The Restaurant Website Hero Section — Why the Top of Your Page Is Worth More Than Everything Below It
If you have ten seconds to understand everything important about restaurant website design, here it is: 85% of your web visitors only visit the homepage, and most of them make their decision about whether to stay or leave before they ever scroll. The hero section, the part of the page that loads immediately, is the most valuable real estate on your entire website. What you put there determines whether you convert visitors into guests or lose them to the restaurant that showed up below you in the search results.
The Three Buttons That Belong Above the Fold
The best restaurant web design puts three things in the hero section above everything else. A call now button. An order online button. A catering link.
Call now and order online serve the guest who is hungry right now. They are in immediate purchase mode and your job is to remove every possible obstacle between their hunger and your food. One tap to call. One tap to order. That is what converts.
The catering link serves a different purpose. People plan catering weeks, months, sometimes a year in advance. But they discover your catering option when they are already on your site because they are hungry right now. They order food, love it, and remember that catering link when little Johnny's graduation party needs planning. Putting catering in the hero section builds long term relationships with guests who came looking for something immediate. It is one of the most strategically undervalued elements of restaurant website design.
Video vs Photo — What Works Best in the Hero Section
A video with people in it is the gold standard for the restaurant website hero section. There is a self fulfilling psychology at work: show a full room and the restaurant feels like the kind of place people want to be. Show an empty restaurant and the restaurant feels empty. If you have footage from an event, a private party, a busy Saturday night, use it. The energy of a full room is worth more than the most beautifully composed empty dining room photo.
If video is not possible, a photo of your staff with the food achieves something almost as powerful. A guest lands on your site, sees your bartender shaking a cocktail, walks in, and says hey I recognize you from the website. The relationship has already begun before they sat down. That kind of connection is what separates restaurants that build loyalty quickly from ones that take years to build a regular customer base.
We explored this concept in our post on how a simple website can boost your restaurant's brand. The hero section is where that brand impression is made or lost.
What Kills the Hero Section
The most common thing I see destroying otherwise decent restaurant website design is the life story in the hero section. We came from Italy in 1983. Our family has been in the restaurant business for three generations. This is valuable information. It belongs on the about us page. The homepage is not the place to read. The homepage is the place to act.
At 5 Loaves Restaurant Consulting, our restaurant website design service builds every hero section around the three buttons that convert visitors into guests.
Contact 5 Loaves Restaurant Consulting for a free consultation about your restaurant website design.
