Congratulations on your food truck! Now it’s time to get out there and promote it. That starts with a website. Read on to find out why your food truck needs a website, how to start building your website, and what your website needs. Then you’ll be back out on the road in no time!
Why Your Food Truck Needs a Website
A food truck is a different kind of business, but it needs a website just as much, if not more than other types of businesses.
Reach More Potential Customers
A website is a cost-effective way to show potential customers how cool you are. You know better than anyone how competitive the food industry is. 90% of diners do research online before they decide where they want to eat. If you don't have a website, that's a lot of people who are missing out on your delicious food.
Keep Customers Informed
A website makes it easy for customers to find information about your business in one place. Whether visitors want to look at the menu, see where you’ll be next, book you for an event, follow your social media profiles, read your announcements, or call the owner, they should be able to do that based on the information on your website.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Food trucks aren’t the underdog of the food service world that they once were, but it can still be tricky to compete out there. Use your website to let people know why they should book your food truck for their event instead of the others in your city.
Lower Marketing Costs
As a food truck, you may not have the budget of a big-name brick and mortar restaurant. A digital marketing strategy leading back to your website can give you more for less.
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How to Start Building a Website for Your Food Truck
Pick a Website Builder
You don't necessarily HAVE to use a website builder, but if you don't you're just making your life harder for no reason. With a website builder, anyone can create a site that looks and functions like it was made by a team of professionals. The subscription fees will save you money compared to hiring a web developer and designer to build a website from scratch. The best website builders for food trucks allow users to connect a custom domain, have a variety of templates to choose from, and make managing a website easy so you can focus on running your business.
Choose a Template
With our professionally designed, fully customizable templates, you don't need to know a thing about web design to make your site as mouth-watering as your food. No matter your tastes, you'll find a template to match. Just drag and drop until our beautiful AI feature is ready. Then you won't even have to do that. You'll just have to give the builder a description of what you want and it'll do it.
Buy a Custom Domain
A domain is the name of a website, including both the web address and the TLD. The right domain is a crucial part of marketing your business. The best domain name would be the name or your food truck with a keyword like the cuisine you sell or the city you're located in. Keep it short, memorable, and free of punctuation. Sav's world-class domain marketplace makes it easy with our wide selection and industry low prices. All domains purchased from Sav come with a free 30-day website builder trial, a free SSL certificate, mobile friendly optimization, SEO optimization, Google Analytics integration, and unlimited storage.
Food Truck Website Essentials
Pages
Homepage
The home page is the welcome mat to your website. Make a good first impression with clean, appealing visuals and your food truck’s name and tagline front and center.
Triple Jays lets their pizza do the talking on their homepage.
About
The About Us page is the place to tell your food truck's story. What makes it unique? What's your expertise? What values drive you and your business? Did you learn how to bake somewhere cool? A unique, personal narrative allows your site visitors to emotionally connect to your brand in a way that they can't connect with faceless corporations.
Puddin' highlights the history, specialty, and values of owner Toyin Alli.
Contact
Being easy to contact is essential to your online presence. Make sure to include the following in a contact page or at the footer of your website.:
- Google Maps Plugin
- mailing address
- business hours
- business phone number
- all relevant email addresses
- all social media links
It also might be a good idea to include a contact form so visitors can reach out to you by email without leaving the site.
Whole Le Crepe's contact page makes them easy to find and book.
Menu
Having a full menu on your site and easy to find allows people to plan ahead. This is especially valuable for people with food allergies or any other dietary needs. It can also allow any menu item to serve as a search keyword, which would increase your search engine visibility.
Your menu page should be complete, easy to find, mobile-friendly, and visually appealing. Consider dividing it up by sections and including photos of popular dishes.
The Cookie Bar's menu features a photo of every treat and allows customers to easily filter their view by category.
Reviews and Testimonials
Reviews make the service industry go 'round. It only makes sense to highlight yours. In the age of Yelp, people trust customer reviews now more than ever. With a simple plugin, you can connect your website to Yelp and other review sites. Including positive press coverage of your food truck is another great way to offer social proof of your food’s quality.
Frequently Asked Questions
If your customers are asking the same questions over and over again, an FAQ page is a great way to cut down on the time and effort you spend on customer service. Some websites also call this a help center or a knowledge base.
To get started on this page, gather up the questions customers and potential customers ask you often. Especially if they aren’t already answered elsewhere on your website. It may be sparse at first, but that's all right. As more questions pour in, keep adding to the page.
Design
Website design and visuals matter. The fonts, color palette, images, and buttons you choose go a long way in creating a great user experience. Standard, readable fonts are essential for functionality and mobile-friendly optimization. Using bold colors with high contrast will make your website look and function great. Images can communicate things that words can’t. The size, shape, and color of CTA buttons can affect how likely visitors are to click through.
Images
A photo gallery is your chance to draw people in with photos of your truck, your most mouth-watering food, your customers enjoying themselves, and the staff hard at work. Get your website visitors’ mouths watering so much that they’ll actively look for your truck.
The Butcher and the Blonde has the right idea with their photo gallery. They've got food, customers, and we can see that they recently opened a brick and mortar location!
Mobile-Friendly Optimization
Where food trucks are, desktop computers usually aren’t. That’s why websites for food trucks especially need to prioritize a mobile-friendly experience. Here are a few ways to do that:
- Choose a responsive template
- Use readable fonts
- Avoid large blocks of text
- Keep your design simple
- Optimize your images
- Space out links
- Avoid pop-ups
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Online Presence
What good is a website if no one sees it? Having a solid online presence goes hand in hand with building a good website.
Social Media
Active social media profiles allow loyal customers to follow your food truck wherever it goes. Facebook and Instagram advertising algorithms are famously effective at targeting potential customers based on their interests. Twitter allows businesses to see the public's opinion of them and respond to customers' concerns. YouTube is great for a visual medium like food.
Search Engine Optimization
If you don't know what Search Optimization (SEO) is, it's the strategy of moving your content further up the Google search results page. SEO allows small companies to stand a chance competing against big corporations despite the difference in funds and advertising reach.
It may seem tedious, but with the SEO features that come with many website builders, you don't have to be an expert to pull it off.
Newsletter
A once a month email newsletter is a great way to engage with your most loyal customers. Include a sign-up form in your contact page. It’s also a good idea to invite customers to sign up when they place an order by offering them a discount or some other reward in exchange.
Blog
A branded blog, like the one you’re reading now, is a key part of any content marketing strategy. With a little SEO strategy branded blog posts bring people to your website who might not have otherwise found it.
Blog posts can also beef up your social media calendar and establish you as an authority in your field. Food-related businesses are especially blog-friendly because people love to read about food.
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Security
An SSL Certificate provides an extra layer of security to your site. It is highly recommended for any site that collects information from customers and search engine algorithms prioritize sites that have it. And, of course, the certificate prevents that embarrassing "not secure" warning from popping up next to the URL. That's why all domains registered with Sav come with free SSL.
Test Your Website
The final step for creating a website is to test it. How does it look on desktop and mobile? Do all the links work? Can a user easily place an order and contact the business? Have someone else who wasn’t involved in building the website test it out to make sure.
How Sav Can Help
Sav’s straightforward pricing and user-friendly interface, make it easy to choose a website builder plan that meets your needs and budget. Your business will grow in ways you never imagined in no time. What are you waiting for? Start building your website today!
