10 Best WordPress Restaurant Menu Plugins to Provide Great Online Experience

On the lookout for the best WordPress restaurant menu plugin?

The COVID-19 pandemic prevented people from eating out. As a result, takeaways and home food deliveries boomed, but despite easing restrictions, there is no sign of that slowing down. And how have people been ordering their food? Online, of course!

As such, your restaurant must have an excellent online presence if it is to stand out from the crowd. The first step toward achieving this is using a WordPress restaurant menu plugin that will allow you to show your customers exactly what your food business offers.

What Else Can Menu Plugins Do?

Once your customers have selected what they want from the menu, wouldn’t it be great if they could place the order from that menu without even having to pick up the phone? Well, the great news is, such functionality is not just for the large restaurant chains, and many of the plugins we will be discussing in this article can also automate the ordering process.

The advantages of having online ordering are many. The most obvious is you don’t need to drop everything to answer the telephone; instead, you can focus on food production. It is also possible to collect payment online, avoiding wasting time and money on bogus orders. And updating your menu is a breeze, as there will be no reprinting involved. Above all, your customers will have a great ordering experience, and if they are happy, not only are they likely to return to your site, they will tell their friends too.

To assist you in your search for the most suitable WordPress restaurant plugin for your business, we have selected ten of the best that are currently available. All were recently updated, so compatibility issues should not arise.

Orderable

Orderable helps local businesses seamlessly take and process orders online without any added costs. This plugin is designed to help you manage your restaurant online without the steep fees of other ordering systems. 

Orderable is a plug-and-play solution that allows you to start taking online orders in a matter of minutes. The plugin’s flexible product and menu layouts make it as easy as possible to add beautiful, mobile-friendly menus to your website. The plugin is also fully responsive so your menu adapts to different screen sizes and looks great across devices.

The free version packs an impressive suite of features that can help you get started in no time:

• Zero fee for every transaction
• Mobile design that looks great across devices
• Smooth ordering process
• Create one-off or recurring holiday schedules for your shop
• Set your own fees
• Include your preferred payment getaways
• Instant notifications for new orders

However, you can always upgrade for even more features and functionality should your needs grow. The Orderable Pro single site license costs $149 including a year of updates and support. 

Here are some of the additional features you get with Orderable Pro:

• Product Addons
• Order Bumps
• Time Slots
• Order Flow
• Custom Checkout
• Checkout Tipping
• Timed Products

If you run a local restaurant, café, flower shop, or any other local retail shop, and are looking for a reliable online ordering system, this plugin is definitely worth checking out. 

Since the plugin is relatively new, it currently has over 300 active installations to date and a 4.5 star rating from its users.

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Five Star Restaurant Menu

Using Five Star Restaurant Menu’s straightforward menu builder, creating food and drinks menus on your website becomes child’s play.

This plugin enables you to fully customize the appearance of your menus with images of dishes and drinks, descriptions, prices, and more. In addition, you’ll be able to organize your offerings into categories such as starters, main courses, vegan, dairy or gluten-free, daily specials, etc.

The menus created by this plugin are optimized for all device types, including mobile, something that is very important given most people order from their mobile phone or tablet.

Key features of the free version of Five Star Restaurant Menu include:

• Unlimited menus and items
• Responsive menus work on all device types
• Menus can be added to any page using the included Gutenberg menu block or shortcode
• Add unique photographs and prices to each item on the menus
• Display restaurant sections in the optional sidebar
• Configurable online ordering hours
• Side-screen cart for food orders
• Integrates with the Five Star Business Profile plugin to provide Schema.org menu URLs for enhanced SEO

Upgrading to the premium version costs $40, $130, and $220 per year for one, five, or ten sites, respectively. This version significantly enhances functionality with features such as:

• Additional menu layouts and advanced styling options
• Custom menu fields and flags that allow you to add additional information to menu items
• Enhanced ordering cart functionality: menu item add-ons, accept payments, and display the progress of orders
• Sorting and filtering so customers can easily find what they are looking for
• Icons for dietary and ethical requirements, e.g., halal, kosher, organic, gluten-free, etc.
• Badges to highlight things such as item features, specials, and offers
• Special and discount pricing
• Google maps to promote local suppliers or ethical sourcing programs
• Updates and support

The premium version is available as a 7-day trial, and the developer also gives a 14-day moneyback guarantee, meaning trying it out is risk-free.

Five Star Restaurant Menu is a very popular plugin, with over 10,000 active installations to date and a 4.6/5.0-star rating on the WordPress plugins directory.

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Food Store

Food Store is perfect for takeaway and food delivery restaurants. It is an add-on for WooCommerce and enables you to add menus, ordering, and payments to your site. Customers can then select directly from your menu, choose their preferred delivery/pick-up time, and pay, all from their phone, tablet or computer.

Some features of the free version of this plugin include:

• Works with the complete range of WooCommerce settings
• Tag items as vegetarian or non-vegetarian
• Unlimited item add-ons can be displayed
• Variable pricing
• Various online payment gateways are supported
• Mobile responsive
• Shortcode enabled
• Open source, with hooks allowing for a broad range of customization

Several premium add-on extensions are available from within the plugin. These include:

• Essentials
• Store & Service Hours
• WhatsApp Cart
• Time-Based Menu
• Tips

Remember, your site needs to be a WooCommerce one to use this plugin, but the two together make a potent combination that will give a full-featured, easily scalable website that grows with your business.

Users have given this plugin the full 5.0/5.0 stars, and over two thousand active downloads are in operation.

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WPPizza

As the name suggests, WPPizza originally evolved to cater to pizza restaurants. However, being highly customizable via a wide range of add-on extensions, its use has extended to all types of restaurants.

With WPPizza, you can create and customize fantastic online menus, manage customer’s orders, as well as handle different tax rates, discounts, and gratuities, all from this plugin.

Key features include:

• Create menus with categories, multiple prices per item, and descriptions
• Default, responsive, and grid layouts included
• Accept cash on delivery orders
• Notification of new incoming orders
• Configurable opening and closing for each day
• Collect tips and gratuities
• Offer simple discounts
• Multiple tax rates
• Keep track of online orders
• Order reporting
• Multilingual frontend and WPML compatible.
• Multisite enabled
• Shortcode enabled

A range of extensions is available to extend functionality, such as:

• Add ingredients (e.g., toppings)
• Delivery by Zipcode
• Cross-sells
• Pick-up prices
• Pre-order
• Stock management
• Coupons and discounts
• Timed menu
• Rewards schemes
• Confirm, reject or notify orders
• PDF invoices
• Mailing lists
• Auto-print

While the WPPizza plugin is free, the add-on extensions are annual subscriptions that vary considerably in price. That is also the case with payment gateways. So, while it is great that you can just buy the bits you need, costs can really add up when you add several of them. Therefore, we strongly suggest that you start with the bare minimum, adding the extensions and payment gateways as and when your website scales. If you think you will need quite a few extensions or gateways, the ‘All Access Pass’ would be worth considering. That costs from €199 per annum and gives you access to absolutely everything.

This great little plugin has an excellent reputation, with users giving it a score of 5.0/5.0-star. So far, over two thousand active installations are in operation.

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Restaurant & Café Addon for Elementor

If Elementor is your preferred page builder, then this plugin could be for you. It contains all the elements and widgets you will ever need for creating a fully featured website for your food business.

The free version is, of course, pretty basic, but it does allow you to do the following:

• Create attractive menus
• Gather and display statistics
• Have pricing packages that could be useful for set meals, etc.
• Display opening hours
• Display specialties
• Display pictures and bios of your team, which is an excellent way of building trust
• Display your branch locations
• Testimonials

Upgrading to the Pro version costs $29.99 per year for a single site and adds a bunch of additional features, including:

• WooCommerce integrated restaurant elements: product add ons, filters, food items, and food menus
• More customization options: food banners, sliders, pricing tabs, gift cards, etc.
• Support and updates.

Lifetime and multiple domain packages are also available, as is a 7-day free trial.

Restaurant & Café Addon for Elementor is quite a popular plugin, with over 1,000 active installations to date and a user rating of 4.5/5.0 stars.

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WPCafe

WPCafe is an all-in-one restaurant solution, integrating food ordering, pick-up, and delivery functionality into restaurant sites built around WooCommerce. What’s more, if you have seating, it can also manage your table reservations.

The free version of WPCafe offers the following features:

• Create and manage responsive menus
• WooCommerce food menu and food ordering
• Ordering system for takeaway or delivery
• Customizable Ajax mini cart
• Accept and manage restaurant reservations and cancellations from both front and back end
• Restaurant menu system
• Shortcode enabled
• Includes Elementor widgets and Gutenberg blocks

All of that may well be enough to get you set up. Then, as your business grows, you could upgrade to Pro. This costs between $29.99 and $279 per year, depending on how many sites you need. It adds lots of extra features like:

• Additional menu customization options, including templates
• Customizable customer e-mail notifications for orders, reservations, and cancelations
• Discounts on menu items: percentage or on overall purchase
• Location and category-based food menus
• Live search
• Downloadable PDFs for reservation details
• Shortcode for the advanced reservation form with calendar view
• Export reservations to CSV
• Quick view for variable products
• Support and updates.

A 15-day moneyback guarantee backs Pro subscriptions.

WPCafe has over 2,000 active installations to date, and users have rated it a full 5.0/5.0 stars.

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Food Menu

Food Menu is an easy-to-use plugin that lets you create and display food and drink menus. The menus can be added to templates, posts, pages, or widgets. Moreover, online ordering capability is available via WooCommerce.

Key features of the free version include:

• Shortcode and widget included
• Custom detail page template
• Display all food items, single or multiple categories at a time in a page or post
• Fully responsive for all device types
• Currency selection option
• Custom meta fields CSS
• Shortcode enabled
• Fully translatable, with POT files provided
• Available fields: title, description, category, order, price, excerpt, featured image

A Pro version is available, and the cheapest subscription for that costs $19 per year for a single site. That is good value considering you will get additional features such as:

• Several layouts (grid, masonry, isotope, and slider)
• Layout by category
• Layout preview in shortcode settings
• Custom number of menus per page
• Display image size (thumbnail, medium, large, full, and custom image size), including a resizer
• Visual composer add-on
• Isotope layout features search field, filter button, show all button
• All fields control
• Control overlay color and opacity, text color and size, button color
• Default image set option in shortcode generator settings
• Enable or disable pagination, including number pagination support
• Ajax pagination
• Single menu item popup
• Support and updates.

Pro subscriptions are discounted by 50% in subsequent years, so you will only be paying $9.50 for the support and updates from the second year for a single site. In addition, a generous 30-day moneyback guarantee provides peace of mind.

Food Menu has an average user rating of 4.9/5.0 stars, and over 1,000 active installations exist.

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Food Online for WooCommerce

As the name suggests, Food Online for WooCommerce is a plugin that allows you to add menus and food ordering capabilities to your restaurant’s WooCommerce site. It’s a relatively basic plugin, with features limited to:

• Insert menus via shortcode on any page, including override the shop page
• Choice of one- or two-column menu layouts
• Customizable menu colors, icons, and borders
• Product attributes allow you to offer things such as different varieties of portion size, protein, sides, etc.
• Compatible with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons plugin
• Mobile and desktop responsive

It is possible to add more features with the Premium version. Costing between $49 and $199, depending on how many licenses you need, Premium gives you the following:

• Google validation and automatic insertion of delivery addresses into the checkout
• Different displays for home delivery, eat-in, or takeaway
• Upsell popups at checkout, e.g., add beverages, sides, etc.
• Set scheduled time slots for delivery or pick up. These can be made available for single or group product categories or tags
• Ability to arrange the order of menu headings in the settings area
• Calculate and display the time until the order will be ready
• Calculate delivery times using Google Maps for either car or bike deliveries
• Allow customers to choose the delivery or pick-up time at checkout
• Six months of support and updates

Food Online for WooCommerce scores an average user rating of 4.1/5.0 stars. Download-wise, over 1,000 are currently active.

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Easy Restaurant Menu Upload

If you are looking for nothing more than a simple way to add your menus to your website, Easy Restaurant Menu Upload could be the plugin you need. It is super basic, as all it does is allow you or authorized employees to upload and manage PDFs of your menus to your site, but it may be all you need.

Key features of the free plugin include:

• Authorize employees as Restaurant Menu Uploaders, allowing them to add menus to the website with no other access to other areas of WordPress
• Support two food or drink menu types, e.g., lunch and a main menu only
• Using shortcodes, place menu links anywhere you wish within WordPress
• Easily change link text in the shortcode.
• Multilanguage support.
• Add descriptive text containing instructions on how to use for the menu uploader
• Optional immediate redirect to the menu upload page after a Restaurant Menu Uploader logs in
• Menus are easy to upload to Media > Easy PDF Menu
• Unlimited domain usage

The Premium version of the plugin offers a tiny amount of enhanced functionality and costs between €8 and €24 for ten or unlimited domains, respectively. For that, you will get the following extra features:

• Updates
• Unlimited food and drink menu types

Easy Restaurant Menu Upload is a relatively new plugin, and as such, only around 200 downloads are in operation. That said, it does have a 5.0/5.0 user star rating.

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Gutentor

Strictly speaking, Gutentor is not specifically a restaurant menu plugin for WordPress – it is, in fact, a collection of blocks and widgets for the Gutenberg page builder. One of these is the Restaurant Menu Widget which allows you to create online menus on your website. That can be combined with any other Gutenberg blocks to really make your restaurant site stand out.

This lightweight, SEO-friendly plugin is entirely free. However, it comes bundled with tons of other handy blocks and widgets, many of which will be helpful on restaurant-type websites.

Gutentor is immensely popular, boasting over 50,000 active downloads to date and an impressive 4.9/5.0 user star rating.

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What’s Your Favorite WordPress Restaurant Menu Plugin?

If you have a restaurant business with a website, are you already using a WordPress food menu plugin? Which one are you currently using, and what have been your experiences with it so far? Have you tried any others previously? If you are still building your site, have any of the plugins we suggested caught your eye? Please go ahead and tell us your thoughts in the comments section below.