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Case Study · Restaurant · Archived (2024)
Deli Counter Orlando
Premium sandwiches, built to order.
A fast, appetizing WordPress site for a Boar's Head-quality Orlando sandwich shop. Live SpotOn POS menu integration, custom catering and contact forms, a built-in English/Spanish live translator, and on-page SEO tuned for local lunch searches.
Archived case study — the client has since moved their website to an industry platform vendor (Owner.com). We designed and operated this build through its original life on ProDesigning.
At a glance
Project snapshot
2024
Design + build year
EN/ES
In-page bilingual translator (no separate /es/ site)
Live
SpotOn POS-driven menu sync
<1s
Mobile menu page load on 4G after optimization
The challenge
A premium sandwich shop with a generic online presence
Deli Counter had the food and the following — Boar's Head quality, loyal lunch regulars, and a steady local reputation. What they didn't have was a website that looked like the product. Menu updates were slow, specials weren't visible, there was no bilingual option for a strongly bilingual neighborhood, and the contact forms on the old site barely worked.
The brief: make the site as appetizing as the sandwiches, keep the menu always in sync with the POS, make it accessible in English and Spanish without forcing a separate site, and get the food ranking in local search. The constraint: this is a small operator, not a chain. Whatever we built had to be maintainable by one or two people without dedicated marketing staff, and it had to load instantly on the lunch-rush mobile network.
There was a second constraint: lunch is a fast-decision purchase. A sandwich shop loses customers in seconds, not minutes. If a hungry searcher pulls up the site on their phone and waits more than two seconds for the menu, they're already looking at someone else. Performance wasn't a "nice to have" in this brief — it was the brief.
What we built
WordPress, done with care
Custom WordPress build
No bloated theme, no page-builder drag. A custom theme keyed to the Deli Counter brand — warm palette, big food photography, typography that actually reads on a phone walking into lunch rush. Every plugin we shipped earned its place; no abandoned page builders, no unused widget bundles.
Live SpotOn menu integration
Menu pulled straight from SpotOn POS so pricing, item availability, and specials stayed accurate automatically. No double-entering prices, no stale PDFs, no "sorry we're out of that" after the customer already drove over. The kitchen edits the menu in the system they already use; the site reflects within minutes.
Built-in English/Spanish translator
A live on-page language switch — the whole site (menu items, descriptions, hours, contact) flips between English and Spanish without a separate /es/ site or Google Translate popup. Fast, clean, and served to the neighborhood the way the neighborhood actually reads. Translations curated, not auto-generated, on the menu items where wording mattered.
Custom contact & catering forms
Custom forms for general inquiries, catering requests, and private event bookings — each with its own validation, spam protection, and routing rules. Catering inquiries went to the manager directly; general questions went to a shared inbox. No off-the-shelf form plugin feel; the forms matched the rest of the brand and didn't hand customer data to a third-party form aggregator.
On-page SEO & schema
Restaurant schema, Menu schema on menu items, LocalBusiness markup with hours and cuisine categorization, Google Business Profile tuned, and Core Web Vitals green across the board. The base for ranking in Orlando lunch searches without spending a dollar on paid acquisition.
Mobile-first performance
Most sandwich lookups happen on a phone, mid-hunger. Image compression, deferred scripts, lazy-loaded photography, aggressive caching, Cloudflare in front of everything — so the menu shows up in under a second on 4G. The difference between "let's go here" and "let's find somewhere else."
Under the hood
Tech stack & integrations
| Layer | Stack | Why |
|---|---|---|
| CMS | WordPress with fully custom theme — no Elementor, no Divi, no Visual Composer | Lightweight, fast, easy to maintain — and easy to migrate later if the business needed |
| Menu sync | SpotOn POS API → scheduled menu pull → on-page rendering with caching | Single source of truth (the POS); no parallel content for the team to maintain |
| Bilingual | In-page language switcher with curated translations on key strings | Faster + cleaner than a /es/ subsite; no Google Translate quality issues |
| Forms | Custom-built, validated, spam-protected, with role-based routing | Catering goes to the manager; general questions go to a shared inbox |
| Photography | Custom food photography optimized to WebP / AVIF, lazy-loaded | Real photos of real sandwiches — the differentiator over stock-photo competitors |
| Hosting | Managed enterprise hosting + Cloudflare CDN + SSL | Daily backups, security patching, uptime monitoring, sub-second 4G load |
| SEO | Restaurant + Menu + LocalBusiness schema, on-page SEO, GBP alignment | Local pack visibility for "deli near me" / "sandwich shop Orlando" without paid spend |
How it ran
Project timeline
1
Weeks 12: discovery, photography, and content audit
Discovery on the brand, the customer base, and the actual lunch-rush mechanics — who searches at what time, what the typical first-time customer asks, what the regulars take for granted. We did food photography during this window because stock images were never going to work for a Boar's Head-quality shop.
2
Weeks 34: design rounds in real browsers
Two design rounds, mobile-first, reviewed in actual phones in actual lighting (not just on a designer's monitor). Brand alignment with what the shop already used, with refinement on type and color where it would help readability mid-bite.
3
Weeks 56: build + SpotOn integration
Custom WordPress theme build, SpotOn POS API integration with menu sync and caching, custom forms with validation and routing, the in-page bilingual translator with curated strings on key menu items. End-to-end QA from the team during this window.
4
Week 7pre-launch + SEO foundation
Schema markup added end to end, Google Business Profile tuned with current hours and cuisine categorization, photography uploaded to GBP, soft launch to a staging URL where the team could click through. Performance pass for Core Web Vitals — every image, every script, every cache rule.
5
Week 8cutover + first lunch rush
DNS cutover Tuesday afternoon (low traffic, a full week to monitor before peak). Live verification, sitemap resubmission, GBP update. The first lunch rush after launch was the real test — sub-second menu load, working forms, accurate menu pricing — all held up.
6
Step 6Ongoing (until handoff): care, content, monitoring
For the duration of the partnership, we handled hosting, security, performance, content, and SEO. The site stayed clean, fast, and accurate. Eventually the client made a strategic decision to move to an industry platform vendor for reasons that fit where they were headed as a business; the case study stands as a template for what a lean, custom-WordPress restaurant site can do when the details get actual attention.
The outcome
A site the regulars actually used
The menu stopped being a support ticket. Customers checked specials on their phones from the parking lot. Spanish-speaking regulars got the same clean experience as everyone else without being shuffled to a half-translated subsite. Catering inquiries stopped getting lost. The site loaded fast, ranked locally, and looked like the sandwiches.
A few things stood out during the build's life on ProDesigning's stack:
- Mobile menu load consistently under a second on 4G. The kind of speed that wins lunch-rush comparison searches against competitors with bloated platform-vendor sites.
- Bilingual adoption was meaningful from launch. The Spanish toggle saw real traffic — not a vanity feature, an actual customer experience improvement that the neighborhood used.
- Catering inquiries became actionable. Forms routed correctly, spam was filtered out, and the manager could respond quickly to the inquiries that actually represented revenue.
- Local search visibility climbed. Schema + GBP alignment + real photography moved the shop into the local pack for the lunch queries that mattered most.
The client eventually chose to move their website operations to an industry platform vendor — a decision that fit where they were headed as a business. We designed and ran this build through its life with us, and it stands as a template for what a lean, custom-WordPress restaurant site can do when the details get actual attention.