Websites for Restaurants — What Customers Actually Want

Restaurant websites get more design budget than they need and miss the basics half the time. The reality: 95% of restaurant website visits boil down to three questions, and customers are getting frustrated when they can’t answer them in 5 seconds.

The three questions, in order

1. Are you open right now?
2. What’s on the menu?
3. How do I get in / get an order?

If your homepage doesn’t answer all three above the fold, you’re losing customers to the place down the street whose homepage does.

Hours: real-time matters

Static hours lie. “Open 11am-9pm” is true on a normal Tuesday and false on Thanksgiving, the day of the snowstorm, and the Saturday you closed for a private event. The good restaurant website surfaces the actual open/closed status in real time. Lapeer Laundry isn’t a restaurant, but the site we built for them uses the same pattern: real-time open/closed display, visible above the fold.

Menus: HTML, not PDF

This is the single most-broken thing on restaurant websites. The menu is a PDF that:

• Doesn’t open well on mobile
• Doesn’t show up in Google search results
• Loads slow
• Was last updated in 2019

The fix: menu items as actual web content. Each section, each item, each price as text. Indexable by Google. Loads in 200ms. Searchable on the page.

Online ordering: third-party or in-house?

Most independent restaurants use a third-party (Toast, Square, ChowNow, Clover). The website’s job is just to link to it cleanly. Don’t pretend to build your own ordering system unless you’re running 5+ locations.

The friction here is usually that the “Order Online” button is buried 3 clicks deep. Put it top-right next to the phone number, on every page.

Reservations

Same logic. OpenTable, Resy, Tock — pick one, link to it prominently. Don’t build it yourself.

Google Business Profile is bigger than your website

For restaurants this is more true than for any other industry. The local pack on Google for “[cuisine] near me” or “[city] restaurants” is where the discovery happens. The GBP has to be:

• Updated weekly with photos
• Menu uploaded (yes, again, separately, to GBP)
• Hours including special hours for holidays
• Reviews responded to within a few days
• Reservations / order links in the right fields

What to skip

• The hero video. Loads slow, looks dated.
• The big intro animation. Customers wanting to check Saturday hours don’t want to wait through your “experience.”
• Generic stock food photos. Use real photos of your real food.
• The “Story” page that’s 2,000 words long. Tighten it.

What to spend on

• Real photography of your food, your space, your team
• Mobile-first responsive design
• Live hours / open status
• Menu as HTML, updated easily
• Schema.org Restaurant markup (helps Google show your hours and menu in search)

What we charge

• Coderize Express: $199-$399/month, $99 deposit, live in 3-5 days. Fits 90% of independent restaurants.
• Custom build: $2,500+ one-time. For multi-location, custom loyalty programs, or unique ordering flows.

Free audit

15 minutes. Reach out.