Is a WordPress restaurant menu plugin the best option for you as a food business owner? Or will a menu platform perform better? Discover answers in this guide.
If you’re considering integrating a WordPress restaurant menu plugin into your website, this guide will help you make the right decision. However, what if we told you that you may not need a WordPress restaurant menu plugin afterall? With a standalone digital menu platform like Menuzen, all you need to do is embed your menu link into your WordPress web page(s) of choice.
In this post, we’ll examine why Menuzen is a better choice for showcasing your myriad of meal options when compared to a WordPress restaurant menu plugin. We’ll also go over four great restaurant menu plugin options for WordPress.
Menuzen isn’t technically a plugin; it’s more than that. It’s a free menu maker that performs all the functions of a WordPress restaurant menu plugin and even more.
Menuzen’s integration into a WordPress page or post is quite easy. All you have to do is embed your designed menu as a link into your desired WordPress web page(s). Moreover, it’s a menu platform — a fully developed menu solution with a broad range of features.
If you have Menuzen, you have both a plugin and a menu platform. By menu platform, we mean a web app dedicated to restaurant menus only. Plugins lack this characteristic — usually, they’re jumbled with other plugins on the same website or platform.
So, if you have a menu plugin, then it’s just a plugin without a dedicated menu server. We can’t stress this huge difference enough. This is the main reason plugins have very limited features compared to fully developed menu platforms that also offer WordPress restaurant menu templates.
The way you design a menu on Menuzen is the same way it displays on your WordPress and social media pages. Whenever you want to make changes, you can just go to Menuzen and do so, and they reflect anywhere you publish the menu. You may even change designs altogether by browsing through our numerous free menu templates.
Of course, this functionality isn’t limited to menu platforms. Plugins can also give you accounts through which to make changes without logging into WordPress, but not all support this.
With that being said, here’s a rundown of the several Menuzen benefits:
Provides a dedicated menu platform.
Offers the broadest features.
Provides larger storage space.
Less vulnerable to technical issues.
Broader compatibility.
Multi-platform menu publishing.
Unlimited number of images.
Unlimited user accounts.
A vast number of templates.
The best template designs.
Great customer support.
Deep market insights (upcoming feature)
If you use both menu options—plugins and menu platforms—in your restaurant or intend to do so, your WordPress restaurant menu plugin could become a problem someday. For example, you might want specific restaurant menu designs that plugins aren’t advanced enough to offer. It could be a design for offline or online use.
Such challenges can force you to significantly alter your website’s content. Since you might already have the plugin menu published on several pages of your website, removing the plugin would require editing all of the pages using it.
Our advice is for you to opt for a platform that never presents any unsolvable problems in the future regarding the design, management, or expansion of your business. Therefore, you need a menu solution that offers a wide breadth of templates with plenty of room for customisation and other features.
Here are some compelling reasons why a WordPress menu plugin may not be your best option:
The market insight you could acquire from people using your menu isn’t obtainable via restaurant menu plugins for WordPress. Menu templates are limited in numbers and adaptable design features, unlike Menuzen, where you have access to many unique designs, and each feature is customisable.
Another issue with restaurant menu plugins on WordPress is their tendency to conflict with some website features. Specific plugins won’t harmonise with the theme, WordPress version, and other plugins you’ve installed. On the other hand, Menuzen isn’t a plugin (though it performs the functions and doubles as a WordPress restaurant menu template provider), so compatibility issues will be a rarity.
There are many reasons why plugins conflict.
Here are two major ones:
This section discusses the top 4 restaurant menu plugin options available to use on WordPress. Here we’ll summarise their best features before analysing them in more detail.
1. Five Star Restaurant Menu — Best for sorting and filtering dishes.
2. WPCafe – Restaurant Menu by Themewinter — The best option for large menus.
3. Restaurant Menu – Food Ordering System by GloriaFood — The cheapest option for delivery service.
4. RestroPress – Online Food Ordering System — The best plugin for a seamless user interface.
While the other WordPress restaurant menu plugins discussed in this guide have filtering and sorting features, the plugin by Five Star is broader and more accurate. The designers clearly invested a lot of effort in building this function to make it as easy as possible for customers to find the dishes they want.
Five Star has other apps and software that complement the plugin to enhance your digital menu experience. This is a great advantage lacking in many restaurant menu plugins for WordPress.
With some plugins, whatever you do on your restaurant’s menu has to come from the plugin itself. Thus, receiving and managing orders will be done in the plugin — provided it has these capabilities. The Five Star restaurant menu plugin, however, easily integrates with other supportive apps, like the Restaurant Manager mobile app by the same developers, to simplify your order management tasks.
This restaurant menu plugin for WordPress has an in-built SEO feature that we love. It has an entire menu schema that organises your menu items in an orderly format so Google can easily identify your menu pages and ranks them accordingly.
The Five Star restaurant menu plugin’s filtering and sorting features are considerably more advanced than other plugins. They let your customers filter out menu options according to their special dietary requirements, such as vegan items, vegetarian items, etc.
The plugin is also designed to be compatible with any page editing system. So, if you switch CMS (content management system) in the future, it’ll still work for your website.
Has other supporting apps
Full menu schema
Advanced sorting & filtering
Has other supporting apps
Due to its sub-categories feature, we consider the WPCafe restaurant menu plugin the best option for extensive menus (featuring more than 32 items). This is especially important if people access the menu using smartphones since the screen size can’t display all items at once. Using the product add-on feature to create these sub-categories provides room to add many more food items.
One of the unique characteristics of this WordPress restaurant menu plugin by Themewinter is the option to enable and disable images and links associated with your menu items. If you don’t want a particular food picture to appear, all you need to do is disable it.
The same thing applies to the links from your menu items. You can have a page on each menu item that provides in-depth info on the dish. You can disable these links whenever you want to — for example, in a case where you significantly alter the ingredients of a dish but haven’t yet updated the page describing it.
The WPCafe restaurant menu plugin has another design feature that many others lack. Some plugins display the same layout for all food categories. However, with this plugin, you can give any food category a distinct layout — perhaps according to the number of dishes, types of foods, etc.
Let’s say you combine several similar items under the same category, and each item has a sub-category — some of which require specific menu layouts. You can use a special feature in the Themewinter WordPress restaurant menu plugin to create different layouts for each sub-category within the main groups.
Different layouts for categories
Enable and disable links & images
Sub-categories within categories
Lacks fluent and impeccable English
With this food ordering system WordPress plugin from GloriaFood, you can receive unlimited orders and reservations for free. Most other plugins would offer free trials on features like receiving orders and reservations. Still, such offers are always limited to a small number of daily or even monthly orders.
We think the menu software from GloriaFood is the best option if you want to use a WordPress restaurant menu plugin for free to complete as many online orders as possible. However, note that you can only receive payments online with a premium upgrade of $29. With the free plan, you can only receive payment in person or cash on delivery. If that’s okay with you, then go ahead and install the plugin.
The GloriaFood plugin offers almost all its features for free; however, this doesn’t mean it’s in any way substandard. It does most of what high-end plugins do — only at a considerably lower price. For starters, online ordering and reservation, templates, and even pre-collected food images are available for free.
Another great feature of GloriaFood’s food ordering system for WordPress is the broad menu customisation option. If your cuisine has a complex collection of preferences, this may be the best plugin for your restaurant. The themes are designed to accommodate complex dishes (dishes with an extensive option for ingredients).
GloriaFood’s Wordpress restaurant menu plugin also has a simple yet important feature that we haven’t seen in many others. The user interface is so intuitive that customers will use it for the first time correctly without any challenges or need for guidance.
The food ordering system WordPress plugin developed by GloriaFood also saves a lot of time with an autofill option for returning customers. Any of the 11 templates available for use allow you to capture and save certain information to help customers who don’t have their details offhand or appreciate not having to type much whenever they order.
Unlimited free orders online
Free food images available
Simple UI (user interface) with auto-fill
Very limited menu layouts
Users of the RestroPress WordPress restaurant menu plugin can easily manage their profiles and orders as this software already has a pre-built dashboard for this purpose. This means setting up an account is quick and easy, and users can quickly find things they saved, their activities, order status, and much more. Still, the overall user interface doesn’t beat what Menuzen offers.
Although all the plugins reviewed here are somewhat easy to implement, RestroPress offers the most ease. Opt for this plugin if you aren’t tech-savvy or are typically nervous about anything requiring installations and setup.
Both the frontend and backend are intuitive, but here, we’re more interested in the backend. The backend refers to the installation, setup, design, etc., that you do from your WordPress dashboard. These are called backend activities because people don’t see when you do them; they only see the result of those activities displayed on your WordPress website.
An important feature of any plugin is an easy-to-use backend UI (user interface). Some WordPress plugins are pretty complex, which prevents many users from deriving the full benefits of those plugins. However, for the RetroPress restaurant menu plugin for WordPress, it’s easy to understand and use all its current functions — and maybe even future ones.
Another aspect of this WordPress plugin from RetroPress we should mention is the auto page-generating function. The plugin automatically creates several vital pages for your website when you activate it. This saves you time, effort, and any potential frustration while creating web pages.
The RetroPress menu plugin allows you to mark specific add-ons as required options when customers order certain dishes. This is an essential feature if you don’t want to sell some items standalone.
For example, you may include food or drink on your menu to help sell other dishes. Customers who order these items will be prompted to add another dish before placing the order.
Finally, we like the developer-friendly design of the RetroPress restaurant menu plugin for WordPress. This allows for the easy introduction of a custom feature anytime by your website designer or RestroPress’s programmers. It’s a powerful provision for restaurants that need some unusual features added to their digital menu.
Great backend UI
Auto page-creation
Broad custom extensions
Weak customer support
The best WordPress restaurant menu plugins cost quite some money, and most are priced yearly. However, they’re cheaper than most dedicated menu platforms, except Menuzen. In fact, Menuzen users have the option to use the platform for free forever. When you think about your user experience and your profit margins, Menuzen appears to be a better choice for your online restaurant menu needs.
What’s more, menu plugins aren’t always the best options for displaying food items on a WordPress website. Many users have technical issues with plugins, and their support is usually poor. For that reason, we don’t advise anyone to pay for a WordPress restaurant menu template when there are several better options.
With Menuzen, all you have to do is embed your menu link into your chosen WordPress web pages.
If you find the right menu solution, adding it to WordPress is easy; the biggest challenge is identifying the right choices. Once you’ve done that, the next step is to install it (for a menu plugin) in WordPress or generate shareable codes (for both plugins and menu platforms) for embedding into those WordPress web pages where you want to display your menu items. You’ll get the detailed process from your digital menu provider.
While it doesn’t fit the typical definition of a plugin, we’d say Menuzen, still. There are several reasons why, some of which you already know if you’ve read our guide this far.For one, Menzen has its own fully comprehensive website platform. If you want to offer yourself and your customers the complete relaxation of using a digital menu, no plugin would satisfy you the way Menuzen would. This carries more weight when you consider that you can use the platform for free forever, despite its numerous outstanding features and benefits.
How you create a restaurant menu layout depends on the functions offered by your SaaS (software as a service) provider. There are many different types of menu layouts, from simple to complex.
Simple layouts usually use only text and maybe a few images. You can list the dishes in rows with bold headings, prices, descriptions, and pictures. You can also divide them into groups of similar dishes and so on.
The first step to optimising your menu is to do a great job of menu planning. An unplanned or poorly planned menu can’t be optimised no matter how hard you try. Hence, you need to get the planning right, and then other things can fall into place.
Next, your menu’s design ought to obey the design rules. Apart from being simple, clear, legible, and aesthetic, your best dishes should be located at the most visible spots on the menu.
Hear from our customers directly.
Juanita’s Bar Owner
Co-Founder of Always Authentic, Sydney
Menuzen is the world's first Menu Experience Platform (MXP) that focuses on menu design, management and marketing of the menu. Our platform offers a wide range of features to help businesses of all sizes manage their menus, create stunning designs, and provide a seamless experience for their customers across all online channels.
Menuzen is a versatile platform that can be used by a wide range of businesses and individuals in the food and beverage industry, including:
Menuzen is designed to be user-friendly and accessible to all, regardless of technical expertise. Whether you're a small independent restaurant or a large global brand, Menuzen can help you streamline your menu management and enhance your overall customer experience.
Menuzen is different from other design software because it is an all-in-one platform that offers a wide range of features to help businesses manage menu related data on the go. We focus on top-of-funnel menu management to help you replace your PDF/JPG menus with dynamic, interactive menus that can be updated in real-time and create a branded experience for your viewers.
Take a look at some comparisons between Menuzen vs Canva.
No, Menuzen is not an ordering or delivery app or service. Our platform focuses on creating and managing the core menu design and brand experience for food service businesses.
We help link all of your services to one menu and simplify the decision and customer journey for your customers, allowing them to easily select their preferred method of ordering, delivery, booking, call, WhatsApp message, and more.
This ensures a seamless experience for your customers and makes it easier for you to manage all aspects of your business from one central platform.
Menuzen offers a complete solution for menu design, management, and marketing, allowing users to create visually stunning menus, make real-time updates and changes, and reach new customers through targeted channels.
Check out Menuzen's solutions page to see more solutions and features.
Bring your business's story to life with a branded and interactive menu that provides memorable experiences to viewers and turns them into customers.
Claim your Menuzen URL before it’s gone.
Create beautiful, branded and interactive menus that turn viewers into customers.
