Restaurants
Hours, menu, address, phone. In that order, in five seconds
Almost every visit to a restaurant website is somebody standing outside or sitting in a car, checking one of four things. A site that makes them wait for a video loop loses them to the place next door.
The four things, and nothing in front of them
- Are you open right now? Today's hours, including the ones that differ on holidays.
- What is on the menu, and what does it cost? As readable text on the page — never a PDF, and never a photograph of a printed menu.
- Where are you and how do I park? Address, a link to maps, and parking, which everybody asks and almost nobody publishes.
- How do I book or order? One tap to the phone, or a link to whichever booking or delivery service you actually use.
The PDF menu is the single most common mistake
A menu in a PDF is slow to open on a phone, difficult to read without zooming, invisible to search engines in any useful way, and unusable by anybody with a screen reader. It is also almost always out of date, because updating it means finding the design file. A menu written as a page is faster, findable, readable aloud, and something you can change yourself in minutes.
That last point does most of the work. A menu you can edit by asking gets updated when a price changes; a menu that requires a designer does not.
What we build for a restaurant
- The menu as real, readable pages — by section, with prices and dietary notes.
- Hours you can change yourself, including special hours, which is the most frequently wrong information on restaurant websites.
Restaurantstructured data with hours, address, phone, price range and cuisine, which is what feeds the panel people see in search results.- Links out to whatever booking, ordering or delivery platform you actually use, rather than a copy of it.
- Photographs of your own food, compressed hard at build time so they load rather than merely exist.
- Pages for private dining, catering and events if you do them — these are the highest-value enquiries and usually the thinnest pages on the site.
If you already have a site
A rebuild keeps every existing address, redirects tested against the live site. Restaurant sites often have an old menu page or a location page carrying years of links, and those keep working. How a rebuild works.
What it costs
$1,500 new, $1,800 rebuild, at the launch rate for our first five clients, then $79 a month.
- New site / rebuild
- $1,500 / $1,800 — launch rate
- Monthly
- $79
- Structured data type
- Restaurant
- Menu
- Readable pages, not a PDF. Changed by asking
- Booking and delivery
- Linked to the platforms you already use
Send us your current menu and your hours. That plus a few photographs is most of a restaurant site.
Restaurant website questions
Can we keep our menu as a PDF?
You can, and we will ask you not to. A PDF menu is slow on a phone, unreadable to a screen reader, invisible to search, and it is the reason most restaurant menus online are out of date. As a page it is faster, findable, and you can change a price yourself in minutes.
Can people book a table through the site?
Through whichever booking platform you already use, linked from the site. We will not rebuild a reservation system, and a static site should not pretend to hold your table availability.
What about our delivery apps?
Linked, prominently, if you want the orders. Worth knowing: a customer who orders direct is worth considerably more to you than the same order through a marketplace, so it is usually right to make your own phone number at least as prominent.
Do we need a page for catering?
If you do catering at all, yes, and a real one. Catering and private dining enquiries are the largest single orders most restaurants take and they are usually represented by one sentence and an email address.