Restaurant and cafe websites: menus, bookings and getting found

Someone lands on a restaurant website with one of three intentions: see the menu, check whether you are open, or book a table. Sites that make those three things instant do well. Sites built around atmospheric photography and a story about the chef's travels do not.

The PDF menu problem

It is worth being blunt about this. A menu published as a PDF is the most common and most costly mistake in hospitality web design.

• It downloads rather than opens, which on a phone means leaving your site.
• It opens at a zoom level that requires pinching and dragging to read anything.
• Search engines cannot use its contents to match someone searching for a dish you serve.
• It is usually out of date, because updating it means finding whoever has the original file.
• Screen readers often cannot read it, which excludes people unnecessarily.

A menu as an ordinary web page fixes all of that at once. It loads instantly, reads properly at any size, can be updated in seconds, and lets you mark dietary information in a way people can actually filter and search. If you need a printable version, offer the PDF as an extra rather than as the menu itself.

Opening hours, everywhere, correct

Turning up at a closed restaurant is the kind of bad experience that ends a customer relationship before it starts. And hours live in more places than people realise: your website, your Google listing, your social profiles, and any delivery platforms you use.

Keep them consistent, and pay particular attention to bank holidays and seasonal changes, which is exactly when people check and exactly when listings are stale. If you serve different hours for kitchen and bar, say both, because 'open until eleven' and 'food until nine' are very different promises.

Booking that works on a phone

Table booking should take under a minute and show real availability. A form that asks someone to request a table and wait for a call back loses the diner who is deciding between you and two other places right now.

Whether you use a booking platform or something simpler, the requirements are the same: visible from every page, real availability, minimal fields, and an immediate confirmation. For smaller venues a phone number is a perfectly respectable answer, as long as it is tappable and someone actually answers during service.

Your Google listing is doing the heavy lifting

For restaurants more than almost any other business, the Google listing is where the decision happens. Photos, reviews, hours, menu link and busy times all appear before anyone clicks through to a website.

So treat it as part of the site rather than an afterthought. Keep the photographs current and appetising, add the menu link, keep hours accurate, and reply to reviews in a way that a future reader will find reassuring. The same local search principles that apply to any local business chasing nearby searches apply here, with photography carrying more weight than usual.

What to cut

• Autoplaying video on the home page. It delays the menu, which is what they came for.
• A splash screen or intro animation. Every second here is a customer choosing somewhere else.
• A long story about the founding of the restaurant above the fold. Keep it, move it down.
• Music that starts on its own. Still happens, still costs you visitors.
• A gallery of thirty dishes at full resolution. It will be the slowest page you own.