Restaurants · Web Design
Websites for restaurants
Someone is standing on a sidewalk, hungry, with one bar of signal, deciding between you and the place across the street.
Put the menu in HTML. Not a PDF.
This is the most common and most expensive mistake in restaurant web design, and it is still everywhere. A menu published as a PDF is slow to open on a phone, is often unreadable without pinching and zooming, is invisible to screen readers, and is largely wasted on search. The dishes you are known for are sitting in a file rather than on a page.
A menu as real text loads instantly, is legible on any device, and lets you rank for the things you actually serve. It is also the single change most likely to increase orders, and it takes an afternoon.
The third-party commission problem
Delivery marketplaces bring volume and take a substantial share of every order, commonly a quarter to a third of the ticket. On restaurant margins that is often the difference between a profitable order and a break-even one.
Direct ordering from your own site keeps that margin, and the honest framing is that most restaurants cannot leave the marketplaces entirely. What is achievable is shifting the mix: making direct ordering visible and easy, and giving repeat customers a reason to use it. Every point of that shift goes straight to the bottom line.
Hours, and the thing that costs you customers silently
Wrong hours are the quiet killer. A customer who drives to a closed restaurant does not usually complain. They just stop trying, and they tell people. Holiday hours, seasonal changes and a kitchen that closes before the bar all need to be right in two places: the site and the Google profile.
We build hours so they are trivial to update, because a system nobody can maintain is a system that becomes wrong within a month.
Speed matters more here than almost anywhere
Restaurant sites are the most image-heavy category we build and they are consumed in the worst possible conditions: on a phone, on cellular, outdoors, by someone who will give up in seconds.
The images stay. Food photography sells food. But they get processed properly and served in modern formats, and the page is static so it appears immediately. You should not have to choose between a site that looks like your restaurant and a site that loads.
Questions
Restaurants: common questions
Do we need online ordering on our own site?
If you do meaningful takeaway volume, the commission saved usually covers the build within months. If you are almost entirely dine-in, a good menu and reservations matter more.
What about reservations?
We integrate whatever platform you already use rather than moving you. Your staff is trained on it and the switching cost during service is not worth the design gain.
How often should the site change?
Menus and hours whenever they change, which for a seasonal kitchen may be weekly. That is exactly what we make easy to edit, and what the care plan covers if you would rather not.
Is Instagram enough instead of a website?
No, though it is doing more of the work than it used to. People still search for menus, hours and directions, and those searches land on your site and your Google profile. Social is discovery; the site is the decision.
Scope
Industry search terms are contested nationally, not locally, so this is a twelve-month investment rather than a quick win. We are straightforward about that. If you are a Tampa Bay business, the city pages will produce enquiries a good deal sooner.
Taking new projects
Get the menu off the PDF
Send us your current site and your ordering setup. We'll tell you what we would change first and what it costs.