Restaurant website design: menu, bookings and local SEO

You open the restaurant’s website on your phone. You look for the menu. You find a button that says ‘View menu’ and it downloads a PDF. You wait. You pinch to zoom. You drag sideways to read the prices.

Monumental mistake. That PDF is why two out of three visits to a restaurant website end before they get anywhere.

Asking a customer to pinch a PDF is like selling them a car with the steering wheel in the boot. It’s all there. Driving it, not so much.

Restaurant website design comes down to three pieces: the menu, the booking and consistency with your Google Business Profile. Everything else is decoration.

Two diners, the same Saturday

It’s twenty to nine. Two different people are looking for somewhere to eat on the same street, each with their phone and one bar of signal.

Scenario A. They open the first restaurant’s website. The homepage has a background video that starts loading. It takes a while. They find ‘Menu’ and a four-megabyte PDF downloads. They open it in the phone’s viewer, zoom in, look for something gluten-free and can’t find it. They go back, look for ‘Bookings’ and get a form saying someone will reply within 24 hours. They close it.

Scenario B. They open the second one. The menu sits on a normal page, with its sections, its prices and an allergen badge on every dish. They see there are two gluten-free options. They tap ‘Book’, choose two people at 9.15pm, type a name and phone number and get the confirmation on screen. Three taps.

They eat at the second one.

The difference between them isn’t the design or the cooking. One has understood the context in which people check its website and the other has uploaded a leaflet.

The menu isn’t a document, it’s a page

The menu is by far the most visited page on a restaurant website. In most cases it isn’t even a page.

What changes when you stop serving it as a PDF:

• It reads without zooming. The text adapts to the width of the screen instead of forcing people to drag it around. It’s the first thing anyone notices.
• It can be searched and linked. A dish with a proper name is text a search engine understands. Someone searching for that dish in your town can end up on your menu.
• It’s labelled dish by dish. Allergens, vegetarian, spicy and anything with pork are flagged on each line. You already have to give allergen information on the premises, so if you publish the menu it makes sense for that information to travel with it.
• It updates in two minutes. You change a price, mark a dish as sold out or post the set lunch without opening a layout program or exporting anything again.
• It can be measured. You know which sections get looked at, for how long and from where. With a PDF you know someone downloaded it.

The daily set menu deserves its own mention: it’s content that changes every day and that people search for every day. Posting it as an image on social media and leaving it off the website is giving all those searches away.

And all of this gets checked standing up, in the street, in a hurry, so the time it takes to appear matters more than the typeface. I went into it in what you lose with every second of waiting.

Direct bookings versus the platform’s

Booking platforms work. They bring people in, fill a quiet Tuesday and give you visibility. They also charge for every cover that comes through them, including the customer who was already yours.

The sensible approach isn’t giving up the platform. It’s to stop paying commission on the customer who searched for you by name.

For that, the direct booking has to be the most visible option and the shortest. A fixed button, no sign-up, no password, with instant confirmation on screen and not a form someone will read tomorrow.

If you embed a third-party widget, check two things: that it doesn’t send the customer to another domain halfway through and that it doesn’t load until someone taps it.

Plenty of booking widgets are the heaviest thing on the whole site. And how many steps someone will really put up with before giving up is covered in where people drop off along the way.

Your website and your Google profile have to say the same thing

Most people looking for somewhere to eat never reach your website: they reach your Google profile. Then they compare.

No opening hours that contradict each other.

If your profile says you’re closed on Mondays and your website says you’re open, one of the two is sending someone to a locked door.

Same with the phone number, the address, kitchen hours and bank holidays. One name, one address and one phone number, identical in both places, written the same way and in the same format.

Three more details are worth marking up on the website so search engines understand them: the type of business, opening hours by time slot and the link to the menu. They’re what shows up when someone searches ‘where to eat near me’.

And if you’re in a town with lots of competition, the difference ends up being what you say and not the template you use, which is the heart of websites that all look the same.

What has to go

Four things that turn up on almost every restaurant website and only take away.

The full-screen homepage video, which weighs more than the rest of the site put together and nobody watches because they came to see the menu. Music that starts on its own and gets closed in a second, angrily. The gallery of sixty photos of the dining room, when eight good ones would do. And the PDF, again, now hiding behind a button that says ‘Download menu’.

Almost all of that comes from ready-made restaurant website templates: they arrive with the shop window built and no thinking behind it. It’s the same pattern as why the cheap template ends up being expensive.

Who this isn’t for

If your restaurant fills every service without lifting a finger, you don’t need any of the above.

Nor is it for anyone who wants a website that looks nice in a screenshot and doesn’t keep track of how many bookings come through it. That’s a different job and anyone can do it.

This is for the restaurant paying commission on customers who already knew it, taking bookings by phone in the middle of service and keeping its menu in an eight-month-old PDF with two wrong prices.

There’s work to do there and it shows quickly. You can see projects with the results on show and judge for yourself.