Web Design and SEO for RestaurantsWeb Design and SEO for Restaurants

What usually goes wrong in restaurants and cafés

The menu as a PDF is the defining fault of this sector, and it costs more than it looks. Google cannot read it properly, so you never appear for a dish you are known for. It opens as a pinch-and-zoom document on a phone, which is where almost every one of your customers is looking. And it goes stale, because updating it means finding whoever has the file. A menu built as real pages ranks for every dish on it and takes a minute to change.

Allergen information sits awkwardly between a legal duty and a web problem. You have to be able to give customers accurate allergen information, and a site that either hides it in the same unreadable PDF or omits it entirely pushes that whole burden onto a member of staff at the worst possible moment. Putting it on the dish, legibly, is better service and removes a real risk — and almost nobody does it.

Then booking, where the site usually hands the customer to an aggregator before they have decided. Those platforms take a cut of a table you had already won, and the customer who arrived on your site leaves it to finish. Direct booking on your own domain, with the aggregator as a fallback rather than the front door, is the difference between paying commission on new covers and paying it on your own regulars.

What transfers, and what does not

The nearest comparable build is Roch Sweets, a family sweet shop selling over a thousand lines by weight. It is a food business where photography had to do the selling, which usually means a slow site — and it still loads completely in 1.27 seconds with first content at 0.86 and zero layout shift, on a page carrying 71 requests. The catalogue was structured into the categories people actually shop by rather than the ones the till system uses, which is the same job as structuring a menu.

What this page cannot show is a restaurant. There is not one on the client list, and the sector data above is research rather than a result produced for somebody in it.

What you get, and what it costs

The same three numbers as every other page on this site: from £500 for the build, from £50 a month for hosting and care, and growth blocks from £250 a month when you want the site to earn more. No setup fee, no management fee, no percentage of ad spend, no minimum term.

• A bespoke build rather than a page-builder assembly, so it is fast on a phone rather than fast on your laptop.
• A page for each thing you actually sell and each place you sell it, so every search a customer might run has somewhere of its own to land.
• Editable by you, with a walkthrough at handover.
• The domain in your name and the hosting in your account, with a full working copy if you ever leave.
• Tracking that counts phone taps as well as forms, because in most sectors the phone is the majority of enquiries.