What you are building
A restaurant directory where every listing has a structured profile: cuisine, price range, opening hours, reservations, delivery and takeout, a menu link, 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 field that drives a filter, not just a tag
- A price band that fits the search facet vocabulary ($ / $$ / $$$ / $$$$)
- Opening hours with day-of-week breakdown + Open now badge logic
- Reviews that distinguish food quality from service speed
- Photo galleries that don’t bury the menu under stock images
Listora ships the restaurant listing type with all of that out of the box.
What Listora delivers out of the box
Restaurant-vertical fields. Cuisine (Italian, Japanese, BBQ, vegetarian, etc.) as a filterable multi-select. Price range as a facet. Business hours with an Open now indicator. Reservations, delivery and takeout as yes/no fields. Menu URL, photo gallery and map pin.
Multi-criteria reviews. You can give the restaurant type its own criteria, so the review form asks for Food, Service, Ambiance and Value separately, each on a 5-star scale. Pro adds ready-made criteria sets and a breakdown chart on the detail page so a diner sees that yes, the food is 5 stars but service is 3, which is honest signal a generic 4.0 average hides.
Photo reviews (Pro). Reviewers attach photos of dishes. Detail pages render review photos in a gallery alongside the owner photos. Visitors trust review photos more than owner marketing shots.
Business claims + owner reply. Restaurant owner claims their listing, gets the dashboard to update hours, respond to every review, upload new menu photos. Builds the trust signal that converts.
Anti-spam on submissions. Honeypot, rate limits, a keyword blacklist and a URL-density cap guard listing submissions and the contact form by default, catching bot-submitted listings and off-topic keyword stuffing. CAPTCHA and Akismet join in once you set them up.
Pro extras that pay back the license
- Badges. A Verified badge for owners you have checked, plus rule badges such as Top Rated, New and Claimed. They render on cards and detail pages, and visitors can filter to verified listings.
- Side-by-side comparison. Diners add 2 to 4 restaurants to compare and see prices, ratings and hours in one table.
- Saved searches. Repeat visitors save a search like “Italian, $$, 4+ stars, Open now” and get a daily alert when a new listing matches.
- Lead capture. A per-listing enquiry form, emailed straight to the owner, with each lead counted per listing.
Where the money is
Three ways to monetize:
- Restaurants pay for featured placement. A Featured plan sorts the listing ahead of standard ones. 100 credits per 60-day cycle.
- Longer sponsored runs. A 90-day Featured plan with “Sponsored” badge text. 200 credits per cycle.
- Paid renewals. Listings expire at the end of their plan, and owners spend credits to renew.
All of it runs through Pro’s credit ledger, with seven ways to take payment: Stripe and PayPal built in, plus five plugin adapters. No payment-stack engineering required.