How to Create a Restaurant Website That Brings In Orders

A guest is standing on the sidewalk, or sitting on the couch, phone in hand, trying to decide where dinner comes from tonight. They tap your name. What loads in the next few seconds decides whether you get the order or the restaurant down the street does. Your website is not a brochure. It is the front door, the menu board and the order counter for everyone who has not walked in yet.

The good news is that a restaurant website that works is not complicated. It needs a handful of pages, your real menu, honest photos and an easy way to order. This guide walks through building one, step by step, in the order that makes the biggest difference.

What your website needs to do

Before you pick colors or fonts, be clear about the jobs your website has. For almost every restaurant, it comes down to four:

• Answer the basic questions fast: are you open, where are you, what do you serve, and how much does it cost.
• Show the food: a real menu with prices and a few photos that make someone hungry.
• Take the order: a clear Order button that works on a phone without hunting for it.
• Get found: give Google enough words and structure to show you when people nearby search for what you cook.

Everything else is optional. A slideshow, a long history of the family or an events calendar can be nice, but none of them should get in the way of those four jobs.

Step 1: Gather what you already have

You probably have most of the raw material already. Pull it together in one folder before you start building, and the rest goes much faster.

• Your menu: the printed one, a PDF, or even a photo of the specials board.
• Photos: your storefront, the dining room, and your best dishes. Recent phone photos in daylight are fine.
• The basics: your exact name, address, phone number and hours, including how you handle holidays.
• Your story in two sentences: who cooks, what you are known for, and what makes the place yours.
• Your areas: the neighborhoods you serve, or plan to serve, if guests come from beyond your block.

Step 2: Start from a restaurant template

A general-purpose website builder hands you a blank page and a hundred choices. A restaurant template starts with the pages and sections restaurants actually need already in place: a menu, an Order button, hours, location and dish pages. You fill them in instead of inventing them.

Pick a template that looks good on a phone first, because that is where most of your guests will see it. Then swap in your photos, your colors and your words. Resist the urge to add widgets. Every extra element is something else to load and something else for a guest to scroll past.

Step 3: Build the pages that matter

A one-page site with a logo and a phone number gives guests and Google very little to work with. Here are the pages worth having, and what each one is for.

If you cater, a dedicated catering page pays for itself quickly, because office managers and party planners search for it directly. Our guide to a restaurant catering page goes deeper.

Step 4: Put your menu online as text

This is the step most restaurants get wrong. A PDF or a photo of the menu is slow to open on a phone, hard to read with a thumb, and invisible to Google, which cannot match "chicken tikka masala" to your restaurant if the words only exist inside an image.

Put every dish on the page as real text, grouped by section, with the price and a short description. Mark vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free items clearly. Then give your best sellers their own pages so they can rank on their own. We cover this in detail in our guide to putting your restaurant menu online.

Step 5: Add ordering to your own site

Many restaurant websites send guests away to a delivery marketplace the moment they want to order. That guest leaves your site, the marketplace takes a commission (typically 15-30% of the order), and the guest's details belong to someone else. Next time, they may open the app and order from a competitor.

Ordering on your own website keeps the guest with you. The Order button should be visible on every page, especially on a phone, and each dish should link straight to ordering it.

Step 6: Use your own domain

Your website should live at an address you own, like tonyspizza.com, not a subdomain of someone else's service. Your own domain looks more trustworthy, is easier to say over the phone, and stays yours if you ever change providers. Make sure the site uses SSL (the padlock in the browser), which modern browsers expect and guests notice when it is missing.

Own the domain in your name, not your web designer's or your nephew's. The same goes for your guest list and your content. If someone else controls them, you do not really control your restaurant's online presence.

Step 7: Test it like a guest would

Before you tell anyone about the new site, use it the way a hungry stranger would. Do this on your own phone, on cellular data, not on the office Wi-Fi.

1. Search for your restaurant's name and tap through to the site. Does the homepage load quickly and say what you serve?
2. Find today's hours without scrolling. Are they right?
3. Open the menu. Can you read prices without pinching to zoom?
4. Order a dish all the way to checkout. Count the taps.
5. Tap the phone number and the address. Do they open the dialer and the map?

Then run the free online health report. It checks your website's speed, structured data, menu and mobile layout, shows how you rank against restaurants nearby, and gives you a list of what to fix first.

Your launch checklist

• Name, address, phone and hours match your Google profile exactly.
• The full menu is on the site as text, with prices.
• Your top three to five dishes each have their own page with a photo.
• An Order button is visible on every page on a phone, and it keeps guests on your site.
• The site is on your own domain with SSL.
• Your Google profile's website and order links point to your site, not a marketplace.
• You have checked it on a phone over cellular data.
• You have a reminder to update holiday hours and seasonal dishes every month.

A restaurant website is never finished, and that is a good thing. Add a page when you launch a new dish, update the menu when prices change, and keep your hours right. A site that stays current does more for you than a flashy one that never changes. When you are ready to build, get started here.