A pub website has more jobs than most small business sites. It has to sell food, drink, events, the garden, sometimes rooms, and often a function room that brings in more money per enquiry than anything else. Most pub sites manage one of these badly and ignore the rest. This pub website checklist covers what each part needs and the rules that apply to licensed premises.
The good news is that the searches which fill a pub are very specific and very winnable: Sunday roast, dog-friendly pub, pub with a beer garden, pub with rooms, quiz night. If those words appear on your site in plain text, you are already ahead of most competitors.
Kitchen hours are not the same as opening hours
The most common failure on pub websites is showing the bar’s hours and nothing else. A family deciding where to have lunch at half two needs to know whether the kitchen is still serving. Show both, side by side, on the homepage and in the footer, and keep them correct through bank holidays, winter hours and the weeks the chef is on holiday.
The same goes for Google Business Profile. Google lets you add separate hours for things like the kitchen or takeaway under “more hours”. Keep the website and the profile saying the same thing, because customers will quote whichever one they saw.
The pages a pub website needs
| Page | What it must do |
|---|---|
| Home | Bar and kitchen hours, the booking button, and a line on what kind of pub this is: village local, gastropub, sports pub, riverside. |
| Food | Every menu as text, including Sunday lunch and specials, with dietary markers and how to ask about allergens. |
| Drinks | What is on the bar: cask ales, local breweries, wine list. Cask Marque or Good Beer Guide listings where genuinely held. |
| What’s on | Quiz nights, live music, sport, seasonal events. Kept current by the licensee without needing a developer. |
| Functions and parties | Room capacity, layouts, menus or price per head, and an enquiry form asking for date, numbers and occasion. |
| Rooms (if you have them) | Each room with photos, prices and a way to check availability and book. |
| Find us | Directions, parking, walking routes, dog and child policy, step-free access. |
Say it plainly: dogs, children, garden, parking
People choose pubs for practical reasons. Is the dog allowed inside or only in the bar? Are children welcome in the evening? Is the garden big enough for a birthday? Is there parking or do we walk from the village? These are the questions that decide the visit, and they are also the exact phrases people type into Google and ask AI assistants.
Write each one as a short, specific statement on the homepage or find-us page. “Dogs welcome in the bar and garden, not in the dining room. Children welcome until 9pm.” Two sentences like that do more for your search visibility than a paragraph about heritage and hospitality.
Functions and private hire: the most valuable enquiry
A wake, a christening, a significant birthday or a small wedding reception can be worth more than a week of Tuesday lunches. Yet the function room is usually a sentence on the about page. Give it its own page, with photos of the room set up, the capacity seated and standing, sample menus or buffet prices, what is included, and an enquiry form.
The form should ask for the date, the number of guests and the occasion, because those three answers let you reply with a useful quote the same day. Treat funeral enquiries with care: a short, calm section about wakes, separate from party promotions, is both kinder and more likely to be found by someone who needs it.
Licensing and alcohol marketing rules
Your premises licence under the Licensing Act 2003 (in England and Wales) sets your permitted hours and conditions, so check that the hours on your website do not promise anything your licence does not allow. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own licensing regimes.
Alcohol promotion on your own website is covered by the CAP Code, which the Advertising Standards Authority enforces. In broad terms, marketing should not link alcohol with social or sexual success, encourage irresponsible or excessive drinking, or appeal particularly to under-18s, and anyone shown drinking should look over 25. That rarely causes problems for a pub, but it is worth knowing before you write an event promotion built around cheap shots.
Food rules apply as for any restaurant: allergen information must be available for the 14 major allergens, and your food hygiene rating is worth showing. Prices shown online should include any compulsory charges, following the CMA’s guidance on drip pricing under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.
Tenanted and leased pubs
Many tenanted and leased pubs are given a page on the pub company’s website, or a template site the licensee cannot edit. It is usually better than nothing, but it rarely has the local detail that wins searches. Check your agreement to see what you are allowed to run yourself, and whether you can use your own domain. If you can, a site you control, with events you can post from your phone, will serve you better. If you move pubs, you want the site, the domain and the reviews connected to you, not to a building you have left.
What to avoid on a pub website
- A menu PDF from two chefs ago.
- A what’s-on page with nothing newer than last summer. It tells people the pub is tired.
- Photos of the outside of the building and nothing else. Show the fire, the garden, the plates and the room.
- Missing kitchen hours.
- A function room with no capacity, no prices and no form.
- Room booking that sends guests to a booking site when they are already on your website.
How much a pub website costs
A DIY builder site costs around £10 to £40 a month plus your time. Freelancers usually charge £800 to £3,000 for a small pub site; agencies building a site with table booking, rooms and events management often quote £3,000 to £8,000. Table booking and room booking systems usually have their own monthly fees.
We design pub websites from scratch, write the copy with you and keep the site running: £299 and then £99/month on Monthly (12 months minimum), or £1,795 plus £49/month on Own It. Live table or room availability and payments on your own site can be added to any plan, quoted on your call; if you run several pubs, our Pro plan at £6,950 plus £299/month includes them as standard. Nerdsharks builds for businesses of every size, from a single village local to a group with a dozen sites.