What you are building
A restaurant directory where every listing has a structured profile: cuisine, price band, opening hours, accepted payments, dietary tags, full menu, photo gallery. Reviews break down by food / service / ambiance / value the way diners actually evaluate dining out. Restaurant owners claim their listing, respond to reviews, manage their hours.
Think Yelp, but on WordPress, with the schema and reviews aligned to how restaurants are actually compared.
Why generic listing plugins fall short
Most directory plugins treat a restaurant the same as a contractor: a name, address, phone, photo. That misses everything that matters to a diner. A restaurant needs:
- A cuisine taxonomy that drives a filter, not just a tag
- A price band that fits the search facet vocabulary ($ / $$ / $$$ / $$$$)
- Opening hours with day-of-week breakdown + Open now badge logic
- Reviews that distinguish food quality from service speed
- Photo galleries that don’t bury the menu under stock images
Listora ships the restaurant listing type with all of that out of the box.
What Listora delivers out of the box
Restaurant-vertical fields. Cuisine (Italian, Japanese, BBQ, vegetarian, etc.) as a filterable taxonomy. Price band as a faceted chip. Business hours with timezone-aware Open now badge. Dietary tags (vegan, gluten-free, halal, kosher). Menu URL + photo gallery + map pin.
Multi-criteria reviews (Pro). A restaurant review form prompts for Food, Service, Ambiance, Value separately - each on a 5-star scale. The detail page renders the breakdown so a diner sees that yes, the food is 5 stars but service is 3, which is honest signal a generic 4.0 average hides.
Photo reviews (Pro). Reviewers attach photos of dishes. Detail pages render review photos in a gallery alongside the owner photos. Visitors trust review photos more than owner marketing shots.
Business claims + owner reply. Restaurant owner claims their listing, gets the dashboard to update hours, respond to every review, upload new menu photos. Builds the trust signal that converts.
Anti-spam tuned for restaurants. The 6-layer stack catches the typical spam patterns - fake reviews from competitor IPs, bot-submitted listings, off-topic keyword stuffing. Akismet integration handles the comment side.
Pro extras that pay back the license
- Verification badges. Admin-defined badges like Verified Owner, Editor’s Pick, Top Rated. Render on cards + detail pages + as a search facet.
- Side-by-side comparison. Diners heart-save up to 4 restaurants and hit Compare to see prices, ratings, hours, distance in one table.
- Saved searches. Repeat visitors save a search like “Italian, $$, 4+ stars, Open now” and get a daily alert when a new listing matches.
- Lead capture. Per-listing reservation request form. Goes straight to the owner, conversion tracked per listing.
Where the money is
Three ways to monetize:
- Restaurants pay for featured placement. Featured rotation through prime carousel slots. 100 credits per 60-day cycle.
- Sponsored listings on category pages. Top of the “Italian restaurants” results page for a city. 200 credits per 90-day cycle.
- Verified owner badge. $19 / month subscription that includes the badge + analytics + lead capture.
All of it runs through Pro’s credit ledger + 7 payment adapters. No payment-stack engineering required.