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Most people decide where to eat before they ever walk in. They search on their phone, look at a few photos, check the menu, maybe read a review or two, and decide. If your restaurant doesn't show up well in those thirty seconds, you've lost a customer to the place next door — even if your food is better.
A restaurant website doesn't need to be fancy. It needs to answer three questions fast: what do you serve, can I book a table, and can I trust this place. Here's how to get each of those right.
A lot of restaurant sites still link to a PDF menu. On a phone, that means pinching, zooming, and squinting. People give up. Your menu should be a normal page on your site — text you can read without zooming, organized by starters, mains, drinks, whatever makes sense for you.
Prices should be there too. Leaving prices off doesn't make you look upscale, it makes people unsure and less likely to commit. If you change your menu seasonally, keep it simple to update yourself, or make sure whoever built your site can update it for you quickly.
Photos help, but only good ones. A few sharp photos of your best dishes do more than twenty blurry ones. If you don't have great photos yet, it's fine to launch with none rather than bad ones — text and prices alone still work.
The biggest mistake restaurant sites make is hiding the phone number or making booking feel like a chore. Some people want to call. Others — especially anyone under 40 — would rather tap a button and pick a time than talk to a person. Give them both options.
A simple booking button that opens a form, or links to a tool like TheFork or your own reservation system, removes the friction. If someone has to search for how to book, they'll often just try the next restaurant instead.
Your address, opening hours, and phone number should be visible without scrolling, on every page. This sounds obvious, but it's the single most common thing missing from restaurant sites.
People trust other diners more than they trust your own description of your food. That's just how it works now. If you have good reviews on Google, show a few of them on your homepage. It costs nothing and it works better than any amount of marketing copy about how fresh your ingredients are.
If you don't have many reviews yet, ask happy regulars directly — most people are glad to leave one if you simply ask at the right moment, like when they're paying and mention how much they enjoyed the meal.
You don't need a fancy review widget. Even three or four short quotes with names, pasted onto your homepage, build trust fast.
Food photos matter, but so does the room. People want to know what kind of place they're walking into — cozy, loud, family-friendly, romantic, casual. A couple of honest photos of the dining area, the bar, or the terrace tell that story better than words.
If you have outdoor seating, a view, or something that makes your place different, put it near the top of the site. That's often the actual reason someone picks you over a similar restaurant two streets away.
Restaurants change menus, close for holidays, add specials. Your website should be something you can update yourself in two minutes, not something you need to call someone about every time your fish special changes.
We built Keepyz for exactly this. You tell us about your restaurant, we build you a real site — menu, booking info, reviews, photos, hours — in about 10 minutes. It's free, publishing included, and it stays free. Your own domain, if you want it, is Premium: €39 a year plus the domain at cost. No automatic renewal.
If your current site is a PDF menu and a phone number from five years ago, it might be worth ten minutes to see what a proper one looks like. Take a look at keepyz.com when you get a chance.
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