How to Create a Restaurant Online Order Form With WordPress

Are you looking for a WordPress restaurant ordering system or just an easy, simple way to let people order from your restaurant online?

Your website can easily start making your business more money if you let customers order take-out or delivery online. So in this post, we’ve put together a step-by-step, beginner-friendly tutorial on how to create a restaurant online order form with WordPress.

Click Here to Make Your Restaurant Online Order Form Now

Why Is Online Ordering Better?

There are a lot of reasons why you might consider adding online ordering to your restaurant website. Here are a few:

• To keep an income flowing into your business if you are forced to close for dine-in
• You’ll get even more accurate orders when customers put in their own online orders
• You can expand your business reach by letting more customers discover your restaurant and try your food without dining in
• You’ll build an email list and can digitally market to your customers with things like coupons or online contests
• Employee productivity could increase with less time taking orders over the phone

It’s pretty obvious that offering online ordering for your restaurant is a good idea, so let’s not waste any more time and jump right into how to turn your website into a WordPress restaurant ordering system.

How to Create a Restaurant Online Order Form with WordPress

If you want to turn your site into a WordPress restaurant ordering system, it’s actually quite easy. You can do it by simply creating an online order form with WordPress.

Here are the steps to build your restaurant online order form:

If you prefer written instructions, keep reading.

Step 1: Generate a Takeout Order Form

The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, see this step-by-step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.

Next, you’ll need to go to WPForms » Add New to name your form and choose a template. WPForms Pro includes 2,000+ form templates right out of the box to help you create your WordPress restaurant order form quickly.

Use the search bar to find the Takeout Order form and then click Use Template to load it in the form builder.

Pretty awesome, right? Let’s go ahead and customize this form.

Step 2: Customize Your Form

WPForms makes customizing forms easy to do.

The Takeout Order Form template comes with the following fields in this order:

• Checkbox Items
• Total
• Name (First and Last)
• Email
• Phone
• Address
• Paragraph Text

Unless you’re running a pizza place, you’ll probably need to customize your template a bit to match your particular menu.

It’s easy to do this. First, go ahead and click on the Checkbox Items field. This will open its options on the left-hand side of the form builder. Then you can change the item names and prices.

One of the coolest things you can do is add image choices to your online restaurant menu, too. Just turn on the Use image choices option to add them.

Now, click on the Upload Image button under each item to choose an image for each menu item.

The Total field will show customers how much they own based on the items they select from the checkboxes.

The other fields are to collect customers’ information so you know who the order belongs to. Want to invite your customer to choose a delivery time? Check out this guide to adding a date/ time picker to your WordPress form.

When you’re done customizing your restaurant’s online ordering system form, click Save in the top right corner of the form builder.

Step 3: Configure Your Form Settings

To start, go to Settings » General.

Here you can configure the following:

• Form Name — Change the name of your form here if you’d like.
• Form Description — Give your form a description.
• Tags — Apply tags to organize your site’s forms.
• Submit Button Text — Customize the copy on the submit button.
• Submit Button Processing Text — Change the text that will show while your form is submitting.

There are also more advanced settings in the expandable section at the bottom of the screen:

• CSS Classes — Add CSS classes to your form or submit button.
• Enable Prefill by URL — Automatically fill in some fields based on a custom URL.
• Enable AJAX form submissions — Enable AJAX settings with no page reload.
• Disable storing of entry information in WordPress — You can disable the storing of entry information and user details, such as IP addresses and user agents, in an effort to comply with GDPR requirements. Check out our step-by-step instructions on how to add a GDPR agreement field to your simple contact form.

Once you’re done here, you can switch to the Spam Protection and Security settings.

The options here include:

• Enable modern anti-spam protection — Stop contact form spam with the WPForms modern anti-spam protection. It runs in the background and provides a built-in layer of protection against spam that works great when paired with other options, such as a CAPTCHA.
• Enable Akismet anti-spam protection — You can connect your form to the Akismet plugin to prevent spam entries.
• Enable country filter — Block submissions for certain countries.
• Enable keyword filter — Prevent entries that include certain words or phrases.

When you’re done, click Save.

Step 4: Configure Your Form Notifications

When you receive an order from your restaurant website, it’s important your team is notified right away.

Notifications are a great way to send an email whenever a restaurant online form is submitted on your website.

If you use Smart Tags, you can also send a notification to the user when they fill your form out, letting them know you received their order and that someone will begin working on it shortly. This assures people their request has gone through.

For help with this step, check out our documentation on how to set up form notifications in WordPress.

And if you want to keep branding across your emails consistent, you can check out this guide on adding a custom header to your email template.

This is a great way to send online food orders to your restaurant staff to make sure they jump on things quickly!

Step 5: Customize Your Form Confirmations

Form confirmations are messages that display to site visitors once they submit a food order on your website. They let people know that their request has gone through and offer you the chance to let them know what the next steps are.

WPForms has 3 confirmation types to choose from:

1. Message — This is the default confirmation type in WPForms. When a site visitor submits a request, a simple message confirmation will appear letting them know their order was processed. Check out some great success messages to help boost user happiness.
2. Show Page — This confirmation type will take site visitors to a specific web page on your site, thanking them for ordering. For help doing this, check out our tutorial on redirecting customers to a thank you page. In addition, be sure to read our article on creating effective Thank You pages.
3. Go to URL (Redirect) — This option is for when you want to send site visitors to a different website.

Let’s see how to set up a simple form confirmation in WPForms so you can customize the message site visitors will see when they fill out your form.

To start, click on the Confirmation tab in the Form Editor under Settings.

Next, select the type of confirmation you’d like to create. For this example, we’ll select Message.

Then, customize the confirmation message to your liking and click Save.

For help with other confirmation types, see our documentation on setting up form confirmations.

Step 6: Configure the Payment Settings

In order for customers to pay for their restaurant orders online, you’ll need to have at least one payment platform on your website.

You can choose between Stripe, Square, Authorize.Net, Paypal, or multiple payment methods.

For this example, we’ll use Stripe. Once you’ve completed the setup of Stripe via the tutorial above, simply drag the Stripe Credit Card field from Payment Fields onto the form.

Then go to the Payments tab in the form builder and fill out the settings for your payment integration.

Once you’re done, click Save.

Step 7: Add Your Restaurant Online Order Form to Your Site

After you’ve created your form, you need to add it to your WordPress website. WPForms allows you to add your forms to many locations on your website, including your blog posts, pages, and even sidebar widgets.

Let’s take a look at the most common placement option: page or post embedding.

To begin, create a new page or post in WordPress, or go to the update settings on an existing one.

After that, click inside the first block (the blank area below your page title) and click on the WPForms block.

The handy WPForms widget will appear inside of your block. Click on the WPForms dropdown and pick which one of the forms you’ve already created that you want to insert into your page. Select your Takeout Order Form.

Then, publish or update your post or page so your restaurant order form will appear on your website.

To view form entries after they’ve been submitted, check out this complete guide to form entries. For example, you can view, search for, filter, print, and delete any form entries, making the process that much easier.

In addition, you can use our Zapier addon to automatically save file uploads to cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox.

Click Here to Make Your Restaurant Online Order Form Now

Next, Upgrade Your WordPress Restaurant Theme

Well, there you have it. After reading this post, you now know how to easily build a WordPress restaurant ordering system by creating a restaurant online order form in WordPress.

We hope this tutorial helped you and your restaurant. You may also be interested in heading over to our post on the best WordPress restaurant themes.

And if you want to stop taking orders when the kitchen closes, check out this guide to setting an automatic deadline on your forms.

Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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