Most restaurant websites have too many pages and too little on the ones that matter. A diner is deciding quickly, so the site works best as a handful of pages each doing one obvious job.
The menu page
The most visited page on almost every restaurant site, and the one most often neglected. It should be a proper web page rather than a PDF, sectioned clearly, current on price, and marked up so dietary and allergen information is visible on the dish rather than in a downloadable chart. If someone can read your menu comfortably on a phone in a pub car park, it is doing its job.
The booking page, or better, the booking button
Booking should not really need a page, it should be a button on every page. Where a page helps is for the details around it: group sizes, deposits, cancellation, whether walk-ins are welcome. Keeping those answers visible reduces the phone calls asking them. The commission side is covered in direct bookings, not platform commission.
The about page, which people do read
Restaurants underestimate this one. People choosing where to spend an evening want to know whose place it is and what the room feels like. A couple of honest paragraphs and photographs of the space with people in it do more than a page of adjectives about passion and provenance.
Private hire and events
If you take bookings for parties, wakes or Christmas, that deserves its own page with capacities, options and a way to enquire. It is usually the highest-value enquiry a restaurant gets and it is very often buried in a paragraph on the contact page.
The pages doing nothing
- A gallery page with no context, when those photographs would work harder on the menu and hire pages.
- A blog nobody updates, which ages the whole site.
- A separate page per menu, splitting what should be one page.
- A news page whose last entry is two years old.
The basics of the site itself are in restaurant website design that fills tables.
The short version. Fewer pages, each with a job. A readable menu, booking everywhere, an honest about page, and a proper private hire page. Cut the rest.
More on the sector on our page for hospitality.
