Why your restaurant needs a website
Someone looking for dinner types their town and a type of food. They check three things: reviews, photos, the menu. Without a website, you are entirely dependent on your Google listing and the delivery platforms.
A website puts you back in control of the information people see. The opening hours are right, the prices are current, the phone number is tappable. You also win back the clicks that directory sites were collecting on your behalf.
The difference shows up outside service hours. Nobody calls at 11pm, but a web page can take an enquiry at any hour. In a 60-cover dining room, picking up 5 to 8 bookings a week outside opening hours adds up to an extra service every month.
A website also filters out pointless phone calls. Terrace, step-free access, parking, children's menu: these questions come in every day and eat into your front-of-house team's time.
Start with the menu: the first thing to put online
If you only do one thing this month, put your menu online. It is the most visited page on any restaurant website, far ahead of the "about us" page. People want to know what they will eat and what it costs before they leave the house.
A downloadable PDF menu no longer cuts it. The file is heavy, it displays badly on mobile, and Google cannot read its contents properly. A digital menu that opens straight in the browser takes two minutes to update and stays readable on a phone screen.
On most of the restaurant websites we come across, the menu page accounts for 50 to 70% of all visits. Everything else on the site is scenery around it.
What your online menu should include
- Full dish descriptions, not just a poetic name
- Current prices, including anything you are legally required to display
- Allergens, either on request or listed dish by dish
- Daily specials and lunch deals
- The useful labels: vegetarian, gluten-free, made in-house
The rules on displaying restaurant prices apply to your website too. An out-of-date online menu is not just commercially awkward, it leaves you exposed.
A menu that works in the dining room too
The same menu can live in two places: on your website and behind a QR code on the tables. That way you only maintain one source. Creating a QR code menu takes an hour and saves you reprinting everything every time a supplier changes.
Your options for building a restaurant website
There are four realistic routes. The right one depends on how much time you have, not on the sales pitch you are hearing. A chef-owner working alone in the kitchen has a very different project from a group with three sites.
| Option | Typical budget | Timeline | How independent you are afterwards |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website builder (Wix, Squarespace) | €150 to €400 per year | 1 to 3 days | Complete, you make changes yourself |
| Restaurant-specific platform | €200 to €600 per year | A few hours | Good, menu and bookings built in |
| Freelance WordPress developer | €1,200 to €3,500 to build | 3 to 6 weeks | Varies, depends on the handover you get |
| Web agency | €3,500 to €10,000 | 6 to 12 weeks | Limited without a maintenance contract |
Templates and the DIY route
Plenty of people go looking for a free restaurant website or an HTML and CSS template to install themselves. That works if someone you know can build and host a page. The trap is not getting it live, it is updating it six months later when that person is no longer around.
What you are actually paying an agency for
An agency mostly bills for planning time, custom design and coordination. That makes sense for a fine-dining restaurant with a strong identity, or for a website covering several restaurants with a different menu at each address. For a neighbourhood bistro, it is rarely the best use of €4,000.
The real costs, beyond the quote
The initial quote is not the whole bill. Three lines come back every year, whichever option you pick.
- Domain name: €10 to €20 per year, registered in your name and not your supplier's
- Hosting: €50 to €200 per year depending on the plan
- Professional photos: €300 to €800 for a half-day, worth redoing when the menu genuinely changes
Budget for your own time as well. Two hours a month to keep opening hours, closures and daily specials up to date is an honest minimum. An abandoned website does more damage than no website at all.
The content you need, page by page
The home page
In three seconds it should answer: what kind of food, where, and how to book a table. Put the restaurant name, the town, a photo of the room and a booking button visible without scrolling. Everything else can wait further down.
Practical information
Full address, hours day by day, tappable phone number, directions, parking, accessibility. All of it in readable text, not inside an image: search engines cannot read graphics.
Photos
Good photos do more for your bookings than any amount of copy. Three well-lit plates, one shot of the dining room and one of the terrace are enough. Compress the images before you put them online, otherwise the page takes five seconds to load on mobile data and your visitor leaves.
The menu page
It should be one click away from every page. Do not bury it in a drop-down. If you want to push a lunch deal, give it its own block with the price on show.
What is optional
The chef's story, a 40-photo gallery, a blog: only worth it if you have time to keep them alive. Five solid pages beat fifteen half-finished ones.
Online booking and ordering
Online booking is usually plugged in through an external tool. You can embed a widget directly in the page, so people can book in a few clicks without leaving your site. Expect €30 to €100 per month depending on the provider, sometimes a commission per cover.
For online ordering, the question is where the orders land. On a dedicated tablet, by email, or straight into your till if the software supports it. Check this before you sign: an order that arrives in the wrong place derails the rush.
You can do both, keeping the delivery platforms for volume and pushing your own channel with regulars. The margins are not comparable: on a €30 order, a platform often takes 25 to 30%, your own site a few percent in card fees.
Local search: being visible when people look for you
Restaurant search visibility is local first. Your Google business profile counts for more than your website in nearby-search results. The two must say exactly the same thing: same name, same address, same hours.
On the site itself, the SEO work that matters comes down to a few points. Put your town in the home page title, publish the menu as text, and make sure the site loads fast. To go further, add Restaurant and Menu structured data.
- A clear page title: cuisine, name, town
- An address in text, identical everywhere on the web
- Alt tags on your food photos
- A load time under 3 seconds on mobile
Social media rounds out your online presence without replacing it. Instagram and Facebook are there to catch attention and show daily life; post your specials there, and always point people back to your site for the menu and bookings.
One last habit: ask three customers to try your site on their own phone while you watch. In five minutes you will see what breaks, what is not visible, and what they were looking for and could not find. It is the best free audit there is, and it beats any 30-page report. Then, month after month, work out which pages are really pulling their weight, and put your effort there rather than adding content everywhere.