Restaurant websites: menu, opening hours, booking a table

Restaurant websites fail in remarkably uniform ways. It is almost never the design, almost never the technology and almost never the budget. It is the menu sitting behind a link as a PDF, the opening hours that do not match Google, and the booking that is three steps too far away. The good news: all three are cheap to fix, and none of them needs a large website. This article sets out what a hospitality website actually has to do — and what you can safely leave out.

Three things matter; everything else is decoration

A typical visit to a restaurant website lasts under a minute, happens on a phone, and has one of three causes. Someone is deciding whether to eat here and wants to see the menu. Someone is already half into their coat and wants to know whether you are open. Or someone has decided and wants a table. That is the whole list.

• The menu: what is there, what does it cost, is there anything for me if I do not eat meat?
• The hours: are you open today, until when, and what happens on public holidays?
• The table: how do I book, in how many steps, and can I still just ring?

Everything else — the history of the building, the photo of the kitchen team, the wine notes, the philosophy — can be good and adds to the impression. But it answers none of those three questions, so it does not belong first. A test you can run yourself in five minutes: hand a friend your phone with your website open and ask them to tell you the price of a particular starter. If they have to zoom, scroll or download a file, you have your answer.

Which leads to something that argues against our own interests: most restaurants need considerably less website than they are offered. Five good pages that are always correct beat fifteen where half describe the summer before last. Size does not help in this sector. Being up to date does.

The menu belongs on the page as text — not as a PDF and not as an image

This is the single biggest and most common mistake in hospitality, and it has three independent consequences. First: a PDF is unusable on a phone. It opens in a separate viewer, it is set for A4, and reading a price means zooming in and then scrolling sideways. Second: search engines and assistants do not reliably read the contents as part of your website. Someone searching for a specific dish in your town will not find you, even though you serve it. Third: a menu published as an image simply does not exist for a screen reader — it is a rectangle with no content in it.

What changes when the same menu is real text on a real page: every dish becomes findable. Every price becomes readable aloud. And the point restaurateurs feel fastest: a price change then takes two minutes on a phone instead of an appointment with whoever holds the template. For voice assistants and AI answers the difference is fundamental too — only text can be quoted.

The objection that always comes at this point is a fair one: the beautifully typeset menu already exists, the printer has it, and it looks better. The two are not mutually exclusive. The printed menu stays exactly as it is; the PDF may be offered as an additional download. It just must not be the only version on the web.

How to move a PDF menu over to text

1. 01Decide which version is the source of truth. Usually that is the printed menu in the restaurant — which makes the website the copy, updated whenever the printed one changes.
2. 02Give the menu a fixed address, such as /menu, and keep that address permanently. It gets linked, bookmarked and forwarded.
3. 03Carry the groups over as headings: starters, mains, desserts, drinks. That structure is what makes a menu usable on a phone at all.
4. 04Carry each dish over as its own entry with a name, a short description and a price. The price is text, not an image and not part of a graphic.
5. 05Carry over the labelling that appears on the printed menu — vegetarian, vegan, and the allergen and additive information, in the same system you use in the restaurant.
6. 06Group or mark vegetarian and vegan dishes so they can be found without reading the whole menu. This is the most common reason a group picks a different restaurant.
7. 07Keep the old PDF address alive and redirect it permanently to the new menu page. Otherwise old links from portals, emails and search results lead nowhere.
8. 08Decide who edits the menu from now on, and set up access so that person can do it without an agency. Otherwise the menu goes stale within a quarter.
9. 09Check the result on a phone: readable without zooming, prices visible, page loaded in under two seconds.
10. 10Submit the new menu page in Google Search Console so it gets indexed promptly.

One side effect people rarely plan for: once the menu is text, Search Console will show you which dishes people search for before they reach you. That is the most honest feedback on your own menu available anywhere, and it is free.

Opening hours: one truth, several places

Your opening hours appear in at least three places: the website, the Google Business Profile and the door. Then come portals and delivery services, either ones you signed up to or ones that listed you without asking. A contradiction between those places is worse than a missing entry. Someone who finds no hours rings up. Someone who finds the wrong hours ends up standing outside a locked door — and that costs you more than one evening.

So decide which source is the truth, maintain that one first, and bring the others into line in the same sitting. In practice that means a short list of every place your hours appear, on a piece of paper in the office. Public holidays belong on that list explicitly, and they need doing before the holiday arrives. So do closing days, annual closures and last orders — last orders is the detail most often missing and most often the cause of friction, because open and still serving food are two different things.

Booking has to be one tap

Every extra step between deciding and having a table costs you bookings. The shortest version is the phone number as a tappable link: tap, it rings, done. That sounds old-fashioned and it is still the most reliable route in hospitality — provided somebody answers. Where an online route is wanted, one hard rule applies:

• No account. Nobody registers in order to get a table for two.
• The booking button sits in the same place on every page, not only on the home page.
• One route, not three side by side. If there are several, say in one sentence what each is for.
• Keep the phone number visible next to it — older guests and last-minute requests still go that way.
• If a third-party booking widget is embedded, it loads scripts from someone else. That makes it a question for your consent banner too, not only a question about tables.
• A booking system nobody maintains is worse than a phone somebody answers. Settle who checks the calendar daily before you buy one.

We deliberately recommend no particular system here and assess none. The choice depends on your operation, the number of covers and who on the floor is meant to work with it. What we can say: make the decision before the website is built, because it determines what sits at the top of every page.

Photos: your food, your room, your people

In few sectors do bought stock images do damage as quickly as in hospitality. A flawless burger from an image library tells the guest nothing about your burger — and when something else arrives, they have not just a different plate but the feeling of having been misled. With food this is more than a matter of taste: showing pictures that promise a particular dish is a statement about what you offer.

The effort is smaller than it sounds. Half a day with a photographer in daylight produces enough material for years: eight to twelve dishes, the room empty and the room full, the frontage with the entrance so people recognise it, the terrace, and the people who actually stand behind the bar. The picture of the frontage is routinely underrated — it is the image someone looks for when they are trying to find you on the street right now.

Two technical points you settle at build time and then never touch again: oversized image files are the most common cause of slow loading on a restaurant website, because photos are the actual content here. And every image needs alternative text describing what is in it. Both cost practically nothing on a new build and are tedious to retrofit.

What guests look for — and where it belongs

Allergen labelling and price information are regulated

The moment you publish a menu, you are not publishing advertising but information about what you offer — and in Germany that comes with its own requirements. Labelling for allergens and additives is regulated, and there are rules about how prices must be stated as well. Exactly which details are required in your case, and in what form, depends on your operation.

For the website that produces one practical rule, independent of the detail: whatever appears on the menu in the restaurant belongs on the website in the same system — and the two have to be maintained together. The dangerous state is not the missing entry but the old one. A website showing a recipe or a price from two years ago is saying something untrue about what you serve today. So plan the labelling as part of the maintenance routine, not as a one-off task at launch.

Your Google Business Profile often matters more than your website

We say that even though we build websites. In hospitality the search almost always begins in the map or the local results, not on a website. Someone searching for a cuisine near them sees names, ratings, pictures and opening hours first — and decides right there. If you can invest one hour of work in a single place, invest it in your Google Business Profile: correct hours including holidays, real photographs, correct address and phone number, and replies to reviews.

What still makes the website indispensable is control. On portals and in directories, other people decide which pictures go on top, which menu is shown and whether the prices still hold. Your website is the only surface where you set that picture yourself — and it is the source Google, the portals and increasingly AI answers draw their details from. So the two work together: the profile brings the attention, the website supplies the reliable, complete and current version behind it. The practical consequence: name, address and phone number must be identical character for character everywhere, and the website should point to the profile just as the profile points to the website.

Frequently asked questions about restaurant websites