Local Restaurant Chain

CASE STUDY

Local Restaurant Chain

A multi-location restaurant chain’s website was frustrating hungry customers with slow menu and location pages. Mobile users — their primary audience — were abandoning the site before finding nearest locations or viewing the menu.

The Problem

This restaurant chain had 12 locations and a WordPress site that served as their primary menu and location finder. The site loaded in 7.4 seconds on mobile — an eternity for someone trying to find a nearby restaurant or check the menu. The site was bloated with five unused plugins, uncompressed images of menu items, and a theme that loaded three separate font families. Google Business Profile drove significant traffic to the site, but analytics showed 68% of mobile visitors were leaving within 3 seconds.

Our Approach

We performed a comprehensive audit and found low-hanging fruit everywhere. We removed five inactive plugins that were still loading scripts, compressed and converted all menu item photos to WebP (reducing total image weight from 45MB to 3MB), consolidated three font families into one variable font, implemented browser caching headers and Cloudflare CDN, rewrote the location finder to use a lightweight JavaScript solution instead of a heavy plugin, and added proper lazy loading for below-the-fold menu images.

The Results

PageSpeed soared from 28 to 96. Load time dropped from 7.4s to 0.9s. The mobile bounce rate decreased from 68% to 35%. Online order click-throughs from the menu page increased by 42%, and the owner reported that customer complaints about the website completely stopped.