Most diners decide in under a minute. They type your restaurant's name, look for the menu, check whether you're open and see whether the place is close enough to bother with. If any of those answers is hard to find, they tend to pick the next restaurant on the list.
A restaurant website earns its place when it answers those questions first and keeps everything else one tap away. This guide covers what belongs on the first screen, what can wait and what to avoid.
The first screen: menu, hours and location
On a phone, put three things above the fold:
- A clear way into the menu. A button labelled "Menu" that opens a text menu, not a PDF or a photo nobody can zoom into.
- Opening hours, including the days you're closed, written in plain words, such as "Open daily, 11 am to 11 pm" or "Closed on Mondays".
- Your location, with a map link and a short line about the nearest landmark. People read that line more than you might expect.
A call button and a WhatsApp button belong close by. Table questions often arrive on WhatsApp, so that button should open a chat with the restaurant's own number.
What the menu page needs
The menu is the page people come back to most, so make it easy to read:
- Group dishes into sections (starters, mains, desserts, drinks) in the order people eat them.
- Mark vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes with the same marks your physical menu uses.
- Show prices in one consistent format. If prices change with the season, say so in one line at the top instead of rewriting the page every week.
- Use the names people say out loud. A diner who searches for "paneer tikka" should find "Paneer Tikka" on your menu, not only a long description of the dish.
What can wait
Your restaurant's history, the chef's biography and a long account of the décor are nice to have, but they can sit on a separate About page. A diner who has already decided to visit only needs the address and the hours.
Photos help, but only real ones. A few clear photos of the food and the seating, taken in daylight, do more for a diner than a gallery of stock images.
Table requests and reservations
If you take table requests, ask for the details that let you reply quickly: the date, the time, the number of people and a phone number. Say clearly that a request is not a confirmed booking until you reply. That one line prevents a lot of arguments at the door.
If you don't take reservations, say so. "Walk-ins only" is honest and saves a visitor the trouble of filling in a form that nobody answers.
A quick test you can run
Open your website on your own phone, using mobile data rather than your office Wi-Fi. Time how long it takes you to find the menu and the opening hours. If you have to scroll past photos and long paragraphs to get there, move those two things higher up the page.
What to do next
The restaurant websites page shows how these sections are usually arranged for a restaurant. The layout behind this is covered on the business websites page, which suits any restaurant building its first site. Start with the menu and the hours, because those two answer most of the questions that come in by phone.