Are you planning to build an online food ordering website, but not sure where to start with WordPress?
More customers now prefer ordering food online instead of calling. If your website does not support online orders, you risk losing customers to places that do.
A well-structured food ordering website lets you show your menu clearly, take orders without friction, and manage everything from one dashboard.
In this guide, you will learn how to build an online food ordering website in WordPress using WPCafe. By the end, you will know how to set up a user-friendly ordering system that helps you take more orders and run your restaurant more smoothly.
To make food ordering management even easier, WPCafe can also work with Bit Flows automation tools. By using WPCafe events in Bit Flows, restaurants can automatically handle updates, notifications, and data syncing, keeping operations efficient as order and reservation volume grow.
You do not need a complex setup to start online food ordering. A few core tools are enough.
1. A WordPress website: You need a live WordPress website to begin. If you already have a WordPress site for your restaurant, you can use the same one.
2. WooCommerce plugin (handles orders and payments on your website): If WooCommerce is already installed on your site, you do not need to install it again. WPCafe can read your existing WooCommerce items and automatically show them as food menu items.
Make sure WooCommerce is ready
Note: If you already use WooCommerce, WPCafe can pull your existing products and display them as menu items automatically. This saves time and avoids duplicate work.
3. WPCafe plugin (for restaurant management): WPCafe is an all-in-one restaurant management plugin for WordPress that combines online food ordering, table booking, and delivery management in one dashboard.
Install and activate WPCafe
4. A restaurant-friendly WordPress theme (optional): WPCafe works with most WordPress themes, so you are free to choose what fits your brand.
5. Suggested restaurant themes: Cafesio, Cuinare, Gloreya, Deliciko
Once these are in place, you are ready to start building your online food ordering website with WPCafe.
6. Automation tools like Bit Flows (Optional): To add more power to your food ordering website, you can use Bit Flows. This powerful plugin lets you create fully automated workflows, helping you stay organized and save time.
WPCafe is an all-in-one restaurant management plugin for WordPress that helps you run online food ordering and table bookings from one dashboard. Instead of using separate tools for menus, orders, and reservations, WPCafe keeps everything in one place.
With WPCafe, you can create food menus, accept online orders, manage table bookings, and handle both pickup and delivery with ease. It is fully compatible with WooCommerce, which means you get full control over payments, orders, and customer data.
Moreover, it works well for restaurants of all sizes, from small cafes to full-service chains.
Highlight restaurant-focused features:
Now that you understand why WPCafe is one of the best restaurant management plugins for WordPress restaurant users. So, it’s time to set everything up.
This step-by-step guide shows how to build a complete food ordering website in WordPress using WPCafe. You will learn how to set up menus, enable pickup and delivery, configure payments, add reservations, and start accepting orders from your website.
Your food menu is the first thing customers look for, so it needs to be clear and easy to browse. If you’re not yet adding any items to your WooCommerce products, then add them.
Add food items
Pickup and delivery let customers place orders online and choose how they want to receive their food. You can control schedules, time slots, preparation time, and order rules from one place.
After enabling, pickup and delivery settings will appear under Settings → Pickup and Settings → Delivery. Now configure pickup and delivery rules:
Save the settings and go to configure payments and the checkout process.
This step lets customers pay for their orders securely from your website. WPCafe uses WooCommerce checkout, so you can manage payments and orders from one place.
WPCafe uses the WooCommerce checkout, so customers will see a familiar and secure payment flow.
Offering discounts helps encourage more orders and promote special deals on your menu items. WPCafe lets you create both fixed-amount and percentage-based discounts and control when and where they appear.
Same way, go to WPCafe → Settings & Tools → Modules and enable the Discount module.
Then navigate to Settings → Discounts and click Add New Discount.
In the discount settings, select the discount type (fixed amount or percentage), enter a name such as Breakfast Discount, set the discount value, and apply rules for specific products or categories.
You can also define a date and time if the offer should run for a limited period.
Click Save and Publish to create the discount. After that, open the Discount List and toggle the discount to activate it.
You can simplify your table reservation process by controlling seat capacity, guest limits, booking limits, hold times, button labels, and reservation status from one place. WPCafe also offers a multi-branch restaurant management and Visual Table Layout feature that lets you design your table setup visually and assign reservations more efficiently.
Enable visual table reservation (optional)
This feature allows you to design and manage your table layout in an interactive way. You can add tables, define seating capacity, adjust styles, and link everything directly to your reservation system.
After arranging and styling your tables, click Save Layout from the top-right corner to apply the changes.
This setup helps you avoid overbooking, manage dine-in traffic better, and give customers a clear reservation experience.
*Note: Access to advanced features, such as visual table reservation and other exclusive functionalities, requires the WPCafe Premium version.
Once your menu, ordering, and reservations are ready, the final step is to show them on your website pages so customers can start placing orders.
Now add it to a page:
The same process works for all WPCafe features. You can add your food menu, online ordering, and table reservation forms to any page using the relevant shortcodes.
Once you add the food ordering and reservation sections to your pages, your website is ready to accept real orders.
Take sometimes to test the full flow from menu selection to checkout and reservation confirmation.
When everything works as expected, you can start sharing your website link and begin taking orders directly from your own site.
Bit Flows is a no-code workflow automation tool that integrates with WPCafe. It allows you to automate reservation and order events, connect multiple platforms, and manage follow-up actions from a single workflow.
As reservation and order volume increase, organizing data becomes harder to manage. Bit Flows is deeply integrated with WPCafe and allows you to automate actions based on events without any complex setup.
Bit Flows connects directly with WPCafe and listens to important triggers such as reservation creation, updates, cancellations, and order notifications. Once an event occurs, Bit Flows can run one or multiple actions automatically.
Bit Flows connects with WPCafe and listens to key reservation and order events. These events act as triggers to automate actions across different tools and systems.
Let’s build an automated workflow in Bit Flows by using WPCafe events. Automated workflow helps restaurants track reservations, notify staff, and keep customers informed automatically. It runs in the background and requires no manual follow-ups.
Start by selecting WPCafe as the trigger app in Bit Flows. Choose events like Reservation Created, Reservation Updated, or Reservation Cancelled based on your workflow goal. Here I have selected the Reservation Created event.
To map the data in the workflow, you need to capture a test response by clicking on the “Listen Response” button. Then make a test reservation. Once the event fires, Bit Flows captures reservation details automatically. This includes customer name, date, time, guest count, contact information, and more.
Add a Router to run more than one action at the same time. This allows you to notify staff, update records, and message customers together.
To add a router, navigate to the Tools section in the Bit Flows builder. Drag and drop the Router on the workflow and connect it after the WPCafe Event.
Connect tools like Google Sheets or similar tools to save reservation data. This helps with daily tracking, reporting, and future analysis.
To add actions, click on the + (plus) icon after the router and search for Google Sheet. Select Add Row as the event.
After selecting the event, you need to connect the Google Sheet with Bit Flows by using your credentials. Then, select the spreadsheet and map the fields according to your needs.
You can also add email or messaging apps to notify staff instantly. Bit Flows allows you to connect Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Gmail, Slack, and similar platforms.
Run a test to make sure each action works correctly. You can check the Bit Flows detailed logs to see how the workflow is performing.
This is a simple workflow. You can create more complex and conditional workflows using Bit Flows’ logical tools, such as Delay, Schedule, Condition, and more. You can also integrate AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Deepseek to make your workflow AI-powered.
Building an online food ordering website does not have to be complicated. With WordPress, WooCommerce, and WPCafe, you can manage menus, online orders, payments, and table reservations from one system.
WPCafe helps you take orders and reservations. Bit Flows helps you manage what happens next in a more organized way. By automating events, notifications, and updates, restaurants can save time, reduce mistakes, and focus more on customer experience.
You can start with the basics and add more features as your restaurant grows. This setup gives you full control over your orders and customer experience, without relying on third-party platforms. Once your site is live, keep testing and improving it to make ordering easy for your customers and smoother for your team.
No. You can set everything up using the WPCafe dashboard, settings, and shortcodes. No coding is required.
Yes. WPCafe works with most WordPress themes. You can also use a restaurant-focused theme if you prefer. And it has lots of shortcodes that you use to set up features.
Yes. WooCommerce is required to handle orders, checkout, and payments, but if you only want to take table bookings/reservations with food, you don’t need WooCommerce. WPCafe can handle them inside it.
Yes. WPCafe supports pickup, delivery, and dine-in ordering from the same system.
Yes. You can enable table reservations and manage booking rules, time slots, and seat limits.
Yes. WPCafe is an all-in-one restaurant management plugin for WordPress, capable of handling food orders and reservations. If you require advanced features such as live order notifications, visual table reservations, and more, you can upgrade to the premium plan.
Yes. WPCafe events can be used in Bit Flows as triggers. This allows restaurants to automate actions after reservations or order updates.
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