What this guide is
There is no restaurant, café or takeaway client on this site. This is a method and a market reading rather than a case study, and it says so here rather than implying otherwise.
It also leaves allergen information alone. That is a real legal obligation with its own guide on this site, and summarising it loosely in a page about menus would be worse than linking to it.
The PDF menu is costing more than you think
Watch what a customer actually does. They are deciding where to eat on Friday, on a phone, with two other places open in other tabs. They go to the menu first — before the gallery, before the About page, often before the booking widget.
If the menu is a PDF, four things go wrong at once.
- It downloads. On a phone that is a visible pause, and then it opens in a separate viewer where your site, your booking button and your phone number no longer exist.
- It is laid out for A4, so the customer is pinching and zooming to read a price. The other two tabs are not asking them to do that.
- Search engines cannot use it properly. Every dish you serve is a thing somebody might search for, and none of it is on a page.
- A screen reader gets nothing useful from a menu that is an image, which for a public-facing business is a problem beyond the commercial one.
A menu as real HTML text fixes all four and costs nothing extra to maintain — less, in fact, once somebody can change a price without opening a design file.
Structure it the way the kitchen thinks: sections for courses, a line per dish with its own description and price. Add the things people ask on the phone — what is vegan, what can be made gluten-free, what the children's options are, whether the set menu runs on a Saturday. Every one of those is a question you currently answer by phone during service.
What the search data says, including one odd number
Our own figures for this sector are published in full on the food and drink industry page, and two things in them are worth pulling out.
The first: this is one of the most open markets we measured.
The second is a genuine oddity. Same volume, same intent, same month — and one is a serious fight while the other is empty. That is as clean a demonstration as our research contains that competitive difficulty attaches to a phrase rather than to a market.
Somebody is paying a lot to reach restaurants with a service nobody has written the pages for.
Those are terms a studio selling to restaurants competes for rather than terms your diners use. They are published so the market we work in is checkable. What transfers is the pattern — and on the diner side the same thing is true: "restaurants near me" is a war, and "Sunday roast with a garden in [town]" is not.
The ordering decision, without the sales pitch
Delivery and ordering platforms charge a commission on every order. The rates differ by platform, by whether they deliver or you do, and by what you negotiate, and they change — so check your own current rate rather than any figure quoted on a web studio's website, including this one.
What does not change is the structure of the trade-off, and it is worth being clear-eyed about both halves.
The platform genuinely brings demand. People browse it the way they used to browse a high street, and a new place with no following gets orders on day one that it would not otherwise get. Anybody telling you to switch it all off is ignoring where your orders actually come from.
But the commission recurs for ever, on every order, including from the customer who has ordered from you forty times and would happily order direct. You do not get their details, so you cannot tell them you have a new menu. And if the platform changes its terms, you find out when it happens.
The sensible shape for most places is both, with a deliberate migration path: keep the platform for discovery, run your own ordering for repeat custom, and make the direct route visibly better. A lower price, a bigger portion, a free side, loyalty that only works direct — something concrete. A "order direct and save" banner with nothing behind it does not move anybody.
Two practical notes. Put the direct ordering link on the menu page itself, where the decision is being made, not only in the navigation. And print the direct URL on the packaging that goes out with every platform order, because that is the one moment you have the customer's attention and the platform is not mediating it.
Bookings, and the questions that stop them
For a sit-down restaurant the booking is the conversion, and it is lost to unanswered questions more often than to a clumsy widget.
The ones worth answering on the page, because they are the ones asked on the phone:
- Parking, and where. "Street parking nearby" is not an answer at seven on a Friday.
- Accessibility: steps at the entrance, accessible toilet, whether there is space for a wheelchair at a table rather than in a gangway.
- Children: whether they are welcome, whether there are high chairs, whether there is a children's menu.
- Dogs.
- Whether you take large groups, and the point at which it becomes a set menu.
- How long you hold a table, and what happens if the party is late.
- Dietary provision in general terms, with the allergen detail handled as the separate guide sets out.
None of that is marketing copy. It is the list of reasons somebody decided to book the other place instead, and it is cheap to remove.
The free thing that outperforms the website
For a restaurant the Google Business Profile does more work than the site, and it is worth saying so plainly on a web studio's page.
Opening hours that are correct, especially over bank holidays and Christmas. Photographs of the actual food, added regularly, not a launch set from three years ago. The menu attached to the profile as well as the site. Reviews, replied to. For somebody searching on a phone two streets away, that profile is the whole shop window.
There are separate guides here on the profile and on getting reviews. For a restaurant they are the first two jobs, and the menu-as-pages work is the third.
What to check on your own site
- Is the menu real text on a page, or a PDF or an image?
- Can you change a price yourself, today, without opening a design file?
- Does the menu say what is vegan, what can be adapted, and what the children's options are?
- Is there a direct ordering route, and is it on the menu page itself?
- Is direct ordering visibly better than the platform in some concrete way?
- Is your direct URL on the packaging that goes out with platform orders?
- Are parking, accessibility, children and dogs answered without ringing?
- Are your Google Business Profile hours right for the next bank holiday?
- Is allergen information handled properly? That is a legal obligation with its own guide.
The first is the one that changes the most for the least money, and almost every restaurant website in the country fails it.
