What Every Restaurant Website Needs (and What to Cut)

Nobody browses a restaurant website. They arrive with one of five questions, and they leave the second it is answered — or the second it is clear it will not be.

The five questions

1. What is on the menu, and what does it cost?
2. Are you open now?
3. Where are you and where do I park?
4. Can I book a table?
5. Can I order this to my house?

Every one of those should be answerable in under five seconds on a phone. A restaurant site that does those five things well and nothing else outperforms an elaborate one that buries them.

The menu is the website

It is the most-visited page by an enormous margin, and it is the page most often handled worst.

Do not use a PDF. It is slow to download on mobile data, it requires pinch-zooming to read, search engines index it poorly, screen readers often cannot use it at all, and updating a price means sending it back to whoever has the original file. Every one of those is a real cost and the last one is why so many PDF menus are eighteen months out of date.

The menu should be text on the page. That way it loads instantly, resizes to any screen, can be found in search when someone looks for a specific dish, is readable by assistive technology and by the AI assistants people increasingly ask what to eat, and can be updated by anyone in the restaurant in a minute.

Include prices. A menu without prices makes people assume the worst and it is the single most common reason someone closes a restaurant site and opens the next one.

Hours, and why they have to be right in three places

Hours on the website, hours on the Google Business Profile, hours in the structured data on the page. When those three disagree, the one that shows up in search is usually not the one you edited, and a customer who drives to a closed restaurant does not come back.

Holiday hours are the version that catches everyone. Whoever updates them should have both the website and the profile on the same checklist.

Photos of the actual food

Stock photography of food is unusually obvious and unusually damaging, because the customer is deciding whether they want to eat what you cook. A phone, a window seat at lunchtime and ten minutes will produce better images than any stock library, and they will be of dishes you actually serve.

Photograph the room too. A significant part of choosing a restaurant is working out whether it suits the occasion, and nothing on a menu answers that.

What to cut

• Autoplaying video or music. Slow, hostile on mobile, and universally disliked.
• A splash page or animated intro. An extra tap between a hungry person and the menu.
• The chef’s philosophy above the menu. Keep it — put it lower down. It is read after the decision, not before it.
• A popup asking for an email address on arrival. It appears at the exact moment someone is trying to read the menu on a phone.
• A separate mobile site. One responsive site, not two that drift apart.

Booking and ordering

If you take reservations, the booking widget belongs at the top of every page, not on a contact page. If you deliver, be explicit about who handles it and what it costs — customers largely understand that third-party delivery adds a margin, and they resent discovering it at checkout rather than being told.

Direct ordering, where you can support it, is worth pushing. The commission difference on third-party platforms is substantial, and a simple line on the menu page — order direct and we keep the difference rather than the app — persuades more people than most restaurants expect.

The whole checklist

• Menu as text, with prices, updatable in-house.
• Hours on the page and in structured data, matching your Google profile.
• Address with a one-tap map link, and a note about parking.
• Phone number that dials in one tap.
• Booking and ordering reachable from every page.
• Real photos of your food and your room.
• Dietary information — vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free — marked on the menu itself.
• A private dining or catering page if you do that work, since it is searched separately and is worth far more per inquiry.

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