Your first hour
The order to do things in on a fresh installation, and what can safely wait.
Before anyone else logs in
These four decide how everything else behaves, and two of them are awkward to change once you have live data. Do them first.
- Check the business model is the one you meant. Every install starts as a marketplace. It is under Quickmunch → Monetisation → Business model; change it now if it is wrong — see Choosing a business model.
- Set currency and time zone. Currency under WooCommerce → Settings → General, time zone under Settings → General. Every price, report and opening hour is read through them, so getting this wrong makes a whole evening's orders look like they happened at the wrong time.
- Turn off what you do not sell. Under Quickmunch - Theme Options → Restaurant → Restaurant Settings, delivery, pickup and dine-in, reservations, loyalty, restaurant sign-up and sponsored ads each have their own switch. What you switch off now, your customers and staff never see — see Turning features on and off.
- Set permalinks. Settings → Permalinks → Post name, then save. The dashboards live at their own addresses and do not exist without it.
Before you take a real order
- Make email reliable. WordPress sends through your server's own mail, which many hosts deliver badly. Install an SMTP plugin from the WordPress plugin directory and connect it to your mail provider, then set the sender's name and address under Quickmunch - Theme Options → Emails → Sending. Send yourself a test: a customer who orders and hears nothing assumes it failed.
- Choose your payment methods. Under WooCommerce → Settings → Payments. Cash on delivery works with no account at all. For card payments, install a gateway from Appearance → Install Plugins — see Payments & gateways.
- Fill in your contact details. Under Quickmunch - Theme Options → Integrations → Contact Information — phone, email, address and opening hours. They appear on the storefront.
- Place one test order end to end. Order as a customer, watch it arrive in the restaurant's Orders screen, move it through to delivered, and check the email arrived.
What can wait
None of this blocks a first order, and all of it is easier once you have real content to look at:
- Branding — logo, colours and type, under Quickmunch - Theme Options → Header and General.
- Homepage layout, pages and the blog.
- Loyalty, deals and sponsored placement.
- SMS, AI features and the map key.
- Translations — see Languages.
If you imported the demo, remember it is there. Sample
restaurants and dishes make every screen look alive while you learn the product, but they also sit
in your storefront and your reports. Clear them before you go live — see
Maintenance mode & backups.
How long this actually takes
Setting up is a single sitting, not a project. The figures below are for someone doing it for the first time, reading as they go.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| First 10 minutes | Business model, currency and time zone, the feature switches, and permalinks. These are the ones that are awkward to change later. |
| Next 20 minutes | An SMTP plugin and a test email, your payment methods, your contact details. |
| Then 10 minutes | Branding — upload your logo, set the accent colour. That is genuinely all it is. |
| Same session | Add your first restaurant and one test order end to end, so you have seen the whole loop work. |
Building a real menu is the only part that takes real time, and that is data entry rather than setup — a restaurant with sixty dishes will spend longer on photographs than on everything above put together. Import menu exists for exactly that reason.