Study Shows 95% of Restaurants Not On Mobile Web Where Half Of Searches Are Coming From
1 in 8 full service chains and 1 in 20 independent restaurants on mobile web, flash intros annoying to smartphone users.
Restaurants like to put Flash intros with music and animations on their home pages, (or are being sold by designers to do so) however when half of their customers are searching on mobile (and that number is rapidly increasing) with browsers that don’t support Flash it become a huge irritant to people trying to find, contact or see your menu.
Results from a new study by Restaurant Science, a restaurant industry information and analytics provider, only one out of eight full service restaurant chains and a depressing one out of twenty independent restaurants have a mobile website. What makes this even worse is that according to some reports, half of all visits to restaurant websites are from mobile devices.
More than half of the restaurants surveyed in this study didn’t even have a website to begin with (the researchers actually called all these restaurants to make sure they really weren’t online).
What most users – mobile or not – really want from a restaurants site is probably to look at a menu. According to this study, though, fewer than 40% of independent restaurants actually display their menus on their website.
Compared to other businesses, the study argues, restaurants still have a long way to go in using the potential of the Internet. That doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has ever tried to use restaurant websites on a mobile phone, but it’s still rather shocking that so many restaurateurs just don’t get how important their websites are for their businesses.
For restaurants that haven’t built a mobile website (and even for those that have), what you need is quite simple. Your customers want to call you, they want to find you and they want to see your menu. Mobile sites don’t need to be as fancy as regular desktop sites. If you include these three things, you’ll be making a good start.
- A Click-to-Call button allows a mobile visitor to give you a ring in just one click.
- A mobile map that opens in Google Maps and gives visitors turn-by-turn directions from their current location.
- A readable menu that lives on your mobile site – no PDFs!
The good news is that we here at Bespoke Mobile Websites can replicate most of your existing site on the mobile platform in a manner that is quick to load and easy to navigate. Contact us today and we will send you a FREE no obligation working demo of what your site will look like on your phone. You can see this demo right on your phone or on a desktop inside of a template that looks like a mobile phone.
If customers are important to you then start making it easy and convenient for them to become your customers.
