TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
It is 5:40 on a Thursday and somebody is sitting in a parking lot deciding where to eat. They have your website open and two others. In this town that is a brutal competition, because Kansas City has more good restaurants than there are nights in the week. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites, and restaurant sites lose that competition for reasons that have nothing to do with the food.
The good news is that the fixes are small and almost none of them are design. They are mostly about making four answers findable in under a minute on a phone held in one hand.
Four things, in about a minute
Every person landing on a restaurant site is running the same short list:
- What is on the menu, and is this the current one?
- Are you open right now, and how late?
- Where exactly are you, and where do I park?
- How do I order or book a table?
That is the whole job. A beautiful site that hides any one of those loses to a plain site that answers all four, every single time.
Your menu should be text on a page, not a PDF
This is the single most common and most expensive mistake in restaurant websites. A PDF menu means pinch, zoom, drag, squint, and it means a slow download on a phone with two bars. Worse, a photo of a menu is not text at all, so nothing in it can be read by a screen reader, copied, or understood by a search engine.
Google cannot index what it cannot read. When someone in your neighborhood searches for burnt ends or birria or gluten free pizza, the restaurants whose menus are real text on a real page are the ones that can show up. A menu locked inside a PDF is invisible for every dish on it. Put the menu on the page, with sections, prices, and a note about what can be made gluten free or vegetarian, and let people search it.
It also has to be the current menu. If prices changed in the spring and the site still says last year's, you are starting the meal with an argument at the table. Publish the menu somewhere you can edit yourself in two minutes, and edit it the same day the kitchen changes something.
Hours are a promise, and holidays are where they break
Hours live in at least two places, your website and your Google Business Profile, and they have to agree. The week that they do not is the week somebody drives across town to a locked door and writes a review about it.
Three details worth being precise about. Put your kitchen's last seating on the page, because closing time and last call for food are rarely the same thing. Set special hours for holidays in advance, since Google prompts you and most restaurants ignore it. And if you close for a private event or a staff day, say so on the site the moment you know, not the morning of.
Photos of your food, not somebody else's
Stock food photography is instantly recognizable and it quietly tells people you are hiding something. The plate in the photo is not the plate that arrives. Shoot your own, even on a phone, near a window at lunch, and lead with the one or two dishes you are actually known for.
Include the room too. People want to know whether this is a place for a first date, a work lunch, or a table of nine after a game. A photo of the dining room at seven in the evening answers a question your copy cannot.
Ordering and reservations: know what each click costs you
Third-party delivery and reservation platforms bring real reach, and they also take a real cut of every ticket that goes through them. That is a business decision rather than a website decision, but your website is where you get to influence it. Put your own ordering or your own phone number first and largest, and list the platforms below as the alternative rather than the headline.
If you take reservations, the booking link belongs in the header on every page, not only on a contact page. If you do not take them, say that plainly, because a surprising number of people will not drive over without knowing whether they can get a table.
Google is the real home page
For restaurants more than almost any other business, people never reach your site cold. They find you in the map, in the local results, or in a search for a dish. That means your Google Business Profile is doing the heavy lifting: hours, photos, the menu link, the ordering link, and reviews. The full local playbook is in how to show up in Google's map pack, and for a restaurant it matters more than for anyone else.
Your site should feed that. Google can read structured details about a restaurant, including the menu, price range, and whether you take reservations, when the site marks them up properly. That is a build detail rather than something you type, but it is worth asking whoever maintains your site whether it is in place. Google documents what it looks for in its local business structured data guide.
Speed, because they are on a phone with two bars
Restaurant sites are the heaviest small business sites I see, because food photography is beautiful and enormous. A homepage carrying eight full resolution plates will crawl on a phone in a parking lot, and that is precisely where it gets opened. Compress every photo before it goes up, and keep the homepage to a handful of them. Website speed is not an abstract score here, it is whether the menu appears before somebody gives up and picks the other place.
What I would fix first, in order
- Move the menu out of the PDF and onto a real page, with prices and dietary notes.
- Make the phone number tappable in the header of every page.
- Check that your hours match on the site and on Google, and set the next holiday now.
- Put your own ordering or reservation link above the third-party ones.
- Replace stock food photos with a dozen of your own, including the dining room.
- Compress the photos, then load your homepage on a phone with wifi off.
None of that is a redesign. It is an afternoon, and it will do more for a Thursday night than a new logo will.
If you would rather hand it off
I build sites for restaurants and food businesses around the metro, and the honest version of this conversation usually starts with me telling an owner their site needs a menu page and a photo session rather than a rebuild. If you want to know where yours stands, send me the address and I will go through it the way a hungry stranger would. The ranges are on the pricing page if you are further along than that.