Cafés, restaurants & pubs
Website design for cafés and restaurants
Three questions decide whether someone walks through your door: are you open, what’s on the menu, and can I get a table. Most hospitality websites answer all three badly, and one of them with a PDF.
Please stop putting the menu in a PDF
It is the most common mistake in hospitality web design and it costs real covers. A PDF menu on a phone opens in a separate viewer, arrives as a page of unreadable eight-point text, and demands pinching and dragging to read a starter. A meaningful proportion of people give up and look at the place next door instead.
It also means Google can barely read your menu. Every dish you serve is a thing somebody might search for — sourdough pizza [town], Sunday roast near me, gluten free brunch [town] — and none of that is working for you while it sits inside a file designed for printing.
A menu as real, structured text on the page loads instantly, is readable one-handed, can be updated in two minutes when the fish changes, and is fully visible to search engines. There is no argument for the PDF except that the designer had one already.
What we build for hospitality
- Menus as pages, not downloads. Sections, dishes, descriptions and prices in real text, with dietary and allergen markers. Easy for you to update, and Google can read every word.
- Opening hours everywhere, and correct. On the homepage, in the footer, in your structured data and on your Google Business Profile — including bank holidays and the Christmas period, which is exactly when people check and exactly when hours are wrong.
- Booking that goes where you want it. Linked to OpenTable, ResDiary, SevenRooms, Design My Night or whatever you run — or a simple request form if you’d rather keep the diary in your own hands.
- Photographs of your actual food. Not the stock photograph of a burger that appears on four hundred other restaurant sites. Real photos of your room, taken when it’s busy, do more than any amount of copy.
- Directions, parking and access. How to find you, where to park, whether there are steps, whether the dog can come. Small details that decide bookings.
- A functions and private hire page. Usually the highest-margin work you do, and usually the thing hidden three clicks deep with no capacity, price guide or enquiry form.
- Correct
RestaurantandMenuschema. Structured data covering cuisine, price range, hours, location and menu, giving you the best chance in local results and in the AI answers people increasingly ask instead of searching. - Seasonal pages that go up early. Christmas menus need to be live and indexed in September, because that’s when the office party organiser starts looking.
Allergens, done properly
Allergen information is a legal obligation, and it is also a trust signal that brings people back. Fourteen allergens must be declared for the food you serve, and food prepacked for direct sale on your premises must carry a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised.
Your website isn’t a substitute for what happens in the kitchen or at the counter, but it is where a nervous customer checks before deciding whether to risk booking at all. A clear, current allergen matrix — and an honest note about cross-contamination in a small kitchen — converts a family that would otherwise have gone somewhere safer.
We build it as maintainable structured content, so it changes when the menu changes instead of drifting quietly out of date.
Commission, and why a direct booking is worth more
Delivery platforms and booking marketplaces bring volume, and they take a substantial share of every order for it. That may still be worth it — but only if you’re not paying commission on customers who already knew your name.
Somebody who searches for you directly should land on your own site, with your own ordering or booking route, at nothing per cover. Your website’s quiet job is to intercept those people before an aggregator does, and to convert the ones who found you through an aggregator into direct customers next time.
Local search is most of the battle
Hospitality searches are overwhelmingly local and immediate: brunch near me, dog friendly pub [town], best coffee [town]. That means the map pack is where the traffic is, and getting into it takes:
- A Google Business Profile with the right primary category, real photos, current hours and every attribute filled in — outdoor seating, dog friendly, step-free access, vegan options.
- Reviews arriving steadily, and being replied to. A reply to a bad review is written for everyone who reads it afterwards, not for the person who left it.
- Name, address and phone number written identically across your site, your profile and every directory.
- Pages on your own site that genuinely match those searches, rather than one “menu” page expected to rank for everything.
What it costs
Pay-monthly plans run from £45 a month for a five-page site up to £120 a month for a shop or membership site — design, build, hosting, support and monthly changes all included, with nothing to pay upfront.
Prefer to own it? One-off builds start at £1495.
Questions
Hospitality website questions
How much does a restaurant website cost?
Most cafés and restaurants take the £75 a month Business plan, because it covers a page per menu, the copywriting, the local SEO groundwork and enough monthly change time to keep menus and hours current. Nothing to pay upfront.
A small café with one menu and no bookings can work perfectly well on Starter at £45. See the pricing page.
Can we update the menu ourselves?
Yes — we’ll set up an editor for the menus specifically, since that’s the part that changes weekly. Plenty of clients would rather just email us the new prices, and every plan includes change time for exactly that. Whichever you prefer.
Do we need our own booking system, or is a form fine?
Depends on volume. Under roughly twenty covers a night, a request form your team confirms by phone or email is usually better — no monthly fee, and you keep full control of the diary.
Above that, a real booking system pays for itself in reduced no-shows and time saved on the phone. We’ll integrate whichever you choose so it looks like part of the site.
We’re mostly on Instagram. Do we need a website at all?
Yes, for two reasons. Someone deciding where to eat tonight searches Google or Maps, not Instagram — and without a site with correct hours, menu and structured data you are largely absent from that decision.
And your Instagram audience isn’t yours. Reach changes, accounts get restricted, and a business that exists only on someone else’s platform is one algorithm change from a quiet Tuesday becoming a quiet month.
Can you help with online ordering and takeaway?
Yes, on the Growth plan — direct ordering from your own site, with your own payment processing and no per-order commission to an aggregator. It suits collection and your own delivery best.
If you also want the reach of the big platforms, keep them and use the site to steer repeat customers direct. That is where the margin is.
How do we handle bad reviews?
Reply to every one, calmly, quickly and in public. Not for the reviewer — for the hundred people who read the exchange afterwards and are deciding what kind of place you are. A gracious reply to an unfair review does more good than the review did harm.
We’ll set up the review link and the process. We won’t write fake reviews, and neither should anyone else: it breaches Google’s policies and UK consumer protection law.
We have several sites. Can they share one website?
Yes, and they should. One brand site with a proper page per location — its own address, hours, menu, photos and structured data — ranks far better than separate thin sites competing with each other, and it’s much less to keep updated.
Other industries
We build for these too
Let’s build the site your trade actually needs
Tell us what you do and we’ll send you a straight answer: what your site needs, what it will cost each month, and how quickly it can be live.
No pressure, no jargon, no obligation. We usually reply the same working day.