Restaurants
The restaurant website checklist
Restaurants are the niche where I do most of my work, and they have one thing in common: customers aren't browsing, they're deciding. Somebody is standing on a sidewalk with friends, phone in one hand, choosing between you and the place next door. Your website has about ten seconds to answer three questions — where are you, what do you serve, can I get a table.
Here's the checklist I run against every restaurant site I build or audit. Twelve items, ordered roughly by how much revenue each one protects.
1. The menu is real text, not a PDF
The number one offense. A PDF menu can't be read aloud by screen readers, can't be translated by the browser, takes three taps to open and often fails entirely on older phones. Worst of all, Google can't index it properly, so "restaurant name + [dish]" searches go to delivery platforms instead of to you. Your menu should be a real page with real text.
2. One-tap calling
A visible phone number that launches the dialer with one tap (tel: link), in the header or footer of every page. If a customer has to copy-paste your number, some percentage of them just won't.
3. Hours — current, visible, honest
Hours in the header or hero, updated when they change, with special hours for holidays. Nothing burns trust like driving to a closed restaurant the site promised was open.
4. A map that opens the maps app
Not a screenshot of a map — an address plus a link that opens Google or Apple Maps at your pin. "Copy the address" is friction; "navigate" is one tap.
5. Photos of your actual food
Phone photos of real dishes beat stock photography of food that isn't yours. Stock food photos are the restaurant equivalent of a handshake emoji. Six honest, well-lit photos do more than thirty dark ones.
6. Reservations or ordering, one tap deep
Whatever your flow is — booking widget, WhatsApp, phone call — it should be reachable from the home page in one tap. Buried booking flows leak customers nightly.
7. Fast on a bad connection
Your customers are often on 4G in a moving car. If the site takes five seconds because of a 9 MB hero video, everything else on this list stops mattering. I wrote a whole post about speed — for restaurants it's not optional.
8. Consistent name, address, phone everywhere
The same spelling of your name, the same address format, the same number on your site, your Google Business Profile, Facebook, and delivery apps. Local SEO leans heavily on this consistency.
9. Google Business Profile, linked and fed
For most restaurants the Business Profile gets more views than the website. Link them to each other, keep the profile current, and add photos there too — it's the highest-leverage ten minutes in restaurant marketing.
10. Reviews you didn't have to fake
A short strip of real reviews (or a live link to your Google reviews) is enough. Never invent testimonials — customers can smell them, and platforms can penalize them.
11. No autoplay anything
Autoplay music is where restaurant websites go to die. If atmosphere matters that much, use one short muted loop the visitor can choose to play.
12. A site that sounds like the room
Fine dining and a burger joint shouldn't share a template's voice. Type, color and photography should match what people feel when they walk in. That's the difference between "a website for a restaurant" and your restaurant's website.
A real example
Most of this list is embodied in Blue Stallion Bistro, a full restaurant platform my studio built — real-text menu, one-tap actions, and a flow built around "decide in ten seconds." It's the same checklist I run for every hospitality client through Nexa Dev Studio.