For restaurant owners
Restaurant websites that fill the quiet nights as well as Saturday
Your regulars already know where you are. The website is for the people deciding tonight between you and two other places, and for the office manager planning a table of twelve for December. It should be built around those two decisions: the menu and the booking.
The menu is the page people came for
Most of what guests ask when they ring is answered by the menu: is there something for the vegetarian, what does a main cost, is the Sunday roast still on. Online, the menu page is where most visitors head first, and if it is a PDF from last spring that has to be pinched and zoomed on a phone, plenty of them will decide somewhere else is easier.
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A menu written as text on a proper web page loads quickly, reads well on a small screen and can be understood by Google and by the AI assistants people now ask for recommendations.
- Starters, mains and puddings as text, with prices
- Vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free dishes marked, with a line on how to ask staff about allergens
- Set lunch, Sunday lunch and the children's menu on pages of their own, since each is searched for separately
- A booking button right beside the menu
Where the Book a table button goes, and who takes a cut
Most restaurants already use a booking system, and it should stay. The question is where your own website sends people. A booking widget embedded on your site keeps the guest with you. A link out to a listing on a booking platform puts other restaurants one scroll away from yours, and depending on your contract, a booking made through the platform's own app may be charged differently from one made through your widget. It is worth checking.
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Put the button in the same place on every page, keep it reachable on a phone as the visitor scrolls, and make sure the booking link on your Google profile goes to the same place. Large parties are different. Above a certain size most restaurants want a conversation first, so the site should route those to a short enquiry form rather than the widget.
Private dining and the December bookings worth a dozen tables
A table for two is worth having. A booking for eighteen from a local firm in the first week of December can be worth a Tuesday night on its own, and it is decided differently. The person booking wants to see the room, the set menu, the price per head, the deposit terms and whether you can split the bill. If all of that takes three emails to find out, they book the place that put it on a page.
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Give private dining its own page with photos of the room laid for an event, the capacity seated and standing, sample menus and any minimum spend. Christmas deserves a page too, published early, because office party organisers start looking long before the decorations go up.
★★★★★
“… He took the vision for my brand, Byte & Batter, and built a premium, high-converting digital storefront entirely from scratch. …”
Google, TripAdvisor and the version of events on your own site
Diners read reviews in more than one place and your website cannot control what they say. What it can do is make sure the rest of the picture agrees. The opening hours on your site, your Google profile and the door should match, including bank holidays and the week you close in January. Hours that disagree are one of the quickest ways to earn a bad review from someone who arrived at a locked door.
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Your Google Business Profile does a lot of the work before anyone reaches the website. It carries the menu link, the booking link, photos, hours and the reviews themselves, so it is claimed, filled in properly and connected to the new site as part of the build. Replies to reviews are read by the next diner rather than the last one, so short, calm answers work best. If your food hygiene rating is a good one, show it on the site as well.
Searches that name a dish, a mood or an occasion
Few people search for a restaurant by name unless they already know it. They search for a Sunday roast near me, somewhere dog friendly for lunch, a quiet place for an anniversary, or the best curry in a particular neighbourhood. More of them now ask an AI assistant the same thing in a full sentence. Both find you through words on pages: what you cook, when, for whom, and where you are.
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That means plain sentences, and sometimes pages, for the things you are actually good at, rather than one homepage that says fine dining in a relaxed setting. A proper roast, a tasting menu or a big terrace is worth stating clearly enough for a machine to repeat. The site structures your details so search engines and assistants can read them; which restaurant an assistant recommends is its own decision.
Adverts, tracking and a menu that changes with the seasons
Paid search rarely pays for itself on a generic restaurants near me search, where you compete with every table in town for a click that might be worth one cover. It can make sense for something specific with a higher value: private dining, Christmas parties, a new opening or a one-off event night. Before spending anything, the site should record which visitors clicked to book or tapped the phone number, so you can tell whether the advert filled tables.
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After launch, the job that never ends is keeping things current: new dishes, price changes, event nights, holiday hours. On Growth Care you send the changes and they are made, without an invoice for each one, and a one-page monthly report shows visitors and enquiries in plain English.
What it costs
From £1,400, one-off.
That is the whole Growth Website™ rebuild for a restaurant’s business, up to 6 pages. It covers the audit, rewriting how you explain the work, design, build, the conversion and local search groundwork, tracking, speed and launch. It is about 14 working days from agreed direction to launch, and you own it outright.
Growth Care™ is optional: £149 a month. Cancel any time, with a month’s notice. Every price is fixed and published, so you know the cost before you speak to us.
In our clients’ words
What our clients say.
Questions
The ones that come up.
Should my restaurant menu be a PDF or a web page?
A web page. A PDF is slow to open on a phone, hard to read without zooming and difficult for search engines and AI assistants to understand, so the dishes you are proudest of are effectively invisible to them. A text menu with prices and dietary marks is quicker for the diner and easier to keep current. If you like a designed print version for the tables, it can sit alongside as a download.
Can a restaurant website take table bookings directly?
Yes, through the booking system you already use. Most provide a widget that can sit on your own pages, which keeps the guest on your site rather than on a listing surrounded by other restaurants. The booking button is placed consistently on every page and easy to reach on a phone, and clicks on it are tracked so you can see how many bookings started from the website.
Do I still need a website if I am on Google, TripAdvisor and a booking platform?
Yes. Those listings are useful, but you do not own any of them, and each one shows your restaurant next to others. Your website is the only place where you decide what a diner sees first, how private dining and Christmas are explained, and where the booking button leads. It is also a source that search engines and AI assistants check when they describe what you serve.
Is Google Ads worth it for a restaurant?
Usually not on general searches like restaurants near me, because the click is easy to lose and hard to turn into a booking you can measure. It is more often worth testing for high-value bookings such as private dining, office Christmas parties or a launch. Get tracking in place first so you can see which bookings came from the advert, then decide on the bookings it produced.
How are menu and price changes handled after launch?
On Growth Care, you send the new menu, prices or opening hours and they are updated for you, within a fair monthly allowance and without a charge per change. That matters more for restaurants than for most businesses, because an out-of-date price or a dish that is no longer served is exactly the kind of small thing that turns into a disappointed review.
Where to next
Also for restaurants:
Related trades we build for:
Restaurant websites
Find out what your website is costing you.
A free Growth Audit™: a written, prioritised audit of your website, with the three fixes worth making first. It is yours to keep whatever you decide.
We take on a limited number of builds at once, so there is usually a short wait before a new one starts. Once yours starts, it is about 14 working days from agreed direction to launch.