How To Build A Food Truck Website 2023

You have your catchy name. You have your tasty recipes and your tantalizing menu. You have your food truck all ready to hit the streets. Now you just need hungry customers!

A professional-looking website will help draw extra customers to your food truck and have them lining up down the street. Just read on to learn how to build a great food truck website.

How To Create A Food Truck Site Within 10 Minutes

Follow this section for the quickest setup possible. Setting up your core food truck site is actually pretty easy, follow these step-by-step instructions to have your website ready in under 10 minutes:

• Click to visit JustHost, the hosting company which you’ll put your website on.
• Go to the Get Started Now button and click it.
• Pick the Basic plan if you’re creating one site, or Plus plan if you want to make more.
• Type the website name you want, for example MyGreatFoodTruck.com. Click Next.
• Add your details, choose a plan of 12 months or more to save money, then click ‘Submit’. Note: you can deselect any ‘Package Extras’.
• Next, you’ll need to add WordPress. Find & click ‘Install WordPress’.
• Go step by step through the instructions. We’ll sort your themes & plugins later, so don’t select these.
• Next go to ‘Domains’, then ‘Manage’, then ‘Security’, then toggle ‘Domain Privacy’ to on. This will stop people seeing your personal info.

You rock my friend! You’ve set up a fully functional food truck site in just a few minutes; foodies are truly going to be digging it. 🙂 Once the above is done, you’re ready to move on to picking the design of your website.

Now for the longer version:

How To Build A Food Truck Website With WordPress

Here’s our first tip: don’t be intimidated. Building your website from scratch isn’t that complicated. Gone are the days when only nerdy computer geeks were the ones with the ability to make a website. Today, anyone can do it. You can do it, too. Easily, quickly and cheaply.

There are plenty of companies out there that can help you with your food truck web design. One is called JustHost. With JustHost, you can pick your domain name (your URL) and hosting site. Then you upload WordPress to do the rest.

Your domain name should match the name of your food truck. For example, if your food truck is called Best Burger, your domain name should be BestBurger.com. If someone else already has your domain name, then add your city (i.e., BestBurgerTopeka.com). JustHost also allows you to choose an email address that matches your website. ([email protected])

Many businesses make the mistake of cutting corners and using exclusively WordPress because it’s free. However, it means you will never own your website address. Without JustHost, your domain will suffer, and so will traffic to your site and your truck. If you only use WordPress, your sub-domain name will be BestBurgerTopeka.wordpress.com. Pay the small fees to own your site.

While using JustHost, you may also want WHOIS privacy protection. This will protect your private information that you are required to disclose when you set up your domain name. We recommend you do this.

Then you can upload WordPress with just a click of a button on the JustHost website and you are ready. The skeleton is in place, and it’s time for you to start building a delicious food truck website!

Elements You Need on Your Food Truck Website

• Tell your story: Introduce yourself to your customers and share your passion for food. A food truck order is an individual experience, and the more your customers feel they know you, the more inclined they will be to become regulars.
• Menu & Prices: This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many times this is overlooked. This is the place where you sell your food and describe every succulent detail. Visitors to your website will decide right there and then that your food is what they need!
• Location/map: Your food truck is a mobile business and moves around. Make sure to post where you will be. If you have a regular route, post your schedule to your site. Stick to it, as customers who show you at a location to find you’re not there are sure to be disappointed. Some functions can show your customers where you are with interactive maps.
• Photos: What does your food truck look like? That’s how people will find you. Make sure there are good quality, high-resolution images of your truck and your food.
• Contact Us: Give website visitors a place to ask questions. This builds a personal relationship between you and your customers. Just remember to respond!

3 Plugins To Look For In Your Food Truck Website Design

1. WooCommerce: This is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for small to medium-sized businesses. It allows you to sell your products online. For example, sell gift cards online that customers can then bring with them to your food truck window. It’s free and easy to use and has some great add-ons that you can pay for. Many themes on WordPress can use WooCommerce (and some don’t).
2. WPBakery: This is one of the top-selling plugins on WordPress. Why? It has an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop method of website building. You can create stunning, customized elements for your website in minutes.
3. Geolocation: This plugin gives you the ability to show your customers where you are using an interactive map. You can geo-tag your site to show where you are in real-time.

7 WordPress Themes That Will Make Your Food Truck Stand Out

WordPress has several mouth-watering themes that can help you with your food truck website design. These themes take a lot of the design work off your hands.

You don’t need to know complicated computer codes or language. It’s as simple as choosing a theme and filling in the blanks with your information.

Let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress themes for food truck website design.

Food Truck

As its name implies, this theme is specifically designed for food trucks. It has a crisp, clean look that is easy to navigate. It is a simple design offering just one home page variation.

There is a ton of space for images in the default design, and the hover images are creative and relevant.

If you want to customize the site, you’ll have to do it manually, but don’t worry, it’s easy. The Food Truck theme comes with a WPBakery page builder. Use it to individualize and customize your unique page. You can do some pretty cool stuff thanks to the fact that the page builder is built over frameworks such as HTML5 and CSS3.

The theme is elegant and straightforward and will help you tell your story to visitors and show them what they want to see. You can use maps to show visitors your truck’s location.

Restaurants, as well as food trucks, may find this theme the best and easiest to use.

Lunchbox

Opening up the Lunchbox theme will certainly make your customer’s experience more manageable. It gives your website everything your visitors could want. It provides an extra page for a menu and showcases your truck’s location, all in a slick, uncluttered design that is easy on the eyes.

More importantly, it allows your customers to order from your truck online. This theme supports WooCommerce, which is a great add-on that makes online ordering easy and fast.

You’ll love the menu page. There is plenty of space to describe your tasty dishes and explain the pricing. It’ll make your website visitors hungry just by looking at the options! Using the mega menu option, you can organize your dishes in rows and columns.

Stego

The creator of Stego thought of everything, so you don’t have to. All the basics are already in the template, so you can focus on your unique content and launch your website quickly and effortlessly.

You can choose three food truck variations from this theme, so one is bound to be right for you.

Site customization is unlimited. You can choose your fonts, colors, buttons, galleries, spacing, and menus. There is no support for WooCommerce, but it may be coming soon.

Fast Food

Even if you don’t sell burgers and pizzas, this theme may still be right for you. It is bold and colorful with large text and flashy design effects.

Promote your food and special offers loudly. Visitors to your website won’t miss them. There are four variations you can choose from. One of the variations is specifically designed for food trucks.

There is plenty of space to showcase photos of your truck and your food. The theme also has a handy cost calculator tool. Users can choose what they want and see what the price will be before they order.

Use the open Table reservation plugin to allow customers to make an order reservation, or you can use the plugin to announce and invite people to special events.

Fast Food supports Bold page builder but only for minor changes and customizations. WooCommerce is alive and well in this theme to make your job even more comfortable.

Food Truck & Restaurant

Retro is now. Use popular retro-designs with the Food Truck & Restaurant theme. It may be a bit clunky, but the framework gives this package a young feel.

There are 20 home page designs to suit almost any food truck serving any type of food. There’s not much difference between the 20 designs, but each one is tweaked to suit a particular menu specialty. You can pick a one-page version or a multi-page version.

Food Truck & Restaurant supports WooCommerce and uses WPBakery page builder to customize any element you want.

Madang

Madang is a unique theme. Besides showcasing your truck and your menu, Madang focuses on nutrition. If your food truck specializes in healthy, nutritious food, then Madang is the theme for you. It may be why it’s one of the best-selling WordPress themes for businesses in the food industry.

The theme automatically incorporates meal-planning to help your customers choose the healthiest food possible. There are also fun facts on nutrition and a dietician program filter.

Some great front-end editing and customization are possible using the SiteOrigin page builder.

Gastrobar

This one is a fun one. Get creative and use your imagination to create a unique website. Gastrobar features 12 homepage variations with individual interactive design elements that will keep visitors engaged and ensure that your food truck brand sticks in people’s minds. Your personality will undoubtedly shine through here.

One variation features a split-screen design, and another uses tile. A visit to a Gastrobar-theme website is one you won’t soon forget. There are plenty of great fonts to choose from. Even the default font is pretty cool! Plus, you can also use text animation effects to make your site come alive.

The integrations and customizations are easy with WPBakery page builder.

Study These 7 Food Truck Websites For Inspiration

There are some great food trucks on the road that have some pretty cool websites. By looking at other websites, you can come up with your unique ideas.

By no means are we suggesting copying or plagiarizing, but studying what’s on the market can educate you on what you may want (or not like) on your food truck website.

1. Curbside Burgers: This website features excellent photos of their delicious burgers that will make your stomach growl. Right off the home page, visitors can place an order or buy a gift card.
2. Puddin’ Divine Comfort Food: Owner and chef Toyin Allin built this delectable page for her Washington D.C. food truck using customized colors and fonts and some innovative zoom effects on her images. A great photo of her vehicle greets the visitor. Yummy.
3. Olly’s Mini Donuts:  You’ll crave those small warm bundles of sweetness after seeing this website. The Grand Rapids, MI food truck features a lovely calendar right on the front page telling customers where they’ll be.
4. Tacoholics: All the essential information is right there on the front page. It’s simple, straightforward, and doesn’t give the visitor extraneous information. It’s all about the tacos!
5. Balu’s Surf Shack: The site has a simple design and is easy to navigate. What do you think of the zoom effects on the photos? It’s a feature you can use with many of the themes, but be careful as they can become distracting.
6. Triple Jay’s Pizza:This Atlanta pizza joint has a fantastic website that is easy to navigate with great photos.
7. The Cookie Bar: This Las Vegas food truck does a great job promoting its alcohol-infused treats. You can shop for your favorite cookie in the gallery and make an order.

Common Mistakes When Building Your Food Truck Website

While you’re on the road to creating your personal food truck website avoid these potholes:

• Not owning your domain name: There are many website developers out there who will promise to take care of everything. They don’t tell you that they will purchase your desired domain name but on their account. Down the road they may try to sell it back to you, or you could lose it all together. Own your domain.
• Not owning your server: This is why we recommend JustHost as a starting point for your website sign. It gives you control of your server and gives you a domain name that isn’t a sub-domain.
• Not using an open-source content manager such as WordPress: Outsourced web designers may try to use a closed-source design program, which means you will not be able to make your own modifications or changes down the road without proper access. Open-source programs such as WordPress give you all the tools you need to create a great website so insist on using them.
• Create a blog site separate from your website: It’s a common mistake. Business owners will create their website and ignore it, and will create a secondary site for blogging. It dilutes the brand and is confusing for users. Combine the two features. WordPress makes adding bog pages easy.
• Outsourcing your copywriting: It’s your truck. It’s your food. It’s your voice. Don’t let someone convince you to outsource the text that will be on your site. Oftentimes copywriting is outsourced to writers in foreign countries who don’t speak English that well. Tell your own story in your own words.

How To Build A Food Truck Website, Final Thoughts

Your food truck website is an important part of your marketing strategy and should not be ignored or underestimated. Building your own food truck website these days is easy, fast and fun. It’s also an affordable way to connect with existing customers and to create new ones.

Don’t be intimidated. We’ve laid out what you need to do to get started. You can have your own food truck website up and running today if you wanted. And you can always make changes, add features and change photos as you go. A website is an ever-changing advertisement for your businesses. Bon appetit and bon voyage!