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Restaurant website design Restaurants, inns and hotel dining

A restaurant website that holds the booking

A table booking is a small decision made quickly, usually on a phone, by someone who is mildly hungry and entirely impatient. The site has about twenty seconds to be useful.

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A restaurant website shown on desktop and mobile

Restaurant websites fail differently from hotel ones. Nobody spends twenty minutes considering a Tuesday dinner. They want to know what the food is like, whether they can get in at half past seven, and whether the dog, the toddler or the vegan can come. If those answers take more than a few seconds to find, they eat somewhere else and you never learn why.

So the work is mostly subtraction. Fewer steps, fewer PDFs, fewer places to get stuck, and the menu treated as the most important page on the site rather than a download.

01 Menus as pages

A PDF menu is unreadable, unsearchable and always out of date.

Menus become proper pages: fast on a phone, editable by whoever is in the office, and readable by the search engines and assistants that increasingly answer "where can we eat near here". Seasonal changes take a minute rather than a favour from a designer.

  • Menu structure and design
  • Dietary and allergen clarity
  • Team-editable, no developer
  • Seasonal and service variants
  • Readable by search and assistants

02 Booking as an action, not a page

The decision is made on the menu, so the booking belongs there.

Booking is present wherever the guest might decide, carries the date and party size they already indicated, and opens in place rather than throwing them into a grey box in a different typeface with no way back to what they were reading.

  • Reservation system integration
  • Styled to match the restaurant
  • Pre-filled date and covers
  • Large party and private dining routes
  • Drop-off measurement

03 Answer the phone calls in advance

Every question your team answers daily is a booking or a call.

Parking, steps, children, dogs, dress code, gluten free, whether the tasting menu is the only option on a Saturday. Written down plainly, in one findable place. The calls go down and the bookings do not.

  • Opening hours that need no interpreting
  • Access, parking and arrival
  • Dietary and family provision
  • Local search and map presence
  • Structured data for assistants

04 Fast, because food photography is heavy

The slowest site anyone loads all day is usually a restaurant.

Large photographs are the point, so they have to be handled properly: compressed, served in a modern format, sized so nothing jumps while the page settles. A hero image that takes four seconds on a phone in a car park is a booking someone else takes.

  • Image pipeline and compression
  • Core Web Vitals in the green
  • No layout shift while loading
  • Tested on real phones and signal
  • Analytics and Search Console setup

How it runs

Six to ten weeks for a single restaurant, and often less where the photography already exists and the menus are settled.

  1. 01 Weeks 1 to 2

    Understand the room

    Who eats here and when, what the team gets asked, and where the current site loses people.

  2. 02 Weeks 3 to 4

    Structure and design

    Menus first, then everything else, designed on the phone before the desktop.

  3. 03 Weeks 5 to 8

    Build and connect

    The site, the editable menus and the reservation journey, made to feel like one thing.

  4. 04 Weeks 9 to 10

    Launch and hand over

    Real-device testing, local search, measurement and a team that can change the menu themselves.

Questions we are asked

Usually in the first ten minutes, and usually about the menu.

Should the menu be a PDF?

No. A PDF is slow on a phone, unreadable without pinching, invisible to search engines and impossible for an assistant to quote. Menus should be pages, which also means they can be updated by the team in about a minute. It is the single most common fault we find, and fixing it usually improves several things at once.

Which reservation system should we use?

The one your team will actually keep on top of. The bigger gain is usually in the journey to the booking rather than the system itself, since most losses happen before the guest ever reaches it. We work with whichever you already have.

How do we appear when someone searches for restaurants near them?

A complete and current Google Business Profile does most of the work, supported by a website that states the cuisine, price range, opening hours and dietary provision in plain text a machine can read. The consistency between the two matters more than either alone.

We are the restaurant inside a hotel. Do we need our own site?

Often yes, or at least its own clearly separate section with its own route in. A restaurant with a local following is a different audience from hotel guests, searching for different things, and burying it three clicks inside the hotel site costs covers from people who were never going to stay the night.

Tell us about the restaurant

Send the place, the covers you are trying to protect and what is currently getting in the way.

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