A restaurant website has four jobs and a good one does them in about ten seconds: show the menu, confirm the hours, take a booking, and say where you are. Almost everything else is decoration. The most common and most expensive mistake in the category is publishing the menu as an image or a document, which makes the single most searched thing about the restaurant invisible to search engines and awkward on a phone.
The menu must be text on your own site, not an image
Dishes, prices and dietary information as real text on a page you control is the single highest value change most restaurant sites can make. It captures the searches people actually make, it works on a phone, it is readable by screen readers, and it can be updated without a designer. A PDF menu satisfies none of those. If the menu changes frequently, that is an argument for text, not against it.
Hours must be right in three places and holidays are where they break
The website, the business profile and any third-party listings all need to agree, and the failure is nearly always a holiday or a seasonal change nobody updated. A diner who arrives at a closed restaurant leaves a review that outlasts the mistake by years. Put holiday hours in the profile in advance as a standing operational task rather than remembering each time.
Decide who owns ordering and reservations before choosing a designer
Third-party ordering and booking platforms take a commission and own the customer relationship, and the design decision, how prominent they are, whether direct is offered alongside, is a commercial decision worth more than any visual choice. Make it explicitly, and if direct ordering matters, make the direct route genuinely better in some visible way rather than merely present.
Photographs of the actual food, taken properly, once a year
Stock photography of food is recognisable and it undermines trust in a category where the buyer is deciding on appearance. A single session photographing your actual dishes, the room and the staff produces material for the website, the profile, the delivery platforms and social for a year. It is the cheapest high-return spend available to a restaurant and it is skipped constantly.
Accessibility matters here more than the trade expects
Restaurant websites have been a repeated subject of accessibility complaints, frequently because the menu is an image with no text alternative, which is also the SEO problem. Specify conformance to a named standard, currently WCAG 2.2 at a stated level, and require testing. Fixing the menu fixes both problems at once, which is why it is the first thing to specify.
Questions people ask about restaurant website design agency
What does a restaurant website cost?
From a few thousand dollars for a good template implementation with real photography to considerably more for a custom build with integrated ordering. The variables that move it most are photography, whether ordering is integrated, and how much you can edit afterwards. Ask for the quote split into those.
Should we use a restaurant website platform?
They are fast and understand the category, and many host you on their system, which means the site is effectively rented. Ask what happens if you stop paying, who the domain is registered to, and whether the menu content can be exported. Check the domain record yourself.
Do we need a website if we are on delivery platforms?
Yes. The platforms take commission and own the customer, and a large share of diners check the restaurant's own site before visiting or ordering. The site is also where the menu, hours and booking live without a middleman, which is the part of the relationship worth keeping.
What is the fastest improvement?
Putting the menu on the site as text, with prices, and making sure the hours agree everywhere including holidays. Both can be done in a day, cost nothing beyond the time, and address what nearly every diner is actually looking for.