Designing a restaurant website: what guests look for first, and what to leave off

Of 347 independent restaurant home pages we checked in London and New York, two in five did not show opening hours and nearly half had no phone number a guest could tap. Most restaurant websites do not need rebuilding; they need the right few things, kept current.

A restaurant website needs less than most designers sell: the menu as text with prices, opening hours including holiday hours, booking and ordering buttons a guest can tap on a phone without scrolling, the address with a map link, a phone number, your allergen policy and gift cards. It must load fast on a phone and say the same as your Google profile. Leave off autoplay video, PDF-only menus and pop-ups. Last checked: 5 November 2026.

What do guests look for first on a restaurant website?

Guests arrive on a restaurant website with a decision half made. They want to check one thing and act: is it open, what does it cost, can I book, where is it. Design the first screen on a phone around those questions.

Everything else (the story, the team, the press, the photos) helps guests who are deciding between you and another place. It comes after the first screen, not instead of it. If you take private bookings, give them their own page; our private events guide covers what to say about capacity and minimum spend.

How many restaurant websites get the basics right?

Fewer than you would expect. We drew a random sample of 520 independent restaurants with a website listed in OpenStreetMap, 260 in Greater London and 260 in New York City, and fetched each home page as a phone would on 5 November 2026. These are the results for the 347 home pages we could read:

One more finding matters before any design question: 65 of the 514 website links (one in eight, leaving out social media pages) did not load at all. The domain had lapsed, the page returned "not found", or the security certificate failed. Some of those restaurants may have closed; for the rest, every map or app that copied the link sends guests to an error page.

Method. Our analysis of OpenStreetMap restaurant entries with a website and no brand tag (to leave out chains), from extracts dated 3 November 2026 (Greater London) and 31 October 2026 (New York City area), map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Home pages were fetched once with an iPhone browser user agent and checked by pattern matching on the delivered HTML, so treat each figure as approximate. Of 514 non-social links, 104 could not be fetched (dead, blocked or timed out) and 63 delivered too little text to check, because the page is built in the browser; the table uses the other 347.

Why should the menu be text, not a PDF?

Google can index PDF files, so a PDF menu is not invisible to search. The problem is the guest. On a phone, a PDF menu means a download, pinching and zooming, and often an old version that nobody remembered to replace. A text menu on the page loads faster, reads well on any screen, works with screen readers and translation tools, and is easy to update the day prices change.

Three rules for the menu page:

• Show prices. A menu without prices sends guests to review sites to find out.
• One menu, one source. If the website, the QR menu and the delivery menu are edited separately, one of them will be wrong. Keep one price list and publish from it.
• Show dietary and allergen information clearly. In the UK, if guests can order food online or by phone, the Food Standards Agency says allergen information must be available before the order is completed and when the food is delivered (FSA allergen guidance for food businesses). A clear line on the menu page, such as "Ask us about allergens, or see our allergen guide", is the minimum for a dine-in menu; our allergen matrix template helps you build the full information.

If you add a compulsory service charge in the UK, show it with the menu prices, not just on the bill; our service charge guide explains why. In the US, several states now regulate how a mandatory fee is shown on menus and websites; our guide to junk-fee laws has the state-by-state rules.

How fast should a restaurant website load on a phone?

Fast enough that the first screen appears before the guest gives up. Google's Core Web Vitals give three measurable targets (Google Search Central):

Restaurant sites do no worse than the web as a whole on speed, and worse on jumping buttons. In our analysis of Chrome's real-user data as published in the HTTP Archive Technology Report for September 2026, 55.5% of mobile sites using any of the 31 restaurant booking or ordering technologies it detects (about 32,000 origins, counted once per technology) passed all three measures, against 52.8% of all 8.6 million mobile origins. They did better on loading (75% good LCP against 66%) and worse on layout shift (77% good CLS against 83%). Pass rates ranged from 19% to 81% between technologies measured on 100 or more sites, so the platform you build on matters more than whether the site takes bookings.

You can test any page free with Google's PageSpeed Insights. The usual causes of a slow or jumpy restaurant site are the same few:

• a full-screen hero photo uploaded straight from a camera
• autoplay video on the home page
• a booking or ordering widget that loads several scripts from other sites
• pop-ups and chat bubbles that load before the page

Compress photos to the size they are shown at, drop the video from the first screen, and test again.

How should your website match your Google Business Profile?

They should say exactly the same thing, because guests and Google compare them. Check these lines on both, every season:

• Name, address and phone number, written the same way.
• Opening hours, including special hours for bank holidays, Christmas, New Year and any closures.
• Booking, menu and order links on Google pointing to your own pages, not to an old provider or a delivery app you have left.

Our Google Business Profile guide covers setting up the profile, its links and holiday hours. On the website side, add restaurant structured data so search engines read your details correctly. Google's local business structured data documentation lists the menu URL (for food establishments), the cuisine served, opening hours and price range among its recommended properties. Only a quarter of the home pages in our sample had restaurant structured data at all.

What should you leave off a restaurant website?

Do restaurant websites have to be accessible?

Accessibility is good practice everywhere and a legal risk in some places.

• US: the Department of Justice's guidance on web accessibility (18 March 2022) says the ADA's requirements apply to all the goods and services of businesses open to the public, "including those offered on the web", and lists food and drink establishments among those businesses. It points to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as helpful technical guidance.
• UK: the Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and that duty extends to services offered online, such as booking and ordering.

The basics cost little: real text rather than text in images, alt text on photos, enough colour contrast, buttons large enough to tap, a booking flow that works with a keyboard and a screen reader, and no information given only by colour. Check with an adviser if you have received a complaint or a demand letter.

Should you rebuild your website or fix it?

Fix it, unless one of three things is true. Use this test:

If any answer is no and cannot be fixed in the current site, rebuilding is justified. If all three are yes, spend the time on content, not design: current photos, a better menu page, upcoming events and the checklist below.

The page checklist to copy

RESTAURANT WEBSITE CHECKLIST                Checked by: [ ]   Date: [ ]

FIRST SCREEN ON A PHONE (no scrolling)
[ ] Restaurant name and what you are (for example "Neapolitan pizza, Leith")
[ ] Today's opening hours
[ ] "Book a table" button that opens the booking page
[ ] "Order" button (if you do takeaway or delivery) to your own ordering page
[ ] Tappable phone number

MENU PAGE
[ ] Menu as text, with prices, matching the till
[ ] Dietary labels (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free) where true
[ ] Allergen line or link; online orders show allergen info before checkout (UK)
[ ] Any compulsory service charge shown with prices (UK)
[ ] Separate drinks, set menus and kids' menu pages if you have them

EVERY PAGE
[ ] Address with a map link; nearest station or parking
[ ] Opening hours, with holiday and closure dates when they apply
[ ] Book and Order buttons in the header or footer
[ ] Instagram or social links (no embedded feeds that slow the page)

OTHER PAGES
[ ] Gift cards: buy online, see balance
[ ] Private dining and events: capacity, minimum spend, enquiry form
[ ] About: who you are, in a paragraph, with your own photos
[ ] Jobs (optional)
[ ] Privacy notice and cookie notice

TECHNICAL
[ ] Loads fast on a phone (LCP 2.5 s or less, INP 200 ms or less, CLS 0.1 or less)
[ ] Restaurant structured data with menu URL, cuisine, hours, price range
[ ] Name, address, phone and hours identical to the Google Business Profile
[ ] Google booking, menu and order links point to these pages
[ ] Alt text on photos; real text, not text in images
[ ] No splash page, no autoplay video, no arrival pop-up

REVIEW
[ ] Monthly: hours, events, menu prices
[ ] Before every bank holiday: holiday hours here and on Google

Can TablePort handle this for you?

TablePort Sites builds the website from the records you already keep.

1. Always current. Menus, prices, opening hours and locations come from the same live records your team uses, so a price change appears on the site without a second edit.
2. Built to transact. Booking, waitlist, ordering and gift cards run on the same branded host, so guests do not bounce between widgets.
3. Search-ready pages, with restaurant, menu and location structured data.
4. Your own domain, with guided setup and SSL, on Sites Advanced (£99 or $129 a month per business, before VAT or sales tax).

The honest limit: the site is only as current as the menu and hours in TablePort, and custom domains, enquiries and site analytics need Sites Advanced. See Sites.