A website for a restaurant: 7 things it must have

A restaurant website does not have to be complicated, but it does have to answer three questions quickly: what you serve, what it costs and how to book. The rest is atmosphere. A guest standing on the waterfront or in the middle of town unlocks a phone, types “tavern near me” and decides within seconds whether to come to you or to your neighbour. The site is the quiet waiter who works around the clock: if it answers the right questions, the table is full.

Below we go through the seven in order. None of this is a design trick. These are practical decisions that we see decide, every single day, whether somebody sits down at a table. They matter most in summer, when a tourist walking past makes the call on the move and has no patience for a site that loads slowly or hides its prices.

The 7 things it must have

1. A menu that is always current

The menu is reason number one why anybody opens a restaurant website. If they do not find it straight away, they move on. So it has to sit one or two clicks from the home page, read cleanly on a phone without zooming and, above all, be correct. Nothing leaves a worse impression than a dish you stopped serving or a price from last year.

In practice that means the menu is not an image and not a PDF that depends on a developer. It should be editable through a simple interface where the owner or the head of the floor adds the daily special, drops a seasonal dish and corrects a price in a few minutes. If every price change is a small project, the menu goes stale fast. We also recommend keeping prices visible: hiding them puts off careful guests, and those are exactly the people who choose in advance.

2. Booking in one tap (and WhatsApp)

Every extra step in a booking costs you guests. A form with ten fields and a compulsory sign-up is an obstacle. For most taverns and family restaurants, what works best is a button that opens WhatsApp with the message already written (“Hello, I would like to book a table for 4 on Saturday evening”). The guest fills in the details and sends it. Next to that, a clearly visible phone number to call and a short form as a backup for people who do not use WhatsApp both earn their place.

Big systems with a table calendar and online payment only make sense once the volume asks for them, say at a busy place with queues and waiting lists. For most venues they add nothing but cost and complication. At Konoba Toma we cut booking down to a single tap over WhatsApp, and that covers the large majority of guests with no monthly subscription at all. What a larger system has to know about capacity and season we went through in a booking system for tours and transfers.

A guest does not read, a guest scans. If they can see the menu, the prices and how to book within 5 seconds, they turn up.

3. A gallery that sells the atmosphere

On the web, food is eaten with the eyes. A few good photographs of the dishes, the room, the terrace and the view sell the place better than any description can. The rule is simple: ten excellent ones beat fifty average ones. Blurry, dark or stretched photographs do the exact opposite of what you want, because the guest assumes the plate looks the same way.

You do not necessarily need an expensive shoot for every post. A phone in daylight, a clean table and a steady frame is often enough for everyday shots. A professional photographer pays off for the headline photographs, the ones a guest sees first and the ones that go on the Google profile and social media. What matters is that every photograph is optimised to load fast, otherwise they work against the speed of the site.

4. Local SEO and the Google profile

In hospitality, local visibility is worth more than everything else put together. Most guests are not searching for the name of your place: they search for “tavern Split”, “pizzeria near me” or “where to eat in Trogir”. To turn up there you need a tidy, verified Google Business Profile and a site that tells Google plainly who you are, where you are and what you serve.

The most important rule is consistency of details. The name, the address and the phone number have to be exactly the same on the site, on the Google profile and in every directory. Add the right categories, opening hours and photographs to the profile, and keep asking happy guests for reviews, because reviews weigh heavily in local rankings. If you want to go deeper, we covered the groundwork on our web development page, and local SEO step by step is broken down in SEO for small businesses.

5. A mobile design that thinks of the phone first

Nearly everybody looking for somewhere to eat does it on a phone, often one-handed and on the move. If the site was built “for desktop and then somehow for mobile as well”, the guest feels it immediately: tiny text, buttons a thumb cannot hit, a menu that runs off the edge of the screen. The site has to be conceived for the small screen first.

In practical terms, that means large and readable text with no zooming, call and booking buttons within reach of a thumb, and the most important information right at the top. The phone number and the opening hours are ideally one tap away from anywhere on the site. Once the mobile experience works, everything else gets easier.

6. Opening hours and location, with no hunting

There are two things a guest checks before setting off: whether you are open and how to get there. Both have to be visible without any digging. State the opening hours clearly, with a separate note for the season, for public holidays and for the day you are closed. In summer it is worth flagging a late kitchen if you run one, because a lot of tourists eat later than locals do.

For the location, add an embedded map and a button that opens navigation with one tap. If you are inside an old town centre or somewhere genuinely hard to find, a short instruction (“entrance from the side street, parking by the church”) saves guests from giving up. A small thing, and often the one that decides whether somebody actually turns up.

7. Speed that does not chase guests away

The prettiest site in the world is worth nothing if it does not open. On a mobile connection in summer, in a packed town, every second of loading costs you a share of your guests. The usual culprits are enormous, unoptimised photographs and bloated code. A restaurant site should be light and fast, not a gallery of heavy images.

In practice that means photographs prepared for the web, the smallest possible number of unnecessary scripts and a clean build. Speed helps Google and the guest alike: better ranking and fewer people leaving. Why a slow site loses both guests and ranking is covered in more detail in why your site is not on Google, but the principle is simple: a restaurant site has to fly.

What to put first if you are starting from zero

You do not need all of it at once. If you are starting on a limited budget, begin with the things that bring guests in directly and add the rest later. Here is roughly how we set the priorities for a typical tavern or a smaller restaurant.

That order protects the budget and gives you a result from day one. You can see more about how we plan a build and what goes into the scope on the web development page, and if the cost side is what interests you, we broke it down in the guide on how much a website costs.