Your Ad Won the Click. Did Your Website Win the Order?

Illustrative scenario: your ad for a new family box gets a tap. The link opens your social profile, then a menu saved as a file. The customer zooms in to read it, can't see the price of the larger size, and finds a button that says “Order on WhatsApp”. They're hungry and on their phone. They close it and open a delivery app instead.

The ad did its job. Everything after it made ordering harder than it needed to be.

Walk the journey yourself

Before changing anything, follow the path a customer takes, on an ordinary phone and on mobile data rather than the restaurant Wi-Fi: ad or profile, landing page, menu, item choice, details, confirmation. Write down every moment you hesitate, scroll back, or have to guess.

Land where the ad promised

If the ad shows the family box, the link should open the family box, or at least its category, not the home page. Every extra tap between the promise and the product is a chance to lose interest.

Make it quick on a phone

Speed is part of the experience. Google's web.dev guidance treats a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less as good, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads and reported separately for mobile and desktop. You don't need to become a performance expert, but if the menu takes a long time to appear on a mid-range phone, it's worth fixing before spending more on ads.

Make every choice impossible to misread

• Show sizes, options and add-ons with their prices, so the total never surprises anyone.
• Make it obvious which choices are required and which are optional.
• Use photos that match what arrives, and short, plain descriptions.
• Hide or mark items that aren't available today, instead of letting customers find out after ordering.

Ask only for what you need

Long forms cost orders. In its 2024 e-commerce checkout research, the Baymard Institute found that the average checkout contained 11.3 form fields, while most sites need only 8, and that 17% of users had abandoned an order because the checkout was too long or complicated. That research covers online shops in general, not restaurants, but the lesson applies: a restaurant order usually needs a name, a phone number, delivery or pickup details and an optional note.

Make delivery and pickup unmistakable

• Show delivery areas, fees and any minimum order before checkout, not after.
• For pickup, show where and roughly when the order will be ready.
• Show opening hours, and what happens if someone orders when you're closed.
• After the order is submitted, tell the customer what happens next and how they'll hear about it.

Where Zad. Online fits

Zad. Online gives a restaurant its own branded ordering website, with its own link and QR code, a choice of layouts and themes, and the restaurant's logo and colours. It's built for phones, so customers order without installing an app. The menu supports categories, photos, sizes and add-ons, with the correct price for every choice, and customers add delivery details at checkout.

Customers sign in with their phone number and a verification code, which builds the restaurant's own customer list. Loyalty stamps and promo codes help bring them back, and customers can follow their order's status through WhatsApp or SMS updates. Orders arrive in the dashboard and as organised WhatsApp messages.

Zad. Online doesn't need Zad. Plus and can run next to the system you already use, although running alongside another system doesn't mean the two are connected. It can connect to Zad. Plus through an API. A better ordering page won't guarantee more orders, but it removes reasons for a customer to leave.