People visit a restaurant website to answer four questions, usually on a phone, usually within a few minutes of deciding where to eat: what is on the menu, are you open, where are you, and can I book or order. A good restaurant website answers all four on the first screen. Everything else is extra.
1. Start with the four answers
- Menu — a link to it at the top, not buried under “About”.
- Hours — today’s hours visible without scrolling, with the full week a tap away.
- Location — the address as text, a map link that opens in the phone’s maps app, and a note on parking or transit if it helps.
- Book or order — one clear button for each, going straight to the service you use.
2. Put the menu in HTML, not a PDF
PDF menus are slow on mobile data, awkward to zoom, invisible to many search crawlers and AI assistants, and easy to forget to update. Put the menu on a real web page: sections, dish names, short descriptions, prices, and dietary markers (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free) as text. If you change the menu seasonally, say which season the page shows.
Mark allergens carefully, and add a line inviting guests to ask staff about allergies. The website is not the place to make guarantees the kitchen cannot keep.
3. Use your booking and ordering providers
Do not rebuild reservations or online ordering on your website. Reservation platforms and ordering services already handle tables, payments, refunds and kitchen tickets. Link to them prominently — or embed their widget if it loads quickly — and make sure the link opens the right location if you have more than one.
4. Show the room and the food, honestly
A handful of good, real photos beats a gallery of fifty. The dining room in daylight, five or six signature dishes, and the outside of the building so people recognise it when they arrive. Compress images so the page stays fast; a restaurant site should load in a couple of seconds on a phone.
5. Pages worth adding
- Private dining and events, with capacity and how to enquire.
- Catering, if you do it, with lead times.
- Gift cards, linking to wherever you sell them.
- A short about page: who runs it, what the food is, why it exists.
- Jobs, if you are often hiring.
6. Make it findable
- Give each page its own title — “Dinner menu — Rosa’s Trattoria, Boise” beats “Menu”.
- Add Restaurant structured data with your address, hours, cuisine and menu link, matching what the page says.
- Keep your Google Business Profile, Apple Maps and review sites in line with the website — hours especially.
- Make sure AI crawlers are not blocked, so assistants answering “where should we eat tonight?” can read your menu and hours. Our guide on getting recommended by ChatGPT covers this in detail.
7. Keep it right
The most common restaurant-website failure is not design; it is being wrong. Holiday hours not posted, a dish that left the menu in spring, a brunch that stopped last year. Decide who updates the site and make it easy enough that they actually do. Every time your hours change, change them on the website, your Google profile and your booking platform on the same day.
Curb builds restaurant sites around exactly this: the menu as text, hours as a fact that feeds the site, its structured data and AI assistants at once, and links to the booking and ordering services you already use. When something changes, you text it and it is live. See restaurant websites on Curb.
