A restaurant website is a great way to communicate and advertise your restaurant. You can post your menu, photos of the interior, customer reviews — all of which will help attract new visitors. You can even organise online sales of food and drinks and add a bonus system — this will help you build a loyal audience that will come back for new orders.
Just having a website on Google will increase the visibility of your establishment and attract new customers.
If your restaurant does not yet have a website, you are losing most of your potential customers, and if you do not have a Facebook or Instagram account, your restaurant’s marketing strategy has a lot of room for improvement.
What should be on the website and what customers want to see
Information about the restaurant
The description answers one question: how are you different from the three other places on the same street. If the text would fit any of them, it isn't worth writing.
A frame that works: 3–4 sentences with at least one hard fact — the year you opened, the head chef's name, the region your kitchen comes from, the number of covers. "Family kitchen since 2008, 40 covers, every dumpling folded on site" says more than a paragraph about passion and atmosphere.
Reuse the same text in your Google Business Profile description — it has a 750-character limit and is read more often than your website.
Menu
Guests come to the site for the menu and the prices. That is the content everything else exists to support.
Three things decide whether it works:
- A full menu with prices on its own page, not a file to download. A PDF has to be zoomed, and Google does not tie its contents to your site — see PDF menu alternative.
- Photos on the 10–15 most-ordered items. Not on all of them: on a 60-item menu a full set means tens of megabytes and a slow page.
- Allergens next to each item. In the EU that is a duty under Regulation 1169/2011, not an extra.
The homepage needs 5–6 signature items and a link to the full menu. Everything else lives on the menu page.
Photos of dishes
Particular emphasis should be placed on the quality of food photos – the more appetising the photos, the better the dishes will sell. The photos in the menu should correspond to reality – what is in the photo is what is on the customer’s plate.
Schedule
Many of your customers are interested in knowing whether they will have time to get to your establishment and plan their time better, as well as understand which days you are open. Do not forget to provide this information; nothing could be worse than your restaurant’s doors being closed in front of a customer.
Contacts and address
The phone number and the address are where you most often lose a guest who had already decided to come.
- The number as a
tel:link, not text and not an image. One tap and the phone rings. - The address opening maps. A guest who found you at 8:30 pm wants to tap and walk.
- Opening hours as text, including holidays. Public holidays are the worst possible day to get this wrong.
The same details have to match your Google Business Profile character for character. "8/10 High Street" and "8-10 High St" are two different addresses to the algorithm, and the mismatch weakens the profile.
Convenient access to the website from your smartphone
More than 75% of visits to restaurant websites come from phones. This is not the secondary version — it is the primary one.
Three thresholds worth measuring:
- Load time under 3 seconds on a mobile connection. Check it in PageSpeed Insights, looking only at the Mobile tab. Below 50 means guests you will never count.
- Images under 200–300 KB. The usual cause of a slow hospitality site is 6–8 MB files straight from the photographer. Use WebP or AVIF, cap the width at 1600 px.
- Tap targets of at least 44 × 44 px, so a thumb can hit them.
Where this advice breaks down: if the venue lives on group bookings and catering, desktop traffic can be higher — check your own analytics before treating mobile as the only priority.
The most important thing on the website is online ordering and delivery.
If you sell takeaway, the order button matters more than the photo gallery.
Ordering by phone looks cheaper until you cost the labour. At 40 orders a day and 3 minutes per call, that is 2 hours of somebody's time every day — during the hours when that person is needed on the floor. Add the address mistakes nobody counts until the driver is outside the wrong building.
There is a second reason: delivery platforms charge 10–35% of order value, while your own channel costs a flat subscription regardless of turnover.
When it doesn't make sense: below about 5 takeaway orders a day the phone is fine, and the system will cost more than the problem it solves.
Ways to create a website
Commission the creation of a website
Commissioning makes sense when you need something non-standard or have nobody in-house to run it. Typical European ranges:
| Who builds it | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer on a template | €400–1000 | 2–4 weeks |
| Small agency, custom design | €1500–4000 | 6–10 weeks |
| Agency with full branding | €5000+ | 3+ months |
Four things to settle before signing, because none of them can be recovered later:
- Who owns the domain and hosting. Your details, not the contractor's.
- Whether you get the source files. Without them every later change goes back to the same contractor — or means starting over.
- Who updates the menu, and at what price. This cost repeats several times a year and often exceeds the site itself.
- The hourly rate for changes after handover. €40–80/h is normal; no rate in the contract is a problem.
Point 3 usually decides it. A €3000 site where a price change means emailing the agency costs more to run than a €800 site with a menu you edit yourself.
Create a website yourself
Building your own site in a website builder realistically takes 2–3 working days: one for content and photos, one to assemble it, half a day for fixes. Cost: €50–150 a year for the builder and domain.
You need five things — only one of them is technical:
- structure — what goes on the site and in what order,
- the visual side — layout, colours, typography,
- content — text and photos, the hardest and most underestimated part,
- an understanding of usability,
- the technical side — domain, hosting, certificate.
Understanding the structure of the website, what should be on it
As for the structure of the page and what should be on it, we decided on this at the beginning of the article.
Visual aspect
You can spy on successful restaurant website implementation options from your competitors. There is nothing wrong with that. There is no shame in imitating effective solutions, although copying them one-to-one is not worth it.
Content
The content should be well-written, unique, and appealing. If you don’t know how to write beautiful texts, it’s better to hire a copywriter — the quality of photos and food descriptions has a big impact on sales.
Knowing how to make a website user-friendly
It’s quite a science, but to put it simply, imagine that you were a user of the website and wanted to answer the main questions yourself. How much effort would you have to put in and how easily would you find the information you need?
Technical page
This point may be the most difficult, especially if you choose the programming path without the necessary knowledge, so if you want to do it yourself, there are several solutions we can consider.
Programming from scratch
The most creative and free, but also the most time-consuming process, comparable to tailoring a bespoke suit. Writing a website or web application requires serious knowledge not only of programming languages themselves, but also an understanding of many other aspects.
It is suitable for those who have knowledge in this field; if you have it, you can confidently start developing your own website.
Creating a CMS-based website
Creating websites from scratch is a very costly endeavour, not accessible to everyone and not always necessary. Currently, the practice of reusable solutions is very common in this area, and one such solution is WordPress. A large number of solutions and templates are available for use.
You will need knowledge of how to install and configure this system; programming is practically reduced to zero here.
There remains the matter of purchasing and managing the website name (domain) and the place where it will be stored (hosting).
One of the cheapest methods, but it requires a lot of time and skill.
Development in the website builder
The main advantages of using website builders are their user-friendly interface and ease of customisation. Numerous ready-made templates and free hosting allow you to quickly launch your project online – the functionality of the designers allows even beginners to quickly create a website. What’s more, for a small additional fee, most builders offer additional options and features for developing and expanding your project.
One such builder is Wix, a builder with simple functionality and an intuitive interface. It is often used to develop budget solutions, but it has quite a few limitations.
Free versions will have their limitations, and the knowledge and time to build such a website are also essential if you want your website to not deter customers – all the skills mentioned above are needed here, except for the technical ones.
