What a Restaurant Website Actually Needs

The four things

Almost every visit to a restaurant website is one of four questions. What do they serve, are they open, where are they, and can I get a table.

All four should be answerable within seconds of arriving, on a phone, without scrolling past anything. That constraint decides the whole design, and most restaurant sites fail it in the first screen.

Atmosphere matters and it is established by photographs alongside the information rather than instead of it.

The menu, and the file problem

The most visited page and the most commonly broken.

A menu published as a downloadable file is the single most damaging choice a restaurant site makes. It downloads rather than displays on many phones, zooms badly, cannot be read by search engines, and cannot be read aloud by assistive software.

The menu should be text on a page. That means it can be found in search when somebody looks for a dish, it loads instantly, it works at any text size, and it can be updated without a designer.

It also needs a date or a note where things change, since a visitor who orders from a menu they saw online and finds it different arrives disappointed.

What the menu page should include

• Prices, which are the second thing people look for and are sometimes omitted deliberately.
• Dietary information, marked clearly. Vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-related notes decide where groups eat.
• Allergen guidance, handled carefully and with a note to speak to staff, since this is a safety matter rather than a marketing one.
• Separate menus properly labelled, where lunch, dinner, brunch, and drinks differ, with the times each applies.
• Anything seasonal marked as such, so an out-of-date item is expected rather than a surprise.

Hours, which are harder than they look

Restaurants have complicated hours: different by day, different for lunch and dinner, different for the kitchen and the bar, and different on holidays.

All of that needs to be visible without interpretation. The specific failure is a site showing open until eleven when the kitchen closes at nine, which produces an arriving customer and a difficult conversation.

Holiday hours are the other one. A restaurant with unusual hours on a statutory holiday and nothing on the site produces both wasted journeys and phone calls, and updating them takes two minutes on the site and the listing.

Booking

Where the conversion happens, and the arrangement should match how you actually take bookings.

If you use a reservation platform, the link should be prominent and work on a phone. If you take bookings by phone, the number should be tappable and the hours for calling stated. If you do not take bookings, say so plainly, since a visitor who cannot find a booking option assumes the site is broken rather than that you are walk-in only.

Whichever applies, large party arrangements deserve their own mention, since those are the highest-value bookings and the ones most likely to require a conversation.

The listing matters more than the site

For restaurants particularly, a large share of the decision happens in the map result before anyone reaches the website.

That means the business listing carries unusual weight: photographs, hours, the menu link, the booking link, the price level, and reviews. Someone deciding where to eat tonight frequently never leaves that panel.

Photographs on the listing are worth attention. Diner-uploaded photographs accumulate whether or not you add any, and adding good ones of the food and the room influences what appears first.

Photography

The one category where food photography genuinely earns its cost, and where it has to be honest.

Pictures of your actual dishes, as served, rather than stock imagery of food you do not make. A visitor comparing the photograph to the plate is a comparison you have to win, and stock imagery loses it immediately.

The room matters too, since people are choosing an evening rather than a meal. What it looks like when occupied tells them more than an empty dining room at three in the afternoon.

The practical questions people search

• Parking, which decides whether people come.
• Accessibility, including step-free access and washroom facilities.
• Whether children are welcome, and whether there is a children's menu.
• Whether dogs are allowed on a patio.
• Takeaway and delivery, and whether you take orders directly.
• Private events, which is a separate and lucrative enquiry.

Delivery is worth a specific note. Where you take orders directly as well as through platforms, saying so plainly is worth doing, since the direct order is considerably better for the restaurant and many customers do not realise it is an option.

What to cut

The full-screen video that delays the menu. The music that plays automatically. The animated splash before the content. The gallery of forty photographs. A long history of the chef ahead of the hours.

Each of those puts atmosphere before information for a visitor deciding where to eat in the next hour, which is the wrong order for the situation they are actually in.

Reviews matter here as much as anywhere and more than most, since restaurant decisions are made almost entirely on them, which makes the volume and recency argument in building a review habit into the job apply with particular force.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.