)

WooCommerce restaurant floating cart
Use WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering with Fast Cart for quicker ordering.

At this point, your WooCommerce food ordering system is all set up to function as an Uber Eats alternative. However, there are a few other tweaks you might want to make depending on your business.

  1. Add a popup cart and checkoutWooCommerce Restaurant Ordering is designed to work with the WooCommerce Fast Cart plugin so that customers can complete their order from a popup cart and checkout, directly on the food ordering page.
  2. Add restaurant opening times and delivery slotsWant to allow customers to choose an exact delivery time, or and restrict the number of deliveries within each time slot. You can do this with the WooCommerce Delivery Slots plugin. Customers can choose an available delivery slot, ensuring that your delivery drivers can cope with the number of food orders.
  3. Manage your delivery driversUse the free Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce plugin to avoid the manual work of managing your local delivery drivers.
  4. Add a minimum order valueLots of restaurant menu websites only want to take online orders above a certain value. Set minimum order rules with the WooCommerce Quantity Manager plugin.
  5. Offer special deals To run promotions, like buy one get one free, you can use the WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing plugin.
  6. Accept takeaway ordersIf you want to let shoppers pick up their orders (rather than delivering them), you can create a "Local pickup" shipping option for takeout.
  7. Accept tipsIf you want to accept tips, you can use the WooCommerce Donation Or Tip On Cart And Checkout plugin.

Get started with your Uber Eats alternative

If you're looking for a more flexible, cheaper Uber Eats alternative, creating your own WooCommerce food delivery platform cuts out the middlemen and gives you full ownership of your online platform. This approach also makes a great Just Eat alternative, Deliveroo alternative, Grubhub alternative, DoorDash alternative, PostMates alternative, Caviar alternative, etc.

It only takes slightly longer to set up your own food delivery service platform, but the benefits are permanent. Not only can you stop giving up 20-30% of your orders as commission to Uber Eats, but you'll also be able to grow your own audience and build an evergreen marketing asset for your restaurant.

Choose your WordPress hosting, install WooCommerce and WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering, and create your Uber Eats alternative for online ordering today.

Do you have any questions about using a WooCommerce restaurant ordering system as an Uber Eats alternative? Leave a comment and we'll do our best to help.

Best WordPress restaurant themes

Looking for the perfect WordPress restaurant themes for your restaurant, bar, or cafe? For hungry people searching online, your website is going to be their first experience with your food, so you want it to be perfect.

To help you create that awesome online experience, we've collected 25+ of the best WordPress restaurant themes.

But before we dig into those themes, let's quickly run over the most important elements that a restaurant website needs in 2024 and beyond. This will help you to think about what you want and pick the right theme...

What do WordPress restaurant themes need in 2024?

To pick the best WordPress restaurant theme and give your food the attention it deserves, you'll want to pay attention to some specific aesthetic and technical considerations. This will help you choose a theme that you can customize to meet your needs and also that will give your visitors a great user experience:

  • HTML food menu - nowadays, most people (~72%) search for restaurants on their smartphones, so a slow-loading, hard-to-read PDF menu just isn't going to cut it. You want a theme with a quick-loading HTML menu that looks great on all devices.
  • Responsive design - beyond an HTML menu, you'll also just generally want to choose a theme that will look great on all devices. Again, this is because a lot of hungry people are searching for restaurants on their smartphones.
  • Location information - look for a theme that makes it easy to display your address and contact information. An integrated map tool can also be helpful.
  • Reservations - if you use a WordPress restaurant reservation plugin, make sure your theme can accommodate that. Or, you can always create your own reservation form.
  • Full-width homepage and parallax scrolling - these design elements make a great option for restaurant websites as they give you a chance to show off lots of pictures of your food.

WooCommerce online ordering

Some themes also include a WooCommerce integration to help you create an online food ordering system. However, a better approach for most situations is to create your own online ordering system using WooCommerce and WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering.

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering works with all WordPress restaurant themes and will help you create a convenient ordering system like this:

WooCommerce restaurant plugin

25+ best WordPress restaurant themes

Astra

WordPress restaurant theme Astra

Details

Astra is the world’s most popular WordPress theme (except for the Twenty Twenty series you get with the installation). Installed over 1.7 million times, with over 5,600 five star reviews, it’s a very flexible theme.

Astra comes with over 230 Starter Templates, several of which are designed for restaurants and other food businesses. Each is lightweight, fast, fully responsive and SEO-friendly. They are fully compatible with major drag and drop page builders too.

Astra is fully compatible with most WordPress plugins, so you could add an online store, downloadable menus, table booking and any feature you like.

Qi

Qode QI theme restaurant demos

Details | Demos

The Qi theme for Elementor is an excellent choice for creating restaurant websites. This theme is specifically designed to cater to the unique needs of restaurant websites, with a range of features and customization options that make it easy to create a professional and visually appealing website for your restaurant.

One of the standout features of the Qi theme is its selection of 16 pre-built restaurant demos, which provide a quick and easy way to create a stunning website for your restaurant. These demos are designed to showcase the various aspects of a restaurant website, including menus, food and drink options, events, and more. They are also fully customizable, so you can easily modify them to suit your specific needs.

Fully customizable

Alternatively, if you prefer to create your own design, the Qi theme for Elementor also provides a range of customization options that make it easy to create a unique and personalized website for your restaurant. With its drag and drop page builder, you can easily add and arrange elements on your website, such as images, text, and buttons, and customize them with a range of styling options. You can also take advantage of the theme's built-in design elements, such as sliders, galleries, and video backgrounds, to create a dynamic and engaging website.

Overall, the Qi theme for Elementor is the perfect choice for creating restaurant websites. Its selection of pre-built restaurant demos and customization options make it easy to create a professional and visually appealing website that showcases your restaurant's unique style and offerings.

Rosa 2

Rosa 2 WordPress restaurant theme

Details

Rosa 2 is the improved version of Rosa 1, the best-selling restaurant WordPress theme with more than 13,000 customers all over the world. It is also the first theme within this industry built on top of Gutenberg, the latest WordPress's editor. This means that the entire experience is far better: from how you create content to how you showcase it to your audience.

Rosa 2 comes with multiple hero areas that you can use to grab attention with ease with full-bleed images or videos and a smooth parallax scrolling effect. On top of that, you have access to a customization tool that helps you achieve visual coherence across your website due to the predefined color and font palettes.

Another feature that brings real value within this premium WordPress theme is the integration with WooCommerce, the popular plugin that helps you set up an online store. You can launch an online food ordering system to develop new revenue streams and keep your business up and running.

All in all, Rosa 2 fits well for various culinary businesses: bistros, tavernas, fine-dining venues, pizza houses, and more.

Grand

Grand

Details | Demo

Grand is a customizable WordPress recipe theme from ThemeGoods that lets you choose from a variety of different pre-built demo sites. Currently, it has 7+ different demo sites for everything from Asian to Italian food, with more demos on the way.

No matter which demo site you choose, you'll get a range of flexible food menu styles, complete with an option to add variations to menu items. For example, you can add different sizes for a pizza.

You can also accept reservations via a custom form or OpenTable integration, as well as create your own food delivery ordering system with the WooCommerce integration.

Korina

Korina

Details | Demo

Korina is a gorgeous WordPress restaurant theme with a bold full-screen slideshow at the top of the page that helps you showcase your food or restaurant aesthetic.

To show off your food, Korina comes with a built-in HTML menu management system that lets you add new menu items as their own custom post type (just like you'd create a blog post).

To make Korina your own, you'll get tons of header variations, unlimited color schemes, typography options (including Google Fonts), social media support, and more.

Resca

Resca

Details | Demo

Resca is a flexible WordPress restaurant theme from ThimPress that comes packed with features to help your restaurant business be successful.

With Resca, you'll get a built-in table booking system via your own form or OpenTable, a tabbed food menu interface, upcoming events list, and email opt-in form via Mailchimp.

Everything is responsive out of the box and Resca also comes bundled with the Slider Revolution plugin to help you create gorgeous slideshows. You'll also get a detailed theme options panel to customize your theme, cross-browser support, and a great-looking food blog layout.

ComeEat - Modern Elementor WordPress Theme for RestaurantsWordPress restaurant theme ComeEat

Details | Demo

Are you looking for an extraordinary modern restaurant web design? Then, go for ComeEat, a theme with present-day design and robust functionality.

With this theme, you’ll be able to uncover all the unique features of your place and dishes. Showcase a professional menu with appealing images of the dishes served at your place. You’re bound to enjoy the process of customizing your future website with content-intense JetElements widgets and Elementor builder. With JetMenu, you’re encouraged to create modern MegaMenu panels that enhance the usability of your site. JetThemeCore is yet another powerful plugin for beautifying your site’s pages.

While it doesn't come with a built-in restaurant order system, you can easily add one using our tutorial.

Arabusta - Coffee Shop WordPress ThemeWordPress coffee theme

Details | Demo

Do you want your coffee house/cafe website to look both fresh and delicate? Then, embrace this unparalleled WordPress design featuring amazing pastel backgrounds and conversion-optimized storytelling pages.

With this design, you get access to a large collection of premium Cherry and Jet plugins. For example, use TM Timeline and TM Event Calendar to inform users about the upcoming events. Contact Form 7 will help you stay in touch with your site’s guests. Demonstrate your mouth-watering photo gallery with the TM Photo Gallery plugin. This template is friendly in relation to the newbies in site creation. Thanks to the Elementor page builder, you’re more than welcome to completely avoid customizing the theme’s code.

Delicio

Delicio

Details | Demo

As the demo site headline above informs you, Delicio makes a great option for both restaurants and coffee shops.

It comes with built-in sections to help you highlight your food menu, team members, location (on Google Maps), contact form, testimonials, and more. You'll be able to customize exactly how all these elements are arranged using a simple drag-and-drop system.

Delicio also integrates with the free Restaurant Reservations plugin to let you accept bookings directly through your website. And if you want to accept online orders, it also integrates with WooCommerce and the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin.

Delicio theme uses Woocommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin by Barn2
The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin with the Delicio theme

Neve

Neve restaurant theme

Details | Demo

Neve is a lightweight, responsive WordPress theme that comes with a ton of demo sites for different uses, including dedicated demos to help you create a restaurant website or cafe website.

If you go with the restaurant demo, which is available for free, you'll be able to showcase your location on Google Maps, include a great-looking HTML restaurant menu, and accept reservations via a custom form.

If you value performance and page load times, this one is a good option.

Litmus - Creative Restaurant/Multipurpose WordPress ThemeLitmus WordPress restaurant theme

Details | Demo

Litmus is a multipurpose theme with an exceptionally powerful restaurant skin. With this theme, you get access to 3 ready-made website designs. One of them would be ideal for a creative agency/startup, the second suits for a restaurant, and the third is built for an e-store (clothes, accessories, etc.).

Litmus includes a large number of pre-built pages. With the Restaurant skin, you get such much-needed niche pages as Menu Archive, All Menu List, Menu Details, About Us, etc. Moreover, Litmus is very cool when it comes to customization. This theme includes King Composer (otherwise worth $119) and Revolution Slider. Finally, this theme also features Make a Reservation and Order forms.

This WordPress restaurant theme is fully compatible with WooCommerce. It's the perfect base for building the WooCommerce restaurant ordering system described in this tutorial.

Plantable - Organic Food/Vegetarian WordPress ThemeWordPress vegetarian restaurant theme

Details | Demo

On a lookout for the hottest theme for your vegetarian restaurant? You can’t miss on Plantables, one of the latest and most advanced themes for meat-free eateries.

The theme is mobile-friendly, cross-browser compatible and performance-optimized. Despite featuring hi-res imagery and rich media content, your website will load in less than 4 seconds, pleasing you with a low bounce rate. P

lantables brings you a number of ready-made forms, such as search, contact and subscription form, as well as the newsletter subscription box. What’s more, the theme incorporates MailChimp for managing the lists of your subscribers and keeping in touch with them.

Finally, to empower online booking of tables at your place, Plantables includes the handy online table reservation functionality. It doesn't come with a food ordering system, but you can quickly add this by installing the free WooCommerce plugin and following this tutorial.

Osteria

Osteria

Details | Demo

Osteria is another beautiful WordPress restaurant theme from Pixelgrade. It offers a lot of similarities to the Rosa theme above, just with a different aesthetic.

You'll still get a great-looking HTML restaurant menu system, along with options to feature specific menu items to draw attention to them. You can also integrate with WooCommerce to create an online ordering system and let visitors create reservations directly through your website.

And it's all wrapped up with an eye-catching parallax effect, lots of style options, SEO-friendly code, and fast page load speeds.

Dina

Dina

Details | Demo

Dina is a great theme for a restaurant, bar, or bistro.

It ships with a modern look that's built with the Elementor page builder plugin, which means you can customize all the demo content using a simple drag-and-drop system.

It includes a great-looking collapsible food menu system to showcase the different categories of your culinary creations. You can also accept reservations through a built-in form or OpenTable integration.

In total, Dina offers 7 different homepage demos for you to choose from, lots of styling options and Google Fonts support, 9 different food menu layouts, and an option to add a video to the background of your homepage.

Linguini

Linguini

Details | Demo

Linguini is a multipurpose WordPress restaurant theme that makes a great option for a restaurant, cafe, bistro, pub, winery, bar, or anything else related to food. It comes with 3 pre-built demo sites and you can pick the one that works best for you.

Like any good WordPress restaurant themes, it comes with a built-in HTML food menu system and a tool to help you accept reservations.

Linguini goes one step further, though, and also includes a built-in events calendar feature. So if you host a lot of live events at your restaurant, that's a reason you might want to choose this theme.

You'll also get a live theme customizer, dedicated shortcodes, 6 custom widgets, multiple page templates, and more.

LaFood - Italian Cuisine Restaurant WordPress ThemeLaFood WP Restaurant Theme

Details | Demo

Fresh and minimalist, LaFood combines mouthwatering imagery and refreshing mint color accents. What’s more, the abundance of white space is what makes your content stand out and makes the theme really uncluttered.

Thanks to the employment of Bootstrap 3 framework, the layout of LaFood stays mobile-centered and equally temps site visitors from home PCs and on the go. Moreover, the theme’s setup wizard is simplified to its core and lets you run LaFood installation with sample data within 5 minutes or less.

It’s worth mentioning that the theme is also e-commerce ready. You can run a store on the pages of your website with the help of Ecwid, one of the most comprehensive e-commerce plugins out there. Alternatively, you can use it as the foundation for a WooCommerce restaurant ordering website.

Bistro

Bistro

Details | Demo

Bistro is a child theme for the popular Storefront WooCommerce theme that you can easily adapt to creating a restaurant website or other food-related website. Because it's already built for WooCommerce, Bistro will make it super easy to create your own WooCommerce restaurant ordering system.

To add your food menu, you can find plenty of free plugins or use a drag-and-drop page builder plugin like Elementor or Visual Composer.

Bistro is also super lightweight and performance-friendly, which means your restaurant site will load wicked fast.

Betasso - Trendy Barbeque/Fire-cooking Restaurant WordPress ThemeWordPress Barbecue theme

Details | Demo

Are you after one of the juiciest meat-infused designs that make the mouth of your clients water? The Betasso WordPress restaurant theme is ultimately tempting and seducing to visit your place with its hard-to-miss-on imagery.

The theme developers sprinkled the pages of Betasso with additional content elements, all shipped within Jet Plugins. You can apply these elements and control their appearance within the drag-n-drop interface of Elementor.

Among the nice bonuses, you get all the imagery included to the Sample Data free of charge. Moreover, this theme encourages you to run an e-store on your website pages. Ecwid will be a reliable solution that you can integrate within 5 minutes for this purpose. Or if you want a more purpose-built restaurant ordering system, then you can do this by adding WooCommerce.

Sushiland - Asian Cuisine WordPress ThemeSushi WordPress restaurant theme

Details | Demo

Are you searching for a modern and innovative theme for a stylish Asian restaurant? Then, Sushiland definitely deserves your attention.

This theme incorporates appealing thematic imagery and best handwritten fonts to craft the unique vibe of your online presence. However, if you feel that this is not what you need, you’re more than welcome to employ any of 500+ pre-built Google Fonts.

Sushiland theme comes equipped with a thick pack of pre-made pages. Using them, you get a chance to showcase your professional team in the best light, feature testimonials of your satisfied visitors and power an exemplary gallery of your dishes and premises.

Piquant

Piquant

Details | Demo

Piquant is a beautiful restaurant WordPress theme that comes with 6 different homepage designs that you can import with a single click. The demos focus on specific niches, like bars, BBQ joints, a pizzeria, health food cafes, and more.

You can also choose from a variety of menu page layouts and further customize your content using the built-in WPBakery Page Builder WordPress plugin.

Other helpful features include a detailed theme options panel, tons of custom shortcodes, compatibility with WPML for translations, and multiple page layouts.

Yummies - Bakery/Sweetshop WordPress ThemeYummies WordPress restaurant theme

Details | Demo

It’s hard to argue that Yummies is one of the most appealing recently released WordPress restaurant themes. The pages of this theme break and compromise the standards of the commonplace grid layouts to create your unique online presence with its own vibe and mood.

This theme allows you to fully present your business and its advantages. Use additional content elements provided with Jet Plugins to ensure the one-of-a-kind appealing display of your team, services, testimonials, products and more.

Newbies may rejoice as this theme is Elementor-friendly and supports editing the site in WYSIWYG mode. Finally, thanks to the simple yet feature-rich Ecwid extension, you can easily transform your website into a highly convenient and usable e-store. Or if you prefer, then you can install WooCommerce online store plugin and add a one-page food order form for your bakery items.

Deli

Deli

Details | Demo

Like Bistro, Deli is another child theme for the WooCommerce Storefront theme. It also offers a lightweight approach that works great as a cafe theme or organic WordPress restaurant theme. You can also use it for a generic food business website.

It offers a deep WooCommerce integration by default, and you can easily add a restaurant menu and reservation system using some free plugins.

Patisserie - Cakes/Sweets Shop WordPress Theme

WordPress cake theme

 

Details | Demo

Patisserie is a delectable pastel-colored template that marries your website into the fresh web design trends of this spring.

This WYSIWYG-friendly theme doesn’t make you face a steep learning curve when you’re on the way to finish your project. Elementor builder makes editing the design of your site’s blocks a comprehensive process controlled with drag-n-drop and straightforward settings. Thanks to more than 25 modules that come on board of Patisserie, you’ve got a chance to power call-to-action buttons, accordion blocks, interactive counters, unconventional product showcases, and other site elements in a few clicks. Moreover, Patisserie offers you rich media integration, allowing you to embed YouTube videos, audio podcasts and media galleries to your website.

Sydney Pro

Sydney

Details | Demo

Sydney Pro is a multipurpose WordPress business theme that comes with 4 different pre-built demo sites. One of those demo sites is - you guessed it - a WordPress restaurant theme.

It has a great one-page design that includes a tabbed menu interface, space for a full-width gallery of food pictures, testimonials from happy eaters, a news and events listing, and a built-in email subscribe form.

You can also accept reservations via your own form or a third-party service like OpenTable.

Dine

Dine

Details | Demo

Dine is a customizable WordPress restaurant theme. It comes with multiple demo sites built with the popular WPBakery Page Builder plugin. That means you'll be able to customize your site and menu using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

For diners browsing on the go, the mobile version of Dine includes a user-friendly off-canvas menu. This displays navigation menu items better on smartphones.

Of course, Dine also comes with the essentials like a table reservation system. It has gorgeous menu layouts, WooCommerce store support to let people order food online, and more. You also get an option to feature certain menu items. This is a great way to draw attention to your most popular (and profitable) dishes.

Add online food ordering to your WordPress restaurant website

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering cropped

More and more restaurants are needing to take food orders online. For example, perhaps you're running a takeaway restaurant. Or perhaps you need a way for customers to pre-order their food choices. Either way, you can use any of the themes in this roundup with the front-end WooCommerce restaurant ordering system described in our tutorial:

The WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin fully supports product variations and product add-ons on your restaurant order form, which lets you create functional menus for online food delivery. For example, you can let visitors pick the size of a pizza with a drop-down. They can also use checkboxes to select toppings. Or, you can create a simple product for straightforward menu items.

You can also display product images for each food item, use product categories to divide menu items, and more.

Get started with your favorite WordPress restaurant themes

That wraps up our collection of the 25+ best WordPress restaurant themes for all kinds of eateries.

Remember to consider mobile experience when you choose a theme for your WordPress restaurant website. After all, it's easy to forget when you browse theme demos on a desktop computer! But remember - almost three-quarters of people use a smartphone to initiate a Google search in the food and beverage industry. As a result, your site's mobile experience is paramount.

Don't forget online ordering!

Finally, don't feel like you have to find a theme that does absolutely everything. It's fine to rely on plugins for some features.

For example, even though some of these themes include built-in online ordering features, you'd probably be better off creating your own online restaurant ordering system with WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering.

Do you have any questions about how to choose the best theme for your restaurant? Ask away in the comments!