You can’t start a business this day and age without a website. But how exactly does a food truck go about setting up a website?
We’ll take you through your food truck website plan, step by step!
Your Website and Your Truck’s Brand Identity
Your website should be a reflection of your truck’s brand. Design elements present in your food truck’s design and your logo should be reflected in your website.
Information that should always be present on your food truck website includes!
- Schedule / Locations. Get specific as possible about what locations you’ll be at and when. Even better, include Google Maps rich snippets to show your exact location that users can navigate to in order to grab a bite. There are many plugins that can help you add Google Maps to your site easily.
- Menu. Show your food truck menu, as well as your catering menu (and your restaurant menu, if you have a brick and mortar location).
- Photos. High-quality. Considering hiring a photography student to take some gorgeous photos that
- Responsive Design / Mobile Friendly. The vast majority of your customers will be looking for your food truck on their mobile phone, so make sure your website is mobile friendly and super easy to read and navigate on a smaller screen.
- Social Media. Consider linking out to your social media channels, where website visitors can get more recent, instant news about your locations, hours, and essential truck info.
- Newsletter Opt-In. Don’t forget to set up a mailing list and create opt-in forms that will allow your fans to get the latest scoop on your truck happenings right to their inbox.
- Testimonials. Consider highlighting social proof from loyal fans about how great your food is! Don’t forget to add a few testimonials from folks who have used you to cater events, as that’ll be where some of your big business comes from.
How to Build Your Food Truck Website
Let’s face it, we’re not all web design masters. If you’re a food truck owner, you probably don’t have tons of time to spend messing and tweaking your food truck website. You need it to be up on the web and looking great now – or even yesterday!
Well no worries – we’ll take you through the process of how to set up your food truck website.
Can I Create A Website For Free?
Short answer: no. There are services that allow you to create websites for free, but there are very limited and are not professional enough for a legitimate business. Creating a website for your business isn’t terribly expensive. The free option is most certainly not the best option for a business.
Method #1: One Stop Shop (Difficulty: Easy)
First we’ll be examining the easiest option for getting your food truck website off the ground – going with an all-in-one website building platform. We’ll be specifically looking at two popular options – Wix and Squarespace.
Both of these services are very easy to use, designed specifically for folks with little technical background who are looking for an alternative to the more massive and intimidating self-hosting + WordPress route.
PROS:
Easy Peasy. Both Wix and Squarespace are very easy to use. They cater to non-developers, so they are both great choices for those with little time, interest, or understanding of website maintenance.
Decent Support. Going through a web building platform like Wix or Squarespace also gives you access to their support teams, who can answer questions as they come up.
CONS:
Limited Customization. You can do some customization with Wix and Squrespace, but not as much as you can do with bigger setups like WordPress. However, the customization options provided by these one-stop website builders will likely be plenty for newbies.
Wix
Wix is a website building platform that specializes in making it super easy to create a gorgeous, fancy shmancy website – no coding or techy knowledge needed.
Wix’s main goal is to help non-techies make stunning websites for personal use or business needs.
Pricing: You actually can setup a Wix site for free (all you need is to purchase a domain name). However, we’d highly recommend going with one of their paid plans – specifically the eCommerce $8.50/month package which is designed for small businesses.
You get a free domain with the plan, $300 in ad vouchers (for doing PPC Google ads and Facebook ads), an online store, and have Wix ads removed from the site (this is basically mandatory for any business site – it looks very unprofessional to have another company’s branding on your site).
With this package you also get a form builder tool, which can make it easy to build up your email list.
Squarespace
Squarespace is another option for those looking for a less tech-intensive option. Squarespace prides themselves a lot on their designs, with really sophisticated, stylish websites that you traditionally could only get by hiring a professional designer.
Check out Squarespace’s ice cream truck example to get a feel for just one of the website templates they offer!
Main features:
- Great Bonuses. Squarespace offers really great menu designs and integrates with event calendars, email marketing tools, and even OpenTable reservations.
- Integrates With Online Store. Squarespace websites also come with a fully-integrated online store where you can sell anything from gift cards to food. They can even help you with inventory management and order processing.
- Solid Customer Service. Squarespace offers 24/7 customer service to lend you a hand with any website issues.
Pricing:
Squarespace websites range in cost, from $12 – $40/month depending on your needs. We suggest food trucks go with the $18/month plan.
The $18/month plan (aka Business Plan) includes a free domain, unlimited posts and pages for your site, and $100 in Google AdWords credit, among other things.
Medium #2: Medium – Hard
Another option is to setup your food truck website yourself. You’ll need a few different things to get started:
1. Domain Name
Your domain name is simply the address of your website. Most businesses opt for a .com domain (which we’d recommend), but you can also purchase a number of different domain name extensions, like .net or .info, to name a few.
Domains can be purchased through GoDaddy or other services. They tend to cost around $10 – $15/year.
2. Hosting Service
Hosting services provide the online space to build your website. Think of your domain name as your street address (ex. 36 Tasty Bits Road), and the hosting services as your property (the 100 acres of land).
The hosting services gives you the online web space you need for your site.
I personally recommend Dreamhost (who is my own website host). They make it pretty easy to get setup, have decent chat support, and you can get set up for just $8.50/month.
3. Content Management System
So you’ve bought the address and you’ve bought your land, but now you need to actually build your house, right? That’s where your CMS system comes in! CMS systems are the infrastructure needed to build your site and add content to it.
WordPress is the most popular website creation and CMS system, and it’s free. Best of all, many hosting services make it extremely easy to set up CMS systems like WordPress. Dreamhost offers a 1-click install.
WordPress isn’t necessarily hard to use, but it’s not ideal for beginners either. You’ll want to be at least somewhat tech savvy before barreling into the wonders of WordPress.
PROS:
- Easy to Get Developer Help. If you are interested in hiring someone to help you out with your website (whether managing content or tweaking design), you’ll never have trouble finding someone who understands WordPress – WordPress is basically the Google of the web developing world.
- Lots of Customization Options. If you plan on relying on WordPress for your site’s design, you can select from thousands upon thousands of gorgeous, reasonably priced themes on sites like Theme Forest.
CONS:
- Not The Best For Beginners. WordPress does have a decent learning curve – if you’re not big into computers and aren’t into tech speak, Wordpress can be a lot to handle. Especially when you’re trying to manage your budding food truck biz at the same time!
- Support Isn’t Ideal. Wordpress offers plenty of support through their support forums, but you won’t get an instant response, and combing through existing support answers can be cumbersome. When you purchase a theme, theme creators can provide more responsive support, but most quality theme support ends after 6 months (from that point on, you’ll need to pay for theme support).
- Can Be Pricey. While WordPress itself is free, it does cost money to buy a decent theme (allow $50), and while hosting can start relatively cheap, it can get expensive depending on which service you go with and your traffic/bandwidth needs.
Best Food Truck Themes for WordPress
Themes are like fancy splashes of paint and wallpaper – they can really pretty up your website, and there are a huge number of themes to choose from, some designed specifically for WordPress.
For example, some of our favorite WordPress food truck themes include:
Lunchbox Food Truck WordPress Theme ($60) – My personal favorite! This theme has a lovely design that’s very smooth, slick and attractive. It’s a minimalist design (very popular these days) with an emphasis on epic food photos. It has nice menu options as well as a food truck locator option baked in.
The Food Truck WordPress Theme ($60) – This theme’s simple food truck design is very basic, but includes all the features you need, like the food truck locator, food photo galleries, and a menu.
Food Truck & Restaurant Theme with 20 Styles ($64) – I don’t love the design aspect of this theme as much, but it’s really cool that you can choose between 20 different styles, with each style based off of a different kind of food truck food (there’s a style for tacos, seafood, cupcake, burgers, pizza, bbq, and more). You can also choose from a one-page layout, or a multi-page layout. They also have a built-in food truck locator!
Which is Best?
The best method for your food truck website really depends on your time and interest in mantaing the site.
If you’re not especially techy, short on time, and don’t have an interest in tweaking and fine-tuning your website’s every details, then we’d suggest going with Wix or X.
However, if you’re curious about website design and have had past experience with WordPress or similar CMS systems, WordPress offers tons of flexibility and customization that can be fun to mess with.
Have you ever built a website for your food truck? What option did you choose? Let us know in the comments!
