Why Food Brands Love Squarespace for E-commerce

Starting and growing your food business is hard enough; designing your food website shouldn’t be. You shouldn’t need to search everywhere for decent plug-ins for, menu, e-commerce, blogging, memberships, and social media integrations.

The website builder platform you use should come with all the bells and whistles so you can get your website up and running without any hitches in no time. And more than anything, your food website should be stunning.

We did a quick browse on Google Maps of some of our favorite local Portland restaurants and food carts. We found out that at least half of them had websites on Squarespace. We already suspected that this might be the case, but we did more research to find out why food brands love using Squarespace for e-commerce.

Food brands love the visuals they get on  Squarespace.

Visual appeal is critical to restaurants. Squarespace dominates in offering website templates that prioritize high-quality visuals. These visuals serve as an extension of the ambiance and dining experience that customers will have at the restaurants.

It is essential to have a modern, bold, and user-friendly platform where food producers can upload mouth-watering pictures of their food, along with their menus. You shouldn’t have to learn to code to be able to move your menu around on a page or create a page that only features your menus.

Squarespace’s drag-and-drop setup makes it hassle-free for owners to upload their website content. Bold and modern visuals showcase the food, environment, and personality of the food establishment.

Squarespace makes it easy for restaurants, food carts, farms, and other food producers to have a comprehensive online presence that customers can visit and enjoy, just as they would with a brick-and-mortar business.

Sidebar: Portland Food Photography

We’re available for hire as photographers on select projects for local restaurants and food businesses in the Portland area. Just drop us a line if you’re looking to restock your photography for your website or social media.

Food customers love convenience.

Visiting a restaurant’s website should be as easy and inviting as going to the restaurant itself. The navigation should be seamless.  Food customers love the convenience of seamlessly built websites, and food producers love using Squarespace for this reason.

Customers love having easy access to all the restaurant details, clear links that point to social media, and bold information about operating hours. Customers do not appreciate websites that are difficult to navigate and glean information. As a food business owner, you understand this is a major customer pain point.

Food customers love the convenience of having all the information they need about your restaurant in an easy and accessible way. Similarly, you love the convenience of managing your Squarespace website, updating vital information, and updating content as your business grows and evolves.

Sidebar:

It’s important that your website designer or manager gives you detailed guidelines on how to manage your website before handing off the project. They shouldn’t just design and throw the website at you when they’re done.

There should be a carefully planned delivery process. And more importantly, there should be a thought-out update weeks, months, and even years after project completion.

We’re definitely biased here, but we love remaining in contact with our clients years after we’ve completed websites or marketing projects. Speaking of marketing, restaurants love using Squarespace because they love SEO.

Local SEO and Squarespace go together well for food brands.

SEO is vital. And local SEO is even more so. Please disregard what you’ve heard about AI replacing SEO or making it less necessary for search engines. Search engine optimization is essential for search engines.

The only effect that AI has had on search is that there are more recent increases in zero-click searches, meaning users are able to browse and find what they need faster without clicking on websites.

Great, but this isn’t the case for someone searching for something to eat that’s located near them. They will still click on the websites that meet their satisfaction. And when they click, they’re searching through restaurant websites with specific goals in mind: how far is this food establishment from me, what does their food look like, and what’s the price range of their menu?

If customers are already familiar with your restaurant, they will search for it on Google Maps first. Local SEO is vital for successful restaurants to keep thriving. You need to keep updating both your website and your Google Business Profile.

Do you maintain a seasonal menu? This vital information should be updated on all platforms as well. Your customers want to know this information ahead of time. You should maintain a content calendar that reflects your seasonal menus, updating both as time passes.

Need help with content strategy for your website, social media, or Google Maps profile? Let’s chat and see how we can optimize your online presence.

Restaurants love food blogging too.

Besides video and social media marketing, blogging is one of the best and most tried-and-true ways for food businesses to connect with their target audiences, convert them into customers, and scale them authentically and seamlessly.

Food blogging as a food establishment or food business is not the same as your average food content creator who blogs, which is how we started. We were food bloggers before we became web designers.

Food blogging as a food business owner looks more like giving your customers a behind-the-scenes look at your restaurant, staff, story, and inspiration behind your menu. It offers customers an in-depth and genuine connection to your food brand story.

This could be an accountment blog of an award you received as a chef, or a renovation happening; maybe you’re opening a new location or you’re developing a new recipe based on a recent customer survey, all of these are fantastic ideas for blog posts that should be featured on your website.

Squarespace has an amazing blogging and social media interface that makes the entire process dreamy. If you record a video snippet, include that on your blog post too!

Squarespace Portfolio websites are for chefs and caterers.

Having a portfolio or even a landing page is essential for professional chefs and caterers. It’s how you show your work, passion, and career history as a food producer. You need a clean, modern, and bold virtual presence that shows culinary success.

Squarespace portfolio websites are explicitly made for this reason. The portfolio templates make you stand out in just the right light, with modern pages or blocks for including your resume, biography, creative recipes, awards, and events you have coming up.

E-commerce integrations mean culinary success.

Squarespace seamlessly integrates everything a food business needs to get up and running. Just as visiting a restaurant should be as easy as going to the restaurant in person, so should ordering online from the restaurant.

Whether online or in person, customer care should be a top priority. Successful restaurants understand this need, and many of them choose to host their website on Squarespace for this reason.

Restaurants can effortlessly set up online stores for direct customer purchases and integrate a reservation system for customers. Customers want convenient and safe online places to put in their credit card information, knowing it’ll be safe. Again, customer care is vital. How you treat customers matters just as much as what you cook for them.

There are no extra security plug-ins for Squarespace websites, it’s all built-in, meaning less risks for bugs or malware. All domains and websites on the platform have SSL certificates, 24/7 monitoring with Squarespace’s Security Operations Center, and built-in payment-processor integrations that are PCI compliant, and much more.

We design Squarespace websites for busy food brands and owners.

Food business owners are very busy, and they want a website builder platform with built-in SEO, social media, blogging, email, and ecommerce features without taking several design or coding courses.

If you’re ready to build your website on Squarespace, get in touch with us to get started with a template you like, or we’ll design one from scratch for you, based on your custom brand guide, which we also create in house.

Yes, Squarespace allows designers and developers to customize websites, giving us more control as Squarespace Circle Members (we’re Gold Members). Complete a client form to get started, or if you’re wanting to talk strategy, book a quick discovery call. Don’t forget to check out the resource library for more articles like this!