To make a restaurant website, decide who will keep it current, register a domain in your own name, build a few simple pages with the menu as text, and link your own ordering and booking from every page. Most owners can do this in a builder within a week or two. The design matters less than whether a hungry guest on a phone can find the menu, the hours, the address and a way to order.
This guide takes you through it in eight steps, with a checklist for launch day. We build and run restaurant websites, so we have an interest here, but everything below works whichever route you take. If you would rather compare named platforms, see best restaurant website builders.
What the site has to do
Guests usually arrive from a search or from Google Maps, on a phone, wanting one of a few things. Design every page around those jobs:
- 1Show the menuReadable on a phone, as text, with prices.
- 2Say when you are openToday's hours, the same as on Google.
- 3Say where you areAn address that opens in maps, plus parking if it matters.
- 4Take the order or bookingOne tap to your own ordering, or to a table.
1. Decide who will keep it current
This is the decision that matters most. A restaurant site goes wrong through neglect far more often than through bad design: last spring's menu, old prices, holiday hours nobody changed. Pick the route by who will do the updating, not by the launch price.
| Route | What it is | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your POS's site | Some POS systems include one; Square's free plan includes an online site | Getting online fast, ordering already connected | Less control over design and search |
| General website builder | Drag-and-drop templates and a monthly fee | An owner who enjoys editing and has the hours | Menus and ordering are yours to wire up and keep current |
| Restaurant website platform | A builder made for restaurants, often with ordering and marketing | Wanting most things in one place | Contract length, per-order or guest fees, and who owns the domain and guest list |
| An agency or freelancer | Someone builds it, and ideally runs it | No time, or a multi-page site with catering and events | A site nobody can update after handover. Ask who changes the menu, and how fast |
2. Own your domain
Register your domain yourself, in the restaurant's name, on an account you can log in to, whichever route you choose. If a platform or a freelancer registers it for you, get that in writing, because a domain you don't control is the hardest thing to recover when you leave. Keep the name short and easy to say over the phone. Avoid hyphens if you can.
3. Plan the pages
Most independents need fewer pages than they think:
| Page | What it needs | Skip it if |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Name, cuisine, neighborhood, hours today, Order and Book buttons, a few real photos | Never |
| Menu | Every section as text with prices and dietary labels | Never |
| Order | A link to your own ordering, plus pickup and delivery details | You take no online orders |
| Reservations | A booking button, or a phone number that dials when tapped | You don't take bookings |
| Location and hours | Address, map, parking, holiday hours, phone | You can put all of it on the home page |
| Catering and private events | Sample menus, minimums, capacity, a short inquiry form | You don't offer them |
| About | Who runs the place, and the story, in plain words | You'd have to pad it out |
Give each location its own page if you have more than one, with its own hours, phone number and menu differences.
4. Put the menu on the page as text
A PDF or a photo of the printed menu is the most common mistake on restaurant sites, for three reasons. It is hard to read on a phone. Search engines and AI assistants can do less with it than with text, so a search for a dish you serve has less to match. And a screen reader may not be able to read a photo at all.
Write it as a normal page: section headings, dish names, a short description, dietary labels and prices. It's fine to offer a PDF as well for people who want to print it, as long as it isn't the only version. Whatever you do, keep one master menu, because two versions always drift apart. If your POS can supply it, even better.
5. Connect ordering and booking
Put an Order button at the top of every page, going to your own ordering rather than a delivery app. Our guide to online ordering without commission covers how to set that up and what it costs. Then do the same on Google: in your Business Profile, under Food ordering, add your own link and set it as preferred (Google).
For reservations, link the booking system you already use. If you take bookings by phone, make the number tap-to-call. A contact form is the wrong tool for a table tonight, because nobody reads it in time.
6. Build for a phone
Google "uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking", and asks that the mobile site contain the same content as the desktop one (Google). So the phone version isn't a smaller copy. It is the version that counts, and it's the one your guests see.
Build and check on a real phone. Keep the menu, hours and Order button visible without hunting. Avoid pop-ups over the first screen, and don't start with an autoplay video. Compress your photos before uploading them, which is usually the biggest speed win on a food site.
Google's Core Web Vitals give you three numbers to aim for (Google). You can test any page for free with PageSpeed Insights:
7. Add the search basics
You don't need much here, but it does need to be right:
- Page titles that say what and where: "Rosa's Taqueria: Mexican restaurant in Eastside, Austin", not "Home".
- Structured data. Google's documentation says to use the most specific type, such as
Restaurant, and recommends properties includingmenu(the full URL of your menu),servesCuisineandopeningHoursSpecification(Google). Many builders have a field or an app for this. - Alt text on photos, describing the dish or room in plain words.
- The same name, address, phone and hours as your Google profile, everywhere.
Our restaurant SEO guide goes further, including how to choose which searches to go after.
Make it usable by everyone
The Department of Justice lists "food and drink establishments" among businesses open to the public, and says the ADA's requirements extend to goods and services offered online. It has no regulation with detailed technical standards, and points to existing ones such as WCAG as helpful guidance (ADA.gov). Its examples of barriers are ordinary things you can check yourself: poor color contrast, missing alt text on images, videos without captions, menus you can't use without a mouse, and online forms that don't work with assistive technology.
A text menu solves much of this, and it helps every guest squinting at a phone in a dark room. This is general information rather than legal advice, so ask a lawyer if you receive a demand letter.
8. Test it and launch
Before you tell anyone it's live, go through this on a phone, on cellular, not your office Wi-Fi:
- The menu opens as text, and prices match the printed menu
- Hours match Google, holiday hours included
- The Order button reaches your own ordering, and a test order reaches the kitchen
- The Book button works, and the phone number dials when tapped
- The address opens in maps
- Forms send to an inbox someone reads, and you've tested them
- Photos load quickly on cellular
- Every link works, and old page addresses redirect
- Page titles say what and where
- Your Google profile links to the new site
Then connect it up. Set the website link on your Google Business Profile, update your social profiles, and put the address on your menus and takeout bags. If you are replacing an old site, redirect each old page address to its new equivalent, so links and search results keep working.
After launch: keep it current
Give one named person the job of changing the menu, prices and hours, and put a reminder in the calendar: holiday hours two weeks ahead, the full menu every quarter. Check the site on your phone once a month, as a guest would, and place one test order. That hour a month is what separates a site that keeps working from one that quietly turns guests away.
What to do this week
Open your current site on your phone and time how long it takes to find the menu, today's hours and a way to order. Then decide who will own updates, and whether you have the hours for it. Our restaurant website service is one option if you don't. The free restaurant audit checks your site on a phone and tells you the first three things we would fix, whichever route you choose.
