Restaurants
Websites for restaurants and cafés
Restaurant sites have three jobs: the menu, the hours, and how to get there. Everything else is decoration.
What does a restaurant website need?
Short answer: four things, and all four belong in the first screen — the trade and the town you work in, a phone number that is a button rather than text, photographs of your own work, and a price or a price range. For restaurants the three that decide the call are:
- A menu in real text, not a PDF or a photograph
- Hours that update, holidays included
- One-tap directions and phone
A site like that is $750 once with us, with no monthly fee, and usually live within a week. The domain is registered in your name and you keep the files, so it keeps working whatever happens later. Being live is not the same as being found: Google normally indexes a new site within days but takes one to three months to rank for anything competitive, and the Google Business Profile we set up in every tier usually produces calls sooner than the website does. Nobody can promise rankings, and we do not.
The problem
Your menu is a photograph of a paper menu on a delivery app, your hours are wrong on three different sites, and a third of your would-be customers give up before they find the address. None of that is a marketing problem — it is a plumbing problem.
What your customers are typing
- restaurants near me
- [cuisine] restaurant [city]
- menu prices
- restaurants open now
- best brunch [city]
Every one of those is a search you can appear for. None of them can be won by a Facebook page.
What a restaurant site actually needs
A menu in real text, not a PDF or a photograph
Google cannot read a photograph of a menu. Text menus rank for dish searches; images rank for nothing.
Hours that update, holidays included
The most common reason someone gives up on a restaurant is not knowing whether it is open.
One-tap directions and phone
Most restaurant searches happen on a phone, often while driving. Two taps to navigate, or you lose them.
Photographs of the food and the room
People decide with their eyes. The room matters as much as the plate — they are choosing an evening, not a meal.
Reservations or ordering linked clearly
Whatever you use, it should be one obvious button, not buried in a paragraph.
What it costs
Published and fixed. $750 gets a five-page site with your services, your photographs and your phone number where people can find it. $1,500 adds a page for each area you serve and the markup that helps Google read the site correctly. $2,500 is the full local search build with monthly content and call tracking.
For comparison, US agencies typically start small business projects at $4,000–$6,000, and hourly rates run $100–$200. We wrote up the real numbers, including three-year totals against Wix and Squarespace — a $750 one-time site works out cheaper than either before year two.
How long it takes
Usually live within a week. The build itself is a day or two; almost all the waiting is content. If you have photographs, your service list and your hours ready when we start, it goes quickly. More on why websites get delayed and how to avoid it.
Being live is not the same as being found. Expect Google to index the site within days and to take one to three months to rank for anything worth ranking for. Your Google Business Profile, which we set up in every tier, usually produces calls sooner than the website does.
What you own
The domain is registered in your name, not ours, and you get the files. If you stop working with us the site keeps running and anyone can edit it. That is not standard in this industry, so it is worth asking whoever else you talk to whether they do the same.
Still deciding? Read whether you actually need a website — including the cases where the honest answer is no — or compare Wix, Squarespace and having one built. Other trades are covered on the trades index.