Case Studies
The Grey Dog Comes Back to Better SEO, Design, and Usability
The story of one NYC restaurant group’s brief experience with SpotHopper.
- Cuisine type:
- Fine Casual
- Locations:
- 5
- Founded:
- 1996
- City:
- New York City
Products Used:
With five locations across Manhattan, The Grey Dog is one of New York City’s favorite places for cozy, quality bites. In 2018, the restaurant launched its website on BentoBox. For years, that was where they housed their menus, catering, gift cards, and merch store.
In the beginning of 2023, the company moved their website to SpotHopper: a restaurant-focused CMS that wowed Grey Dog’s owners with promises of a superior website.
Less than a year later, The Grey Dog ended that relationship and relaunched their website on the BentoBox Marketing & Commerce platform — along the way, learning what goes into a great restaurant website and what gets in the way.
I have more control with BentoBox. I can add content, change the layout — all the customizations that I couldn’t do with SpotHopper.
Johnny Condron
Tech Associate, The Grey Dog
Johnny Condron started his career at Grey Dog as a busser. Within a few years, he worked his way up to become the group’s Tech Associate, where among other duties he manages the restaurants’ websites. Ever since he started working with BentoBox, he’s been a fan.
“BentoBox is an easy-to-use website platform,” he says. “You can integrate or embed whatever you need to in order to launch your website. It’s a very intuitive platform.”
It was one of Grey Dog’s owners who made the decision to switch to SpotHopper. He liked the layout they offered, specifically the full-bleed homepage video that the company offered to produce for free upon signing up. “They said customers were more likely to interact with the website based on the video,” Condron says.
The Grey Dog’s BentoBox homepage at the time of the switch.
SpotHopper’s homepage featured an autoplaying video they produced for The Grey Dog.
The first difference Grey Dog noticed was the cost. “It was twice the price of BentoBox,” says Condron.
Furthermore, the restaurant could not replicate the site structure they had with BentoBox, where each of their five locations had a dedicated page, because SpotHopper would charge for each of them as if they were new websites.
“We just put the info for all the locations on one page,” says Condron. “We didn’t have store-specific pages on SpotHopper.”
BentoBox hosted each location on a dedicated page, navigable from a drop-down.
SpotHopper required The Grey Dog to put all their locations’ information on a single togglable page.
At the time of the change, Grey Dog was using BentoBox for Events Management and Gift Cards. SpotHopper had neither, sending Condron to onboard third-party platforms.
BentoBox’s Gift Card module.
SpotHopper’s link to an external gift card platform on the homepage.
The website’s Menu section — which with BentoBox was a set of editable, mobile-optimized, SEO-friendly, and accessible pages — became a static page displaying a single, non-scalable image.
BentoBox hosted the menu as text on designed and interactive web pages.
SpotHopper hosted the menu as a static image with a PDF download option.
The back end was much less flexible than what Condron was used to.
“Even just adding content boxes to change the layout of our homepage — any kind of customization — was very much not available with SpotHopper,” Condron says. “With Bento, we could change images as we pleased, how many slides are on the homepage, how long the page is; we could edit our own pages.
“Everything in SpotHopper was pretty much locked. You had to go through support in order to make any changes.”
All together, the change from BentoBox to SpotHopper corresponded to an 8% year-over-year decrease in online orders. But the most impactful limitation on a day-to-day basis was one particular workaround.
“The most frustrating thing about SpotHopper, from my perspective, is that they didn't have a Contact Us form with any sort of filtering,” says Condron. “It was just our email written at the bottom of the page. Any web crawler can grab that and send us random stuff. We got 20-plus emails a day from that.”
BentoBox’s Contact Us form kept The Grey Dog’s email address off the website.
In lieu of a Contact Us form, SpotHopper put the company’s email address in the footer.
Ironically, it was that very email spam that led The Grey Dog back to BentoBox.
“We would get a dozen emails every day saying our site was not good for SEO,” says Condron. When the owners began engaging with one such SEO agency, “they recommended that we change our site because SpotHopper was not optimized for that.”
The owners had seen enough. “The SEO firm has already said the new BentoBox site is going to be significantly better,” Condron says.
The Grey Dog’s new BentoBox site features the same full-bleed homepage video they wanted from SpotHopper.
Now back on BentoBox, The Grey Dog is looking forward to a return to easy customization, better SEO, and no more spam emails.
“There are a lot of reasons we’re switching back,” Condron says. “I have more control with BentoBox. I can add content, change the layout — do all the customizations that I couldn’t with SpotHopper.
“I’m happy to be coming back.”
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