Restaurant websites that open on any phone

Who is a restaurant website actually for?

A restaurant website is for the hungry person outside your door, on a phone, deciding where to eat in the next few minutes. Good restaurant website design puts what that person needs first: the menu, today's hours, directions and a way to book.

Mostly it is not someone at a desk. It is a couple on the sidewalk deciding between you and the place across the street. It is someone on the couch at six, scrolling "dinner near me" with one thumb. It is a regular checking if you are open on a holiday Monday. Every one of them has a short temper and a plan B. They do not want your story first, or a slideshow, or a welcome video. If the site makes them work for the basics, they close the tab and walk on.

What does a restaurant website need up top?

A restaurant website needs four things on the first screen of a phone: the menu, today's hours, directions and a way to book, call or order. Everything else can sit below them.

Today's hours, not a table of seven days to squint at. Directions that open with a tap. Booking, calling or ordering, whichever one you actually use. The room, the people and the story of the sourdough starter still have a place, just below the things that get someone through the door. We go through it screen by screen in what belongs on the first screen of a restaurant homepage.

The menu itself is real text on the page. Dish names, short descriptions, prices if you show them, sections that match how you serve: breakfast, lunch, the weekend brunch, the specials board. It reads well on a small screen and it is easy for us to change.

Quick to open on two bars of signal.

A restaurant website should open quickly on a weak phone connection, because the person deciding where to eat is rarely on fast home wifi. A light page, with images sized for phones and the menu and hours first, keeps them from giving up.

They are on a patchy connection in a parking lot, on a train, or on a busy street where everyone's phone is fighting for the same tower. Huge photos, autoplay video and extra scripts sit there loading while they lose interest, so nothing on our pages is there just for show. A quick site also helps on Google, because a page that opens fast and is easy to use on a phone is the kind of page search engines prefer to send people to.

Why is a PDF menu bad for a restaurant website?

A PDF menu is hard to read on a phone and hard for search engines to read, so it loses guests and searches at the same time. Your menu should be a page, not a file.

On a phone, a PDF means a download, a tiny page, and pinching and dragging to read a dish name. Plenty of people give up before they find the mains. A PDF is also harder for search engines to connect to your site than a normal page, so the dishes people are actually searching for, the ramen, the gluten free brunch, the birthday cakes, may never be tied to your name. And when the menu changes, the old PDF tends to linger in search results long after the dish is gone.

It is the most common problem we see on restaurant sites. We write about it in more depth in why PDF menus hurt restaurant SEO.

When the menu changes, everything changes with it.

When a dish or your hours change, your restaurant website and your Google Business Profile should change together. If they disagree, guests trust neither.

A restaurant website is never finished. The soup comes back for winter. The patio closes in October. You start opening Sundays. The usual problem is that the website gets updated and the Google listing does not, or the other way around.

We keep them together. When a dish changes, we change the site and your Google Business Profile with it. When your hours change, you confirm them once and Google, Apple Maps and your website follow. That listing work is part of our restaurant SEO and Google service, and it means people who find you in search land on a site that agrees with what they just read.

How we work on your restaurant website.

Domin8te Media starts every restaurant website with your current site, opened on a phone the way a hungry stranger would see it, not with a template. Then we fix it or rebuild it, and keep it current.

1. Open it like a strangerWe load your site on a phone, on an ordinary connection, and try to find the menu, today's hours, directions and a way to book. Wherever that takes too long, we write it down.
2. Fix it or rebuild itIf the bones are fine, we fix what is in the way. If the site fights every change, we rebuild it around what people come for, with the menu as a real page and the essentials up top.
3. Keep it currentAfter launch, menu changes, new hours, seasonal dishes and closures go through us. The site, the Google listing and the hours stay in step.

You can follow every step in your private dashboard: what is being worked on, what is waiting for you, and a message thread with us that keeps every note in one place.

For an example of building around phone visitors, look at Le Cookie, a custom cookie studio whose whole site is one page. Most of its visitors arrive from Instagram on their phones, so the page lets them design a cookie in a few taps, watch it bake as they scroll, and send an inquiry without ever hunting for a link.

If your site is not pulling its weight, send us the form and get your plan. Within one business day you get a plain English plan back: what needs fixing first on your site, and why.