Most people who land on a restaurant website want one of four answers: is it open, what is on the menu, can I book, and how do I get there. Everything on this restaurant website checklist follows from that. A site that answers those four questions in under ten seconds on a phone will outperform a far prettier one that makes people hunt.
Cafés are the same with the booking swapped for a different question: can I sit here for an hour with a laptop, a dog or a pushchair. This guide covers both, along with the legal points that apply to food businesses and what a decent site costs.
What a restaurant website actually has to do
A restaurant site is not really a brochure. It is a tool for people who have mostly decided to eat somewhere near you and are choosing between three places. They are often on a phone, often with someone else, and often deciding within a few minutes. The site has to get them from “maybe” to a booked table or a walk through the door.
That means the design should get out of the way of the content. Full-screen video intros, music that autoplays, and menus that open in a new tab all slow down the one thing the visitor came for. Good food photography helps, but only after the practical answers are on screen.
The pages a restaurant or café website needs
| Page | What it must do |
|---|---|
| Home | Say what kind of food, where, and when you are open. Show the booking button and today’s hours without scrolling. |
| Menus | Every current menu as real text: lunch, dinner, Sunday, drinks, children’s. Prices, dietary markers and a note on allergens. |
| Book a table | A booking widget or form that works on a phone, with your policy on large groups, deposits and no-shows. |
| Find us | Address, a map, parking, public transport, step-free access and anything odd about finding the entrance. |
| Private dining and events | Capacity, set menus or price per head, and an enquiry form that asks for date, numbers and occasion. |
| About | Who runs it, who cooks, where the ingredients come from. Short, specific and with real photos. |
| Gift vouchers | A way to buy them online if you sell them. They sell well before Christmas and Mother’s Day. |
Menus: the single biggest fix
If you change one thing, change this. A PDF menu is hard to read on a phone, it is invisible to search engines in any useful way, and it is usually out of date because updating it means reopening a design file. An HTML menu, meaning ordinary text on the page, loads instantly, can be searched for, and can be edited in a couple of minutes when the specials change.
Writing the menu as text also means Google and AI assistants can read it. Someone asking for “somewhere with a good vegan Sunday roast near Exeter” can only be pointed to you if the words vegan, Sunday and roast are on your site in a form a machine can read.
- Put every menu you serve on the site, including drinks and children’s menus.
- Show prices. Hiding them makes people assume the worst.
- Mark vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options with a key that is explained once.
- Date seasonal menus or remove them when they end.
- Keep a short line on each dish rather than a paragraph of adjectives.
Allergens, hygiene ratings and pricing rules
Food businesses in the UK must be able to give customers information about the 14 major allergens in the food they serve. For food sold loose in a restaurant, the Food Standards Agency allows that information to be given in writing or verbally, as long as it is clear how customers can get it. If you take orders online for delivery or collection, the FSA’s guidance says allergen information has to be available before the customer completes the order and when the food is delivered. Read the FSA’s allergen guidance for the detail, because the rules differ for prepacked food.
A practical approach for the website: put dietary markers on the menu, add a clear line such as “please tell us about any allergies before you order; our full allergen information is available from the team”, and make sure the online ordering system (if you have one) carries the allergen details for each dish.
The food hygiene rating is worth showing. In England, displaying your rating is voluntary; in Wales and Northern Ireland businesses must display it at the premises. Either way, a good rating is a trust signal, and a link to your listing on the FSA site lets anyone check it.
On pricing, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 strengthened the rules against hidden or “drip” pricing. CMA guidance says mandatory charges should be included in the price you show up front. If you add a discretionary service charge, say so plainly and make clear it is optional. Check the CMA’s current guidance if you are unsure how it applies to your menu.
Bookings, walk-ins and no-shows
The booking button should be visible on every page, ideally fixed to the bottom of the screen on mobile. Booking intent appears at odd moments: halfway down the menu, or on the “find us” page when someone realises you are near their hotel.
Most restaurants use a dedicated reservations system rather than a simple form, because it handles availability, confirmations and reminders. The website’s job is to make that system easy to reach and to explain your policies around it: how far ahead you take bookings, whether you hold tables for walk-ins, how you handle groups of eight or more, and what happens if someone does not turn up. If you take a card to secure a booking, say so before they start.
Cafés that do not take bookings should say so near the top, along with how busy it tends to get and when to come for a quiet table. It saves a phone call and a disappointed customer.
Mistakes restaurant and café websites make
- Opening hours that are wrong, particularly on bank holidays and over Christmas. Wrong hours cost you the customer and often a bad review.
- Menus as a PDF or a photo of the printed menu.
- A homepage slideshow or video that delays everything else.
- Booking buried in the navigation instead of on screen at all times.
- Stock photos of food you do not serve. Real photos of your own dishes and room, even from a good phone in daylight, do better.
- No mention of the practical things people search for: dog-friendly, outdoor seating, step-free access, high chairs, parking.
- A site built once and never updated, so the events page advertises last year’s Valentine’s menu.
What a good restaurant website looks like
On a phone, a good restaurant site opens on a single strong photo of the food or the room, a one-line description (“Seasonal Devon cooking, open Wednesday to Sunday”), today’s hours and two buttons: Book and Menus. Scroll down and you get a short about section, a few more photos, opening hours in full, and the address with a map.
The menus page is fast, readable text with prices and clear dietary markers. The booking page explains the policy in two sentences and then hands over to the booking system. There is a separate page for private dining with its own enquiry form. Nothing autoplays. The owner can change the specials and the hours themselves, from a phone, in a couple of minutes.
For a café the emphasis shifts to the space: photos of the room at different times of day, clear answers about dogs, laptops, wifi and prams, and a short menu with dietary options.
How much a restaurant or café website costs
Market prices vary widely. A DIY website builder costs roughly £10 to £40 a month plus your own time, and restaurant templates are easy to find. A freelance designer typically charges somewhere between £800 and £3,000 for a small brochure site. An agency building a custom restaurant site with online ordering, gift vouchers and integrations commonly quotes £3,000 to £10,000 or more. Reservations and ordering systems usually carry their own monthly fees or per-order commission on top.
We build restaurant and café websites from scratch, with every word written for you, for £299 to set up and £99/month on our Monthly plan (12 months minimum), or £1,795 upfront and £49/month if you would rather own it outright. If you want table bookings or card payments built into the site itself, we can add them to either plan, quoted on your call, and they come as standard on our Pro plan at £6,950 plus £299/month. Nerdsharks works with businesses of every kind and size, from a single café to a group with several sites.