Restaurants and food businesses

Restaurant websites are judged in about fifteen seconds, on a phone, by someone deciding where to eat right now. They want the menu, whether you are open, where you are, and how to book or order — in that order.

Most restaurant sites answer all four somewhere, but slowly: behind an intro animation, under a hamburger, or inside a PDF that has to be downloaded and pinch-zoomed. I have built a fine-dining restaurant site, a city food delivery store with Stripe and owner-controlled delivery windows, and a recipe project where the content structure was the whole job.

Discuss project

What is different here

01

The menu must be text, not a PDF

A PDF menu downloads slowly, opens in another viewer, needs pinch-zooming, and search engines cannot read it to match someone looking for what you serve. This single change does more than a redesign.

02

Today's hours, in words

Not a weekly table the guest has to parse. "Open until 23:00 today" answers the question; a schedule grid makes them do the work.

03

Photography is the product page

Guests decide with their eyes. One proper session of the food you actually serve, on the plates you actually use, in a room with people in it — and then the file sizes controlled, because galleries are why restaurant sites are slow.

04

Restaurant logic changes weekly

Seasons, holidays, delivery zones, sold-out dishes. If changing any of that needs a developer, the site quietly goes out of date — and wrong holiday hours cost a full service.

What a build includes

  • Menu as structured text you can update in two minutes when a price changes
  • First screen with cuisine, today's hours, a tappable phone number and a map link
  • Booking that asks for name, phone, time and party size — and confirms twice
  • Ordering and delivery with time slots and zones you control by season
  • Structured data for restaurant, menu and opening hours, so search can show them directly
  • Image optimisation, because the gallery is what makes these sites slow

Mistakes I see most often

  • The menu as a downloadable PDF — the single most damaging thing on a restaurant site

  • An intro animation or autoplaying video before anything readable loads

  • A phone number that selects as text instead of dialling when tapped

  • The founder's story on the first screen instead of on its own page

  • Holiday and seasonal hours that were never updated

  • A booking form with no confirmation, so guests phone anyway or book elsewhere

Have a project in this field?
Let's talk about it

Tell me what the site has to do. You get an honest range the same day.

IconDiscuss project
decor

Questions

If you deliver or do takeaway, ordering pays for itself. If you are a dining room, booking and a readable menu matter far more — ordering would be scope you do not use.

Yes, and you should. Prices change and dishes come off. A menu that needs a developer is a menu that goes out of date, and an out-of-date menu is worse than none.

It does more work than the website for discovery. Keep hours, photos and phone identical in both places — mismatched hours are a common and expensive error.

A single-page site with menu and booking starts around $600. A full site with ordering, delivery rules and payments is in online-store territory: from $1,500.