Somebody is standing on a sidewalk with their phone out, deciding whether to eat at your place or the one across the street. They have maybe fifteen seconds of patience. Your website has one job in that moment, and it is not to be beautiful.
Here is what actually matters on a restaurant site, based on what people do rather than what looks good in a portfolio.
The four things, in order
Almost every visit to a restaurant website is one of these questions:
- Are you open right now, and when do you close?
- What is on the menu, and what does it cost?
- Where exactly are you, and can I park?
- Can I book, or order, without phoning?
That is it. Everything else is decoration around those four answers. If a guest has to hunt for any of them, you have already lost some of them to the restaurant with a worse kitchen and a clearer website.
The mistakes that cost you covers
The menu as a PDF. This is the single most common and most expensive mistake. A PDF is slow on mobile data, opens in a separate viewer, needs pinching and dragging to read, and search engines cannot properly read what is in it. Someone searching for a dish you serve will not find you. Put the menu on the page as real text.
Hours that live only in a photo or a graphic. Same problem. If your hours are baked into an image, Google cannot read them, so it cannot show them in search results, so people phone to ask, or they just do not come.
An intro animation. Nobody has ever chosen a restaurant because the site had a nice loading sequence. On a phone on mobile data it is several seconds of nothing while a hungry person waits.
Old photos of food you no longer serve. Guests notice. It is the online equivalent of a sticky menu.
A booking system buried three clicks deep. If you take reservations, the way to make one belongs on the first screen, not on a separate page reached from the footer.
What good looks like
A restaurant site that works usually fits on very few pages. Home, menu, and a visit or contact page carry almost everything. The home page answers all four questions above without scrolling, or with one short scroll.
Photography does more work here than on almost any other kind of site, and it has to be your actual food in your actual room. Stock photos of generic plated dishes are transparent and they undercut trust in everything else on the page.
Speed matters more than it does for most businesses, because a large share of your visitors are outdoors on mobile connections rather than at a desk. A site that takes six seconds is a site a hungry person abandons. This is worth checking properly, because it is usually fixable.
The part restaurants get wrong about Google
Your website is only half of how people find you. The other half is your Google Business Profile, the panel that appears with your hours, photos, reviews and directions. For a restaurant that panel often gets more views than the website does.
The two need to agree. Same name, same address, same phone number, same hours, everywhere. When your site says one thing and your profile says another, Google trusts neither, and guests turn up to a closed door and leave a one-star review about it.
So the practical order for most restaurants is: get the profile accurate and complete, then make the website answer the four questions faster than anyone nearby. Those two things beat almost any other marketing you could buy.
Delivery apps and your own ordering
Aggregator apps bring volume and take a serious cut of it. Your own ordering keeps the margin and the customer relationship, but only if people can find it.
The realistic position for most independents is both: stay on the apps for reach, and make ordering directly from your site obviously available and slightly better, whether that is a discount, a larger portion, or simply being faster. What does not work is having direct ordering that nobody knows about because it is a small link at the bottom of the page.
What it costs
For most independent restaurants and cafés, a site that does the above well sits in the $1,200 to $4,000 range. It is not a complicated build. What you are paying for is the structure, the design, and someone making sure the menu is real text, the hours are readable by Google, and the whole thing loads fast on a phone in a parking lot.
If you take online orders or run several locations, it goes up, because that is genuinely more work.
The two-minute test
Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data, standing outside. Time how long until you can read the menu. Then check whether your hours are text or a picture.
Most restaurant owners find something in that test they did not expect. If you want a second pair of eyes, send us your site and we will tell you the three things costing you the most, whether or not you hire us.