What Every Restaurant Website Needs to Have

The Non-Negotiables: Menu, Hours, Location, Phone

Here's what someone does when they pull up a restaurant website. They want to know what you serve, when you're open, where you are, and how to call you. That's it. That's the visit.

And yet — an alarming number of restaurant websites make at least one of those things hard to find. The menu is buried in a dropdown. The hours are on a separate page nobody clicks. The phone number is tiny text in the footer. The address doesn't link to a map.

Put all four of these things where someone can find them in under five seconds. Your homepage. Above the fold if possible. If a hungry person has to go hunting for your hours, they're going to someone else's website instead. Or more likely, they're just going to a third-party app that already has your info — and now you're paying a commission on an order you could've gotten directly.

Now, about that menu. We need to talk about PDFs.

If your menu is a PDF, you are making a choice to annoy your customers. A PDF menu on a phone means pinching, zooming, squinting, waiting for it to download, and then losing your place when you scroll. It's a miserable experience. People do it because they're already committed to eating at your place — not because it's working well.

Your menu should be actual text on an actual web page. HTML. Readable on any screen, any size, without downloading anything. It loads faster. It's easier to update when you change prices or add a special. And here's a bonus most folks don't think about: Google can actually read it. A PDF menu is invisible to search engines. A text menu means someone searching "best brisket in Tyler" might actually land on your site because your menu mentions brisket. That's free traffic you're leaving on the table with a PDF.

This is a hill worth dying on. If someone tells you a PDF menu is fine, they haven't tried to read one on a phone lately.

Photos That Actually Look Like Your Food

You need photos on your website. But not just any photos.

The temptation is to grab some nice-looking food photography from a stock library and call it done. Here's the problem: your customers are going to walk in and order something that looks nothing like what they saw online. That's a bad first impression, and it's one you created yourself.

Take real photos of your actual food. They don't need to be magazine-quality. A well-lit shot from a decent phone camera is better than a perfect studio shot of food you don't serve. Shoot near a window during the day. Keep the background clean. Take a dozen shots and pick the best three or four.

If you've got a dining room with some character — exposed brick, a patio, string lights, whatever makes your place yours — photograph that too. People eat at restaurants for the experience, not just the food. Give them a reason to picture themselves sitting there.

One thing to avoid: don't plaster your entire menu with photos. Pick your best dishes. Your signature items. The things people already order the most, or the things you want them to try. A website with forty mediocre food photos is worse than one with five good ones.

And update them. If your menu changes seasonally, your photos should too. Nothing says "we don't pay attention to our website" like a summer menu with a photo of butternut squash soup.

Online Ordering and Reservations: Stop Sending People Somewhere Else

If you offer takeout or delivery, you need online ordering on your website. Not a link that sends people to a third-party app. On your website.

Third-party delivery apps take a big cut of every order. When someone finds you through your own website and you send them to an app to actually place the order, you just gave away margin for no reason. There are plenty of ordering systems that plug right into your site — Square, Toast, ChowNow, and others. The customer stays on your site, you keep more of the money, and you own the relationship.

Same goes for reservations. If you take them, put a reservation link or widget right on your homepage. OpenTable, Resy, or even a simple form that sends you an email. The fewer steps between "I want to eat there" and "I have a table," the better.

Here's what a lot of restaurant owners across East Texas don't realize: your website can do the work of a host and a phone operator at the same time. Every order placed online and every reservation booked through your site is one less phone call your staff has to handle during the dinner rush. That's not just convenient for your customers — it makes your operation run smoother.

If you're not sure how to get online ordering set up on your site, that's a web design question, not a restaurant question. It's the kind of thing East Texas Online builds for local businesses — but regardless of who does it, get it done. The longer you wait, the more orders go through apps that take a cut.

Mobile-First Design Isn't Optional

Most people looking up a restaurant are on their phone. They're in the car, they're walking around, they're sitting on the couch trying to decide where to eat. Your website has to work on a phone first and a computer second.

Mobile-first design means your site is built for small screens from the start, then adapted for larger ones — not the other way around. A lot of older restaurant websites were designed for desktop and then sort of crammed onto a phone screen. Text is too small. Buttons are too close together. The menu takes forever to load. It's a mess.

What mobile-first looks like in practice:

— Your phone number is tappable. One tap, it dials. Don't make people copy and paste a number. — Your address links to a map app. One tap, they're getting directions. — Your menu loads as part of the page, not as a separate download. — Buttons are big enough to hit with a thumb. — The page loads in under three seconds on a cell connection. — Nothing important is hidden behind a hover effect, because phones don't hover.

That last one catches people off guard. Desktop websites love hover effects — menus that drop down when you mouse over them, info that appears when you hover on an icon. None of that works on a touchscreen. If important information only shows up on hover, phone users never see it.

Speed matters more than you think, too. A slow site on mobile doesn't just frustrate people — Google ranks slow mobile sites lower in search results. So your beautiful desktop site that takes eight seconds to load on a phone is actively hurting your ability to show up when someone searches for restaurants in your area.

Test your site on your phone. Not just once — regularly. Open it up, try to find your menu, try to call, try to get directions. If any of that takes more than a couple taps, something needs to change.