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Menu, location, table. In that order.

Someone on your website is usually deciding where to eat in the next few hours, on a phone, possibly with poor reception. They want the menu, they want to know where you are, and they want a table. Almost everything else on a restaurant website gets in the way.

  • Menus as real text, never as a PDF
  • Booking in as few taps as your system allows
  • Accurate location, hours and holiday information
  • Fast enough to load on a phone outside your door
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A restaurant dining room set with tables ready for service

What does a restaurant website actually need?

A readable menu, accurate opening hours, an unmistakable location and a booking route. Those four things account for almost every visit. A menu published as a PDF fails on a phone, cannot be read by search engines and cannot be found by someone searching for a dish you serve. Hours that are wrong at Christmas cost you a table and a review. Everything else is secondary.

  • Menus as HTML text, structured by course
  • Hours that are correct including holidays
  • Booking reachable from every page

Common problems

What restaurant websites get wrong

  • The menu is a PDF

    It downloads slowly, opens in a separate viewer, cannot be read by a screen reader and is invisible to search. It is the single most common and most costly mistake.

  • Opening hours are wrong

    Particularly around holidays, when the cost of being wrong is highest and the update is easiest to forget.

  • A full-screen video that nobody waited for

    Several megabytes of atmosphere loading before the menu, on a phone, on mobile data, for a visitor who wanted to know if you serve gluten-free.

  • Booking buried

    One link in the navigation, when booking should be reachable from every screen the visitor sees.

  • Menus that go stale

    The site says winter menu in June because updating it requires the developer who built it two years ago.

  • Location details incomplete

    An address with no parking guidance, no transport information and no accessibility detail, on a page that loads a heavy map iframe.

What we build

A structure that serves a hungry visitor

Menus

  • Real HTML text, structured by course and section
  • Dietary and allergen indicators where you provide them
  • Multiple menus handled properly: lunch, dinner, set, seasonal
  • Editable by your team in minutes, from a phone if needed

Booking and ordering

  • Booking integration with your existing system
  • Reachable from every page, not only the navigation
  • Direct ordering where it is worth the commission saved
  • Fallback to a phone number that is tappable

Location and speed

  • Address, hours, parking, transport and accessibility
  • Holiday hours easy for you to update
  • Local business structured data with correct hours
  • Lightweight pages that load on poor mobile reception

The menu

Why the PDF menu costs you covers

A PDF menu is a scanned brochure pretending to be a web page. On a phone it downloads over mobile data, opens in a separate viewer, and requires pinching and dragging to read a starter. A meaningful proportion of visitors give up there and pick somewhere else.

It also makes you invisible. Someone searching for a specific dish, or for a gluten-free option near them, cannot find your menu because search engines cannot read it usefully. A properly structured HTML menu is faster, accessible, editable by your own staff, and findable by exactly the people looking for what you serve.

  • Readable instantly on a phone, with no download
  • Findable in search for the dishes you actually serve
  • Usable with a screen reader and at high zoom
  • Updatable by your team in minutes, without a developer
Dishes being served to guests during a restaurant service

Variations

How the structure shifts by venue type

  • Restaurants

    Booking is the primary action. Menus, atmosphere and location carry the persuasion.

  • Cafes and casual dining

    Rarely booked. Hours, location and menu accuracy do almost all the work.

  • Takeaway and delivery

    Direct ordering matters commercially, because every order through an aggregator carries a commission.

  • Multi-site groups

    A page per venue with its own menu, hours and booking, rather than one blended site.

  • Function and event venues

    Enquiry-led rather than booking-led, with capacity information and package detail.

  • Bars and pubs

    Events and what is on tap change constantly, so the site must be genuinely easy to update.

Questions

Restaurant website questions

Can we keep our PDF menu?
You can offer a PDF as a download for people who want to print one, but it should not be the primary menu. The main menu needs to be real text on the page so it loads instantly, works with a screen reader, and can be found by someone searching for a dish you serve.
Which booking system should we use?
Usually the one you already use, if it offers a web integration. Changing booking systems for the sake of the website is rarely worth the operational disruption. We check what your current system supports before quoting.
Is direct ordering worth building?
It depends on your volume. Aggregator commission is significant, so at higher order volumes direct ordering pays for itself quickly. At lower volumes the aggregators bring you customers you would not otherwise reach. We will do the arithmetic with your actual numbers rather than assuming.
How do we keep menus and hours current?
By making it genuinely quick. Menu items and opening hours are editable fields, not layouts, so a manager can change a price or set holiday hours from a phone in under a minute. If updating is awkward, it will not happen, and the site will be wrong when it matters.
Do we need a food photographer?
For the hero images and a handful of signature dishes, professional photography is genuinely worth it — food shot badly looks worse than no photograph at all. For everything else, consistent, well-lit phone photography is perfectly adequate.

Related

Also relevant

Rebuilding a restaurant website?

Tell us how many venues you run, which booking system you use and how often menus change. That is most of the brief.

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