What a café or restaurant website actually needs
Four facts, findable in five seconds, and a menu that is not a PDF. Almost everything else on a restaurant website is decoration.
Someone is standing outside on a Tuesday evening, or sitting on a bus deciding where to eat. They want four things: are you open, where are you, what do you serve, and how much is it.
Give them those in five seconds and you have the table. Most restaurant websites take thirty and lose it.
The four facts
Put all of them on the homepage, above the fold, in text:
- Opening hours. Today's, ideally. Nothing frustrates like a full weekly grid when someone wants to know about right now.
- Address, with a link that opens their maps app.
- What kind of food it is, in a few words. "Neapolitan pizza and natural wine" beats "a dining experience".
- How to book, or that you do not take bookings — which is also useful.
Keep them accurate. A wrong opening time is worse than no website, because someone turns up to a locked door and does not come back.
Do not put your menu in a PDF
This is the single most common mistake and it costs real customers.
A PDF menu on a phone opens as a document, renders tiny, requires pinching and dragging, and half the time downloads instead of opening. It is also invisible to search engines, so nobody searching for a dish you serve will ever find you through it.
Put the menu on the page as text. It reads instantly on a phone, and every dish becomes something you can be found for.
If your menu changes daily, put the fixed part on the page and the specials somewhere you can update in seconds — that is exactly what the monthly plan on our service is for.
Photographs of food, done properly
Food photography is unusually unforgiving, and bad food photos actively put people off.
Shoot in daylight, near a window, never under the restaurant's own warm lighting and never with flash. Shoot from directly above or at plate level, not the awkward angle in between. Take far more than you need and use only the ones that survive being looked at twice.
Also photograph the room. People want to know what kind of evening they are walking into — date, family lunch, quick coffee — and the room tells them faster than any description.
The pages
Home. The four facts, a few photos, the booking link.
Menu. As text. Split by course or by section. Mark allergens if you can — people search for that, and it saves your staff phone calls.
About / the room. Short. Photos of the space, a paragraph on what you do.
Find us and book. Address, map, transport and parking, hours, phone, booking link.
Four pages. That is a restaurant website.
What to leave out
- A full-screen video that delays everything else loading.
- Music.
- A splash page before the actual site.
- A gallery of stock food photos that are not your food.
- Long paragraphs about culinary philosophy.
Two things worth more than the website
A Google Business Profile. Restaurants near me is answered by map listings, and that is where most of this traffic actually is. Keep your hours accurate there above all — it is where people look first.
Your photos on that profile. They appear before your website does.
The website's job is to back those up with the menu and the detail. Both matter; the profile comes first.
What it costs
Ours is $499 to build and $49 a month to run, live in three working days once we have your menu and photos. The monthly fee covers content changes — for a restaurant, that means seasonal menu updates and holiday hours without a bill each time.