What restaurant website design is for
Restaurant website design starts with one reader: someone on a phone deciding where to eat. They want the menu, the opening hours, a way to book and a look at the room and the food. Give them those in a form a phone loads quickly, send bookings to the system you already use, and most of the job is done. The rest is for guests who want more than a table.
This guide is for owners and managers of independent restaurants in the UK and Europe who are about to commission a new site. It draws on a site we designed and built for Pelikani Kacurrel, a seafood restaurant in Zogaj, on Lake Shkodra in northern Albania, open since 2018. It is part of our website design and development work, and the same decisions apply in Leeds or Lyon.
Pelikani does two jobs at once. It fills tables on an ordinary evening, and it takes bookings for weddings and celebrations of up to 150 people. Those visitors ask different questions, so the site gives each of them a route of its own.
Two choices on that site matter for almost any restaurant. The menu is a page, not a PDF. And we didn't build a booking system.
Put the menu on a web page, not in a PDF
Publish your menu as a web page: text that fits a phone screen and is quick for you to change. On the Pelikani site, the menu is something to read rather than a file to download.
After two decades of usability studies, Nielsen Norman Group still calls PDFs unfit for reading on screen. A PDF is laid out for paper, so on a phone the diner pinches and zooms around a printed page. In one of its studies, a canteen menu in a PDF on a company intranet took almost three minutes to download. Before giving up, the participant said: "I really don't care what's for lunch."
The UK government reached the same view for its own website. The GOV.UK team writes that information in a PDF is harder to find and maintain than a web page. It adds that PDFs are often bad for accessibility.
Maintenance is the part a restaurant feels. With a PDF, every new dish means editing a design file, exporting it and uploading it again. The old file can stay live at its old link, still shared in last spring's social posts.
To be fair to the PDF, Google can read one: PDF is on its list of file types it indexes. The search engine isn't the problem. The person holding the phone is.
| PDF menu | Menu as a web page | |
|---|---|---|
| On a phone | A printed page shrunk to fit, read by pinching and zooming | Text sized for the screen |
| Adding a dish or changing a price | Edit the design file, export it, upload it again | Edit the item and save |
| Allergen and dietary notes | Printed into the design, if they're there at all | Beside each dish, and quick to correct |
| Screen readers | Readable only if the PDF was built with care | Readable when the page has proper headings and text |
| Your Google listing | Links to a file | Links to the page, as your Business Profile's menu link |
Allergen notes belong on the menu page
A web menu is also the easiest place to keep allergen information current. UK and EU rules both require it for food served in restaurants.
In the UK, the Food Standards Agency lists 14 allergens that must be declared, from celery and gluten to sesame and sulphites. For food served on the premises, the FSA's allergen guidance allows two routes. You can write the information down, on a menu or in an information pack. Or staff can give it verbally, with a clearly visible notice telling customers how to ask.
In the EU, the food information rules make allergen information mandatory for non-prepacked food, including in restaurants and cafes.
If your kitchen uses the written route, a menu page lets you mark allergens beside each dish and fix a mistake the same day. If it uses the verbal route, say so at the top of the menu page. A diner with an allergy then knows to ask before they book. Either way, the page should match what the staff will say at the table.
Take bookings through the system you already run
Don't build a booking system into your website. Use the one your front-of-house team already works in, and make the website's job getting the diner there in one tap. For Pelikani, online reservations go through the booking system the restaurant already runs on.
A restaurant booking system does far more than store a name and a time. Products such as OpenTable, ResDiary and TheFork know your tables and sittings. They send confirmations and reminders, and many can take card details against no-shows.
A second system on the website would have to stay in step with that one. On a busy Saturday, the two would disagree about who has table six.
Our guide to custom software versus off-the-shelf puts the rule simply: when a job works the same way in every company, buy the product. Taking restaurant bookings works the same way everywhere. Presenting your restaurant doesn't. Put the website's effort there.
What the site should do:
- Put a "Book a table" button in the header of every page, linked to your booking system's page or widget
- Add a tap-to-call phone number beside it for guests who would rather ring
- Use the same booking link on your Google Business Profile, which lets restaurants add reservation links
If your provider works with Reserve with Google, your listing can take bookings directly. Google's page on booking through a provider explains how to find the providers that work in your country, and warns that some charge for bookings made through Google. Ask yours before you switch it on.
Give weddings and group events their own path
Pelikani hosts weddings and celebrations for up to 150 guests, with catering and decoration. A couple booking dinner for Friday and a couple planning a wedding need different things from the same site. The first wants a table in a few taps. The second wants to know how many guests you can seat, what you provide, which dates are free and who they will deal with.
So the Pelikani site has a separate path for events. The event enquiry never gets in the way of a table for two. And a wedding party doesn't have to squeeze its questions into a widget built for four people at eight o'clock.
An events path that works has five parts:
- A page of its own, in the main navigation, not a line at the bottom of the home page
- The largest group you can host, and what's included, such as catering and decoration
- Photos of the room set for an event, as well as for dinner service
- An enquiry form that asks for the date, the number of guests and the type of event, so the reply can be specific
- A named person or role who replies, and how soon
Send those enquiries to the person who plans events, not into the booking system. An event is a conversation, and the booking system is built for slots. We made the same call for quote requests in our guide to websites for builders and trades. An enquiry left in a shared inbox may already be lost to the next venue.
Photos and reviews: show the room, and put proof beside the booking button
Pelikani's gallery shows the terrace and the food, because that is what a diner wants to see before choosing. Use your own photos. A stock shot of someone else's pasta tells a diner nothing about the room they're about to book, the view from the table or the size of the plates.
Reviews on the Pelikani site sit where they help rather than on a page of their own. A review beside the booking button reaches a diner at the moment they hesitate. A separate testimonials page makes them go looking. Put two or three short reviews near the booking button and on the events page, and link each to where it was left.
Collect them within the rules. Google's content policy bans businesses from discouraging negative reviews or asking only happy customers for them. Its tips for getting reviews also rule out discounts or free items in exchange. A card offering dessert for a review breaks the policy.
In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has banned fake reviews, and reviews that hide an incentive, since 6 April 2025. The safe method is to send every guest the same review link after their visit, using the link or QR code Google gives you.
Make your Google listing and your website agree
A diner who finds you on Google Maps sees your Business Profile before your website, so the two must tell the same story. Google's guide to Business Profiles for restaurants walks through hours, menus, photos, posts and reservations. Fill in all of it, then point the listing's links at your website.
| Detail | On your website | On your Google Business Profile |
|---|---|---|
| Opening hours | In the footer of every page | Regular hours, plus special hours for holidays and closures |
| Menu | The full menu page, with allergen notes | The menu link, pointing at that page |
| Bookings | "Book a table" on every page | Reservation link to the same booking page |
| Events | Its own page, with an enquiry form | Posts when you have dates to fill |
| Reviews | Two or three, beside the booking button | Where most reviews are left, with your replies |
Hours are the easiest detail to get wrong. Google lets you set special hours for holidays and events, and suggests confirming holiday hours even when they match your usual ones. Change the website on the same day.
Underneath, give search engines the same facts in code. Google's structured data for local businesses includes a menu property for your menu's URL, plus cuisine and opening hours. Google doesn't promise any feature will appear because of it. It is a small piece of work, and we add it to the sites we build.
When a restaurant doesn't need a custom website
Plenty of restaurants don't need a custom site. A café or takeaway with one short menu that rarely changes can do well with a complete Business Profile. Add a one-page site from a website builder, with the menu as text, your hours and a booking link.
Your booking or ordering provider may also offer a website with bookings built in. For a single restaurant with no events trade, that can be a fair choice. Before you take it, check whose name the domain is in, and whether your menu and photos come with you if you change provider. Our five checks for owning your website apply to a site bundled with a booking system too.
A custom site starts to pay when a template can't carry the business:
- Events or private dining are a real part of your trade, as at Pelikani
- You serve several menus, such as lunch, dinner, set menus and drinks
- You run more than one restaurant, each with its own hours and booking link
- Visitors arrive in more than one language
- Staff answer the same questions on the phone every day, and the site could answer them first
And if you're full every night and events are booked out months ahead, a new website won't add covers. Put the effort somewhere else.
Six things to gather before you call a web designer
Before the first call with any web designer, gather these. They make the quote more accurate and the first meeting shorter:
- Every menu you serve, and who changes each one
- How you give allergen information: on the menu, or by asking staff
- The booking system you use, and its booking link
- How event enquiries reach you now, and who answers them
- Photos of the room, the food and the room set for an event
- Access to your Google Business Profile
Our guide to writing a website brief sets out the rest, section by section.
Before service tonight, hand your phone to a member of staff who rarely uses your website. Ask them to find the dinner menu, Sunday's opening hours and a table for four on Saturday. Watch where they hesitate. That is the start of your brief.
Questions
Should we take online orders through our own website?
Only if takeaway or delivery is a real part of your trade. Online ordering needs a basket and a checkout, so scope it separately from the menu page. In the UK, food sold online needs allergen information before the order is complete. It needs it again when the food arrives, under the Food Standards Agency's guidance. Many restaurants keep delivery on the platforms they already use and link to them from the site.
Can we change the menu ourselves after launch?
You should be able to, so ask before you sign with anyone. A menu that needs the designer for every new dish goes out of date. We build a content model your team can edit without breaking the layout. Changing a dish is an edit and a save, not a phone call to us.
How much does a restaurant website cost?
We don't publish prices, because every project is quoted. For a restaurant, the price moves with the number of menus and languages, and with who takes the photos. Events add their own pages and enquiry routing. Our guide to what sets the price of a website in the UK explains what a proper quote should list.
How we wrote this: drafted with AI, then checked and edited by the people who build our projects. Figures come from our own work or from the linked sources.