How people find a restaurant
"Restaurants near me" is one of the most searched phrases on Google, at about 101 million searches a month in the US. City searches are huge too:
"Restaurants chicago" gets 90,500 searches a month, Dallas 74,000 and Houston, San Antonio, San Diego and Austin 60,500 each. Most of these people want to eat soon. They decide in seconds, usually on a phone.
| What people type into Google | US searches per month |
|---|---|
| restaurant website | 2,900 |
| restaurant website design | 480 |
What diners want from a restaurant website
People visiting a restaurant site usually want one of five things:
- The menu, with prices
- Hours, especially today's
- Location and parking
- A way to order for pickup or delivery
- A way to book a table
Everything else is secondary. A good restaurant site puts these on the first screen of a phone.
Pages a restaurant site needs
| Page | What goes on it |
|---|---|
| Home | Cuisine, location, today's hours, order and reserve buttons, a few great photos |
| Menu | Full menu as text, with prices, dietary notes and sections |
| Order | Links to your ordering system or delivery partners |
| Reservations | Your booking tool, or a phone number |
| Private events and catering | If you do them, with capacity and how to inquire |
| About | Your story, chef, sourcing |
| Locations | One page per location, with hours and directions |
Why the menu should be text, not a PDF
PDF menus are slow on phones, hard to read and hard for Google to understand. A text menu:
- Loads instantly
- Is easy to update when prices change
- Can show up when people search for a dish, like "birria tacos near me"
- Works with screen readers for visitors with disabilities
We build menus as real web pages, organized into sections, with prices and dietary tags.
Ordering and reservations
Most restaurants already use tools like Toast, Square, DoorDash, Uber Eats, OpenTable, Resy or Tock. We link them from the top of every page. If you have your own direct ordering, we put it first, since it usually costs you less in fees than third-party apps.
Showing up on the map
That's the map pack for "restaurants near me" searched from New Orleans. Restaurants live and die by these results. Map spots depend on your Google Business Profile, photos, reviews and distance. Your site should have the exact same hours, address and phone, and link to the same menu and ordering.
Photos that make people hungry
- Shoot food in natural light, close up, without heavy filters
- Show the dining room so people know what to expect
- Update photos when the menu changes
- Compress images so pages stay fast
Mistakes we see on restaurant websites
- A PDF menu. Slow, hard to read and invisible to search.
- Old hours. Wrong hours on the site or Google send people to a closed door.
- Autoplay video or music. It slows the page and annoys diners.
- No prices. People want to know before they come.
- Ordering buried in the menu. Put it at the top.
Real Search Console data
That's real data from one of our client sites, with the name hidden. It isn't a restaurant. We share it as an example of the approach.
How we build your restaurant site
- Run the calculator with "restaurant" and your city.
- Send us your menu, hours, photos and ordering and reservation links.
- We build a fast, mobile-first site.
- You review, and we launch.
- We check your Google Business Profile matches the site.
Price
$299 base, $15 per extra page, never more than $630. Most restaurants need 5 to 8 pages. For how much a restaurant website might cost elsewhere, see how much a website costs. For other local businesses, see websites for salons.
Restaurant website templates vs a site built around your menu
Restaurant website templates and themes look great in demos, and some of the best restaurant websites started from one. What sets them apart is the content: a menu written in text, hours that are always right, photos of your real food, and ordering or reservations that work on a phone.
If you use a template, change those four things before anything else. If you'd rather have someone design a website for your restaurant around them, we do that for a fixed price.
