Industries
Websites and marketing for restaurants and cafés
Are you open now, and what does the food actually look like. Everything else on a restaurant site is answering a question nobody asked.
Most restaurant customers decide on a phone, within a few minutes, from a map result — and what settles it is photographs, current hours, and whether the menu opens without pinching. A restaurant website has three jobs and everything else is decoration.
How customers actually find a restaurant
Overwhelmingly through the map, not through your website. Somebody searches for food nearby, sees three results, taps one, looks at photographs, checks it is open, glances at the menu, and either walks in or rings. Your website is the fourth thing they see, if they see it at all.
What they type
- restaurants near me open now
- best [cuisine] in [town]
- [your name] menu
- [your name] booking
- [cuisine] delivery [town]
Bracketed parts are wherever you are and whatever you sell. These are phrasings, not a keyword list to stuff into a page.
Four things restaurants and cafés get wrong online
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The menu is a PDF
It downloads instead of opening, it is unreadable on a phone without pinching, and search engines cannot read a word of it. This is the single most common and most damaging thing a restaurant does to its own website, and it costs covers every night.
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Hours are wrong somewhere
The website says one thing, the Google listing another, and a directory nobody remembers signing up to says a third. Whichever is wrong is the one a hungry customer will find, and holidays are when it bites hardest.
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The photographs are stock
People choose a restaurant by looking at the food. Generic imagery of a plate nobody in your kitchen made reads instantly as not-your-food, and the next result down has real photographs.
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Booking goes through three taps and a form
A booking that takes a phone call is fine. A booking that takes a form, a confirmation email and a wait is one most people abandon at seven in the evening.
If you change one thing
Putting the menu in a PDF. If you change one thing after reading this, make the menu a normal web page — text a phone can enlarge, prices a search engine can read, and no download.
What we would work on
- Local visibility & lead generation Help nearby customers find you, trust you, and call you.
- Website design & development Turn visitors into calls, leads and customers.
- Social media marketing Look established, stay visible, without it eating your week.
In that order, for this trade. The pricing is the same whatever sector you are in — a five-page site is $249 to build and $399 a year to keep running.
Have we done this before
A restaurant we built for
- Paanwalla An Indian street-food business in Naperville. Open it on a phone — the menu is a page, not a download.
A live site, not a mockup. Open it and check how it loads on your own phone.
Straight answers
Questions from restaurants and cafés
Yes, and for a specific reason: the apps take a substantial cut and own the customer relationship. Your own site is where somebody books a table, orders direct, or checks whether you are open — none of which the apps are trying to help you with.
Whether you are open, where you are, what the food looks like, and how to book or order. In that order. Everything else can be a click away.
Yes. It is unreadable on a phone without pinching, it cannot be enlarged by somebody with poor eyesight, and search engines get nothing from it — so you never appear for a dish you are known for.
A proper five-page site with a readable menu starts at $249 to build with us and $399 a year to keep running. A custom build with online ordering integrated is a different order of work and priced accordingly.
No. Two posts a week you actually keep to beats five you abandon in a month. For food, photographs of real dishes on a consistent rhythm do more than volume.
No, and be wary of anyone who claims to specialise in 10 industries at once. What we have is a way of working that suits small businesses — fast sites, clear pricing, no contracts — and enough time spent on restaurant problems to know which of them are worth money. Paanwalla is one of ours you can go and look at.
With whichever of the four problems above you recognised. Most owners know the answer before they finish reading the list. If none of them landed, the fifteen-minute call is free and we will look at what you have got.
Nearby
Other trades, same questions
- Dental and Medical Practices Can I get seen, will it be covered, and do people like this practice. A site that answers all three above the fold converts far better than one that leads with a mission statement.
- Contractors and Home Services Can you come out, when, and roughly what will it cost. A contractor site that answers those three above the fold beats a prettier one that makes people ring to find out.