Website for a restaurant or café: from searching to booking

Tonight, on the sofa, four of them

Nobody reads a restaurant site calmly from start to finish. Someone is messaging friends about where to go tonight. They open your site on their phone and want to know three things within a minute: are you open, roughly what does it cost, and is there a table?

If your site can't answer that quickly, the restaurant where it can wins. However good your food is.

The first screen: open, what and where

Put at the top:

• Your cuisine and your neighbourhood in one sentence. "Italian kitchen on the Willemsparkweg."
• Open today from ... to ... The question asked most often deserves the best spot.
• One button: "Book a table". On mobile also in a fixed bar at the bottom, so it's always there.

A heavy video that starts playing by itself doesn't belong here. It loads slowly on 4G and pushes your opening hours out of view.

Your menu is your product

For a hairdresser it's the treatments, for you it's the menu. It belongs on the page itself, as text with prices. Not a PDF.

A PDF menu on a phone means zooming in, scrolling back and forth and waiting for it to load. Many visitors give up there. A menu as normal text reads quickly, and Google can read it. Someone searching for "pasta Oud-Zuid" then finds your dishes.

A few more things guests look for:

• Prices with every dish, and set menus with their price. That way someone knows whether you fit their budget.
• Allergens with a symbol or a short line. Someone with a nut allergy decides on that basis, and should get that information from you.
• Vegetarian and vegan options, clearly marked.

Atmosphere sells the evening

After the menu comes the question: do I want to sit here? Show your own place. Your dishes, your dining room on a busy evening, your staff. Never stock photos of food: guests see straight away that it isn't real, and then they don't believe the rest either.

A restaurant doesn't need a trust mark to build trust. Your reviews do that work. Research by Michael Luca at Harvard, using Yelp data from Seattle, found that one extra star meant 5 to 9% more revenue for independent restaurants. For chains it made no difference. As an independent place, your Google score matters a lot. Show it with the number of reviews and make sure recent ones are among them.

Only mention awards and guide listings if they're real, with the year.

Booking without a hurdle

Phone-only reservations cost you guests. At ten in the evening nobody calls anymore, and someone messaging friends doesn't want to call either. An online reservation system you already use, such as TheFork, Formitable or Zenchef, belongs directly on your site. Don't let it open on a separate page without explanation.

Also offer a route for what doesn't fit online: groups, a private dinner, a birthday. That's where calling or WhatsApp does work.

The practical section

At the bottom of your homepage, or on its own page, goes everything guests look up just before they leave:

• Opening hours per day, with changes around public holidays.
• Address with a map.
• Parking and public transport.
• Groups: from how many people, and how to arrange it.
• Terrace, dogs, high chairs: whatever you're often asked.

Only then your extras: events, private dining and gift cards. They're interesting, but only after the main question has been answered.

The tone

A bistro can be playful, a fine-dining restaurant restrained. What goes for both: short sentences. Nobody reads a paragraph about your philosophy on a phone before booking.

What you lose if you miss this

• A PDF menu instead of text.
• No opening hours on the first screen.
• Phone-only reservations.
• Stock photos of dishes you don't serve.
• A video that makes the page slow.

A good restaurant site feels like a good waiter: it hands you the menu, says there's a table and takes care of the rest. The faster that goes, the more often the evening ends with you.