The restaurant industry has changed a lot over the last couple of years. In order to keep up with the changing restaurant landscape as well as dining habits, restaurants need better websites.
With the right WordPress restaurant theme, this is an easy goal to accomplish. The trick is to find a theme that’s responsive, feature-rich, and makes your food images look amazing.
In this post, we’ll give you an inside look at three themes that have been designed for different types of food establishments and vendors.
Why Use a Premium Restaurant Website Template?
According to a 2019 survey from MGH, 77% of consumers said they visit a restaurant’s website before they dine in or order online.
However, 68% of those respondents have decided not to go to a restaurant and 62% have chosen not to order online because of the website.
These were the most common reasons a website made diners look unfavorably upon a restaurant:
- 36% said it was because it wasn’t mobile friendly
- 36% said the food photos looked bad
- 33% found the navigation too hard to use
- 30% struggled to read the menu
- 30% said the site looked old and outdated
One of the benefits of using a premium restaurant website template is that you don’t have to worry about the technology of your website costing you customers.
Out of the box, you’ll get a modern-looking, responsive, and feature-rich website. All you need to do is customize it.
As of today, ThemeForest has over 400 WordPress themes for restaurants. These themes are developed by some of the world’s most skilled and experienced WordPress designers. What’s more, these themes have been through our rigorous vetting process.
So when you use one of these premium WordPress themes, you know that you’re getting the best quality work. That’s exactly what you’ll need in order to impress diners and convince them to pay your establishment a visit or to place an order online.
3 WordPress Restaurant Themes That’ll Drive More Diners to Your Doors
With hundreds of themes to choose from, it can be difficult knowing which one will be best for your dining establishment. To help you narrow down the options, we’ve reviewed three popular WordPress restaurant themes that cover a wide range of purposes:
Barista Modern WordPress Theme
Create a fully-featured site for your small, local cafe or eatery.
Laurent Elegant Restaurant Theme
Design a beautiful website for your fine dining establishment.
Eatsy Food Delivery WordPress Theme
Build a website that puts food ordering and delivery front and center.
1. Barista Modern Theme for Cafes, Coffee Shops and Bars
For small, independent cafe or eatery owners, a website might seem like an unnecessary expense.
However, a website is a must if you want people looking for establishments “near me” to find yours. Not only that, you want your website to stand out from the pack of cheap-looking and feature-less competitor sites. That’s what you’ll find with the Barista WordPress theme.
Ease of Use
While Barista comes jam-packed with tools to help you build your website, a lot of it has been simplified for you.
The first thing to do after installation is go to the Barista Dashboard. There’s one file to import. However, you have to choose which page builder you want to use.
If you’re new to WordPress, the Elementor template is better as you can design and edit your pages using a visual editor. Here’s what the Contact page template inside of Elementor looks like:
If you prefer using block editors, import the other template.
The one-click import process will bring in all of the content you would ever need to build a cafe or small eatery website.
This theme comes with eight different home pages based on the type of establishment you run or how you want to display the content. In addition, you’ll find pages for:
- Menu
- Reservations
- About
- Meet Our Team
- Our Process
- Contact
You can also set up a blog or sell products through a shop with the templates provided.
Before you start modifying any of the content, check out Edge Options:
With free WordPress themes, you usually only have basic WordPress customization options to work with. Uploading your logo, changing font colors, that sort of thing.
However, Edge-Themes, the developer of this plugin, gives its users this robust customization tool. It will allow you to make site-wide changes to major elements — like fonts, header design, mobile layouts, search results, and more — with just a few clicks of your mouse. No coding needed.
Restaurant Features
Smaller cafes and eateries have different website needs than fine dining restaurants or fast casual chains. The Barista theme has done a good job of accounting for these differences:
Location Info
Smaller establishments like cafes and bakeries aren’t likely to do as much business online-only the way restaurants can. Because of this, the website needs to make location-specific information a priority.
One important element is the location’s operating hours. You’ll find an easy-to-use tool to manage them in the Barista theme:
In addition to providing visitors with information about your location and services, this theme helps you create a friendly “Meet Our Team” page:
Many times, it’s the staff that brings customers back to a dining establishment — especially if they’re going to linger while enjoying their drinks and eats. Having a website that shines a light on the people delivering that great service is another way your website will win locals over.
Menu
With some restaurant themes, the designer might construct the menu with existing WordPress or WooCommerce tools. The biggest problem with this approach is that it means you have to make the menu fit within the parameters of a block built for an entirely different purpose.
That doesn’t happen with Barista. This theme comes with a restaurant menu plugin called Cafe Menu:
As your menu changes, add or remove items to this list. Customizing them is just as easy:
The menu item builder is tailored for restaurant menus, asking only for essential details like the item label, description, and price. You can also add a photo of the item under Featured Image.
This isn’t necessary though. Here’s how the existing menu looks in the Barista template without images:
If you want to create different menus, by the way, you can. For instance, a cafe might want to create one for “Coffee” and one for “Bakery”. To do this, create menu categories for each and then assign the items to the respective categories so you can keep your menus separate.
Cafe Images
Food and drink images are a huge part of a restaurant’s identity and so they are going to be the main focus for a lot of visitors. As such, it’s important to use a theme that helps you frame them in the best light.
Barista comes with all the tools you’ll need to show off your eye-catching imagery.
For instance, there’s a Parallax Showcase template that takes visitors from one full screen image to the next, creating an immersive experience as they are introduced to your eatery:
Barista’s image gallery tools will also come in handy:
This way, you can create an attractive gallery of related images — of your food, products, team, restaurant location, and so on.
Pros and Cons
Barista enables you to design an attractive online shop that directly mirrors the real one you want to attract customers to. This isn’t something you can generally do with a free WordPress theme, so it’s great when you can find a powerful solution like this one to help you out.
Another thing worth noting is that all of the premium images used in the Barista theme are free to use. This is not something you’ll find in many themes as images serve as placeholders and must be swapped out before the website goes live.
You’ll want your site to accurately depict what your establishment sells as well as the unique ambience within it, so you’ll have to swap out some of the photos in this theme anyway. That said, there are lots of stock images in the theme that you can keep for decorative purposes.
Look inside the Media folder and you’ll find over 300 graphics:
Considering how quickly the cost of stock images can add up, having these images at your disposal is a bonus.
One potential con with this theme is that lots of content gets imported with the demo. This is so that you have options, regardless of what kind of restaurant site you want to build.
However, holding onto the extra content can be bad because it can slow down your server, which means your web pages load more slowly. That or you have to pay more money for faster web hosting. Neither option is ideal.
So, if you decide to use the Barista theme, clean it up after you’ve finished designing the site. Remove anything you don’t end up using, like pages, posts, media files, and plugins.
Also, if you don’t use the Blog or Shop features in the template, delete the content associated with them, too.
2. Laurent Elegant Restaurant Theme
If you’re looking for a restaurant theme with class, Laurent is a nice choice. This well-rated WordPress theme comes pre-loaded with all the page templates and plugins you’ll need to build a website for your fine dining (or drinking) establishment.
Ease of Use
It doesn’t take long to see just how easy this theme will be to use. After installation, you’ll arrive at a welcome page with a big blue button that lets you know where to Install Required Plugins:
That’s just one of the benefits of using a premium WordPress restaurant theme like Laurent. You don’t need to stress over what type of functionality to add to the site and then finding a plugin to help you recreate it. Most of the work is done for you upfront.
Once your plugins are installed and activated, you’ll find two new WordPress menus at the top of the sidebar: Laurent Dashboard and Laurent Options.
Laurent Dashboard is where you go to load the demo content. There’s just one demo, but two different builders to choose from. You can use WP Bakery or Elementor. It’s up to you.
Once the demo content is in there, Laurent Options provides you with everything you need to customize the global settings -- layouts, styles, logos, and more:
There’s no need to do any coding with this restaurant theme. Instead, use the customization settings here to make global style changes and then pick your preferred drag-and-drop builder to personalize the rest.
Restaurant Features
Laurent is a great-looking and well-built WordPress restaurant theme out of the box. While it doesn’t come with every feature you might need to promote your restaurant online, it’ll get you most of the way there.
Page Templates
Your demo site comes pre-loaded with most of the pages you’d ever want to include on a fine dining restaurant website:
Under the Home menu, you’ll find links to various home page options based on your establishment:
- Bar
- Restaurant
- Fine dining
- Haute cuisine
There are also options if you wanted to create a restaurant menu website, a single-page landing page, or to change the layout of the home page altogether with a “showcase”.
Under Pages, you’ll find another collection of pages — these are for the interior of the website:
They’re all designed in the same style as the home page options, so you won’t have to worry about mixing and matching the right templates with the right home pages.
While there are options for Portfolio, Blog, and Shop pages included in the demo, most restaurants won’t need this kind of content.
Shop may come in handy if you decide to set up an online ordering system. However, you’d be better off using a WordPress restaurant template built specifically for that purpose if that’s your goal.
Menu
There’s no need for an additional WordPress restaurant menu plugin when you use Laurent. The home and menu pages already have a great looking menu design in them:
The menu is responsive, too:
This will help you avoid the issues that commonly arise when visitors are left to peruse a PDF menu. There will be no zooming in and out to read this one as it’s designed to look good no matter how big the screen is.
Reservations
The main pages of this restaurant theme include a booking form powered by OpenTable:
The design is already taken care of for you.
If you don’t have an OpenTable account for your restaurant yet, it's easy to set one up. Then, create your Reservation Widget and add the OpenTable ID to the Reservation Form widget in WordPress.
Once it’s connected, your visitors can start making their own reservations and free up staff to focus on serving in-house diners.
Pros and Cons
One of the best things about the Laurent theme is that it anticipates everything that a fine dining restaurant or bar might need to market itself online. For the most part, the groundwork is already laid for you to make a good impression, showcase your menu, and enable customers to book their own reservations.
That said, because of the way the demo is set up, every possible page or plugin you might need gets installed. This means extra cleanup for you, unless you choose to leave those unused assets where they are.
This is similar to the issue you'd experience when using the Barista theme. The main difference between Barista and Laurent, however, is that Laurent's images are not commercially licensed. This means that you'll have to replace every single image included in the demo.
While Laurent gives you tools that make management of your site's design and content easy, the process is going to be more time-consuming than some other WordPress restaurant themes.
Another thing that may exacerbate how much time you spend designing your site with Laurent is Slider Revolution:
Barista uses this slider plugin as well. It’s one of the best ways to create advanced image effects, slider transitions, and animations without having to use code.
However, if you’ve never used this plugin before, it can take some getting used to. Since you have to replace all of the images in this theme, that’ll mean getting moderately acquainted with this plugin so you can figure out how to replace the existing photos or videos with your own.
3. Eatsy Food Delivery WordPress Theme
This WordPress theme isn’t a traditional restaurant theme — at least not in the sense of the others reviewed here today. Instead, Eatsy is a good theme for anyone who wants to sell food online. For instance:
- Fast casual establishments that offer online ordering
- Custom bakeries that prepare and ship bulk orders nationwide
- Local health food and grocery stores that do deliveries
Ease of Use
Eatsy is made and supported by a company called BoldThemes. Unlike some premium theme developers who leverage existing WordPress tools, BoldThemes has created their own.
In order to use one of Eatsy’s six pre-designed website templates, you’ll have to go to Tools > BT Import. From here, there are only two files to import:
- Burgers contains the templates for the burger restaurant, pizza shop, and doughnut maker
- Cupcakes contains the templates for the cupcake shop, honey vendor, and health food store
While you’ll get custom home page templates for the three food establishments included in the file, most of the other files (like the blog, menu, etc.) will only be for Burgers or Cupcakes.
In terms of customizing this WordPress theme, you'll use the WordPress Customization tool to adjust global settings like logos, header layouts, background colors, and typography:
However, editing the content within the site itself will likely be a brand new experience for you. For starters, when you preview your WordPress site, you’ll notice that it looks like this:
This is what BoldThemes called “Edit Mode UI”. You can toggle this on and off using the blue button in the lower right corner.
While you can see where each section starts and begins, you can’t do any editing on the frontend of the site. Clicking on the blue edit button in the top-left corner of the block will take you to the Bold Builder:
Eatsy can only be managed using the Bold Builder. If you’ve ever used a builder like WP Bakery or BeThemes’s Muffin Builder, then you’re familiar with how these drag-and-drop block editors work. There’s no visual editor.
While there may be a steep learning curve for those of you who are new to this style of builder, keep in mind that it comes with a positive tradeoff.
WordPress has a lot of great visual page builder options available. However, in order to do complex things without coding, you usually have to add another plugin like Slider Revolution in order to do it. Bold Builder enables you to do it all from a single tool.
Restaurant Features
Because Eatsy isn’t a normal restaurant theme, it doesn’t really have normal restaurant features. If you need to build a site with a reservation booking system, a perusable menu or anything like that, then use one of the other themes on this list.
That said, if you’re selling food and food products online, this theme comes with some useful features:
Online Ordering
Online ordering is an integral part of a business that delivers any type of food goods. This theme doesn’t treat online ordering as a one-size-fits-all solution though.
Look through the various templates (you can preview them through ThemeForest) and you’ll see the different options available:
This is the online ordering template for the burger shop:
This layout and one-click add-to-cart system would also work great for other fast casual restaurants.
For companies that sell products and custom orders, the cupcakes layout is probably a better choice:
This page template uses a more traditional eCommerce product page layout. This particular demo file also comes with a template for a health food company. It looks like this:
This is more in line with what you’d see when ordering from a small, local grocer online.
Forms
A restaurant or food ordering website may initially be used by visitors as an educational tool — to learn more about the establishment, what kind of food they offer, and where they’re located. However, these websites also need to give prospective customers a way to get in touch.
Contact and subscription forms are a common way to do this. Eatsy integrates with Contact Form 7 for this purpose:
If you take a look at the frontend of the site, you’ll see how great these forms end up looking:
When it comes to bakeries and other vendors that prepare custom orders, basic contact forms won’t suffice though. BoldThemes has created a solution for this — the Cost Calculator:
The builder looks similar to the Bold Builder. It gives you total control over which fields go into your custom ordering or quote form as well as how it looks.
Here’s an example from the cupcakes template:
When you need a custom ordering or quoting solution like this for your site, having a theme provide the exact tools for it is going to be a huge help.
Recipes and Blogs
Another way in which these types of food companies differ from cafes, restaurants, and bars is that they often offer more of an experience online.
Restaurants have websites in order to lure customers to their premises. Or, at the very least, to order in food from their establishments.
Food companies, however, don’t often get to make that person-to-person connection. That’s why their sites need to help them grow their reputation and build trust with prospective and existing customers alike.
Adding a blog or recipes to the site is a great way to do this:
Eatsy has accounted for this just as it has the other foodie features it’s built into its templates.
Pros and Cons
Eatsy may be one of the newer WordPress restaurant themes available on ThemeForest. However, it’s clear that the developers understand their user base well.
For starters, this theme doesn’t clutter up the WordPress UI the way some of the bulkier restaurant themes do:
This makes website management much easier to do since there are fewer menus to sift through.
That said, if you’ve never used a backend block editor like the Bold Builder before, it may take some time for you to get over the learning curve so that you can easily manage your site.
That’s the primary con when it comes to this particular theme. The end results are going to look amazing if you can leverage the templates and learn how to master the builder. It might just take a while before you get to that point.
One other thing worth mentioning is that this theme doesn’t come pre-packaged with WooCommerce, despite online ordering being a central part of each template. Before you start working on anything, install and configure the eCommerce plugin and a payment gateway. Otherwise, you’ll find some holes (like missing content and broken code) in your template.
Find the Right WordPress Theme for Your Restaurant
It wouldn’t be fair to call these three themes the “best” WordPress restaurant themes since they all serve such different purposes.
- Barista is best for smaller, independent establishments. This theme will make your website look like you paid thousands of dollars for it and will give visitors an online experience that makes them want to rush out and visit your establishment.
- Laurent is a great choice for a fine dining restaurant or bar setting. You don’t have to preserve its dark theme and fine dining ambience to create an upscale digital environment either. The theme is easy to customize and make your own.
- Eatsy is a good choice if you want to sell food online, be it as a restaurant, a custom bakery, or a local food vendor. With a bold design and special effects, this theme can help your food business stand out amongst the crowd.
Which will you choose? All three are easy enough to customize. However, the true strength in each of these themes lies in the templates that are designed specifically for certain food establishments.
Find the theme that gets what your business does and what your customers are looking for. Then start there.
WordPress Theme Collections for Restaurateurs and Foodies
Still looking for that perfect WordPress restaurant theme, coffee house theme, or food delivery service theme? Allow us to serve up these tasty WordPress theme collections to see if anything suits your palette!
WordPress Themes30+ Best Restaurant WordPress Themes: With Premium Responsive Designs
WordPress Themes20+ WordPress Themes for Your Coffee Shop Website
WordPress Themes20+ Top Brewery and Winery WordPress Themes (Free and Premium)
WordPress Themes30 Best Food Delivery WordPress Themes for 2021
WordPress Themes20 Food and Grocery Store WordPress Themes (Free and Premium)
Food15 Best WordPress Food Blog Themes 2021
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