I may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.
If you are thinking about starting a Meal Prep Delivery Business, then you are thinking about a website for your new business.
I’ve been supporting my family primarily with a food prep delivery business since 2005, and during that time I’ve had six different versions of our business website.
Let’s dig into the evolution of my food business website so you can avoid the mistakes I’ve made and start with the best possible Prepared Meal Delivery Business Website.
But first let’s make sure we all agree that you need a website and what might be on that website.
Does A Meal Prep Delivery Business Need A Website?
I’m not going to beat around the bush here…
A Meal Prep Delivery Business must have a website regardless of its scale and service area. You need an online place for potential customers to see your menu, understand your ordering process, and perhaps more importantly grow to know, like, and trust you.
What Needs To Be On A Meal Prep Delivery Business Website?
You can clutter up your website with lots of stuff, and when I built the first website for my business it was a cluttered mess.
Nowadays my business website is much simpler and easier for my clients to understand.
Your Business Website Serves Two Groups.
Group #1 – Existing Clients
What these folks need is pretty simple:
- To see any news that might affect their choice to order.
- To see the current menu.
- To be able to order from the current menu.
Group #2 – Potential Clients
- To understand how your service makes their lives better.
- To understand how your service works.
- Ways to make placing their first order easy.
So with these needs in mind, what needs to be on your website?
List Of Essential Items On Your Meal Prep Website
- Current Menu – Your current menu needs to be on the homepage of your website. This is what current customers want to see, and before potential customers want to learn more, they need to be intrigued by your menu.
- News – At the top of my menu, I include the essential information that my clients need to know. I’ve included the ket information below, but you can see the rest on our meal prep business website.
- Order Due Date & Time
- Delivery Area For This Week (ours varies)
- Delivery Date
- First Time Visitor Page – The header at the top of our home page says something like, “First Time Visiting? Start Here!” That takes new potential clients to a sales page that tells them how our meal solutions business makes their lives better.
- How It Works Page – You need one page that is as short and concise as possible where people can figure out how your service works. You probably want to do this with bullet points. These are going to include:
- Service Area
- Contract Requirements
- Order Requirements
- Delivery Method
- An Online Shop – Current and new customers have to be able to order, and in the modern world they expect to be able to order online.
- Contact Information – People are going to have questions, so they need to be able to easily contact you for those answers. You have to have a Phone #, Text #, and Email Address.
Of course you can, and probably will, have other pages on your website, but you need to consider those pages carefully. To much information confuses most people. Keep it simple.
If you do add other pages, they should not be on your menu. They should be linked from essential pages so that those who want more information have the option to find that info.
Don’t confuse the undecided!
So How Do You Build A Website For Your New Meal Prep Business?
You have three choices when creating a business website like this:
- Hire Someone To Build Your Website
- Subscribe To A Service For Your Website
- Build Your Own Website
Now let’s talk about each option for creating a website for your new business.
Hire Someone To Build Your Business Website
I started to tell you that this is the easiest way to make your new business website, but that probably isn’t entirely true.
This is the easiest way to get a custom website. The second option is the easiest way to get a website, but it’s not going to be the website of your dreams. But we’ll dig into that in detail soon. Onward…
You can hire someone to build your website who is really good at building websites.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve hired half-a-dozen or so people/groups to build websites for me. Some were great, some were not.
After all this experience hiring outside-talent, I’ve landed on a few truths about hiring website developers.
- A more expensive website developer isn’t necessarily a better website developer.
- I don’t like working with truly local (in my town) website developers. They want too much of my time and spend too much time trying to talk me into or out of things.
- I don’t mind working with international web developers.
- The easiest way to communicate what you want is by providing links to websites that you like with notes on what you like about those sites.
- I 100% believe that you should only have a custom website designed in WordPress and hosted on your personal account (not on a developer account). I’ve seen too many business owners held hostage by developers who used some odd-ball platform to build a site or some specialized host that a layperson can’t actually use. { To see my recommended website tools Click Here. >>> }
I recommend finding a website developer on a freelancer site. I suggest finding someone who makes lots of websites because you want someone who’s expertise is fast and quality websites.
If this is your first hire to build a website, I suggest that you look at DesignCrowd.
For beginners, DesignCrowd is cool because designers will provide you mockups to choose from. You can get dozens of rough website designs to look at and choose from. If you don’t like any of the designs, they offer a money back guarantee (but be sure to read the restrictions carefully before ordering).
Also, DesignCrowd is Affordable, and you can find website designers starting at just $199!
{Click Here to check out DesignCrowd. >>> }
If you are a more experienced buyer of website design services, I’m a big fan of finding top notch talent on Upwork.
I use Upwork, and highly recommend it.
P.S. If you want me to write a guide on how to hire a website developer on Upwork, please let me know in the comments below.
Subscribe To A Service For Your Website
In full disclosure, I don’t have personal experience using any of these services. I have studied them closely, and considered using them.
However, having started my Meal Prep Delivery Business long before it was cool, I have developed my own website and my own back-end software. I’m just not ready to move off my own systems.
But if I were starting a business from scratch, I’d consider these new services.
The advantage of one of these services is that it’s an all-in-one business software package/application.
All include your Meal Prep Delivery Business Website, and many include recipes, orders, customer tracking, delivery schedules, referral programs, and more. They are really cool.
The downside is that they are not going to be 100% customizable to your dream business. Instead, you’ll be business planning for the software package you are using.
The other disadvantage is that you risk being held hostage by your software provider.
Your provider will 100% control what features are developed on the platform, how it is hosted, and how much it costs.
If at anytime you decide you don’t like the service they are providing your or the cost of that service, you are going to have to figure out how to transfer your whole business to another platform that may not have the same features.
You might have to redesign your whole business if you change platforms.
That’s a big deal.
Now, to be fully transparent, I’m a control freak. My concerns may not be the same as yours.
I fully understand how you might decide that the advantages of one of these services outweigh the disadvantages. If I was starting from scratch, I’d consider each of these.
P.S. If you’d like me to do a more in-depth review of the meal prep services, please let me know in the comments below.
Here are the most popular meal prep delivery applications with links for your convenience.
The Most Popular Meal Prep Delivery Business Apps
| Meal Prep Tech |
| Happy Meal Prep |
| Go Prep |
| Meal Delivery Software |
| Eat Fresh Tech |
| Sprwt.io |
If you know of other Meal Prep Delivery Apps that I should look at, please let me know in the comments below.
Build Your Own Meal Prep Business Website
If you’ve been reading my articles here awhile or have joined my Foodie Business Tribe, you probably know that I’m pretty independent.
With that, it probably comes as no surprise that I build my own Meal Prep Business Website.
The advantage of building your own website is that you can design your website to fit your business plan.
The disadvantage is that your website isn’t going to have all of the features that you’d get from one of the services we talked about above, and perhaps not even the features that you’d a quality freelance website developer.
So what would recommend?
First, I’d recommend that you take another look at the list of ‘truths about hiring freelancers‘ and keep those in mind if you decide to create your own website.
Second, I’d encourage you to look at other Meal Prep Delivery Businesses’ websites. Start by looking at my family business, Magic Meals Home Delivery.
Finally, here are to basic tools that I’d recommend you used when building your own site.
- Website Host – Siteground
- Website Builder – WordPress
- Ecommerce Plugin – Woocommerce
There are tons of videos on YouTube explaining how to build a website, so I’d start there.
- Search on YouTube for “Installing WordPress on Siteground” and watch those videos.
- Search on Youtube for “Installing WooCommerce on WordPress” and watch those videos.
Once you watch those videos, you’ll better know if you feel comfortable building your own business website.
If you do decide to build your own website, or even hire someone else to build your website, I humbly ask that you use my links to Siteground when subscribing to their service.
Siteground is where all of my websites are hosted, and in addition, they are a sponsor of this site. When you set up your account through my links I earn a commission at no additional cost to you. It’s just how you can say thanks for the free advice I share here.
{ Click Here to visit Siteground and subscribe. >>> }
P.S. Start with their cheapest option, you can always upgrade later.
~Stacey
