Most restaurant websites are built around photos of the dining room. Customers arrive wanting four things, and three of them are usually missing.
Key Takeaways
- Most restaurant websites are built around photos of the dining room.
- Customers arrive wanting four things, and three of them are usually missing.
Someone opens your website on a phone, standing on the street, deciding where to eat in the next ten minutes. They want four things: the menu, the price range, where you are, and whether you are open. Everything else on the page is competing with those four for their attention.
Most restaurant websites in Kathmandu lead with a photograph of the dining room and put the menu behind a PDF link. That is backwards.
The menu is the website
Put the menu on the page as text, with prices. Not a downloadable PDF, not an image of a printed menu, not a link to a Facebook album.
Three reasons. A PDF takes several seconds to open on mobile data and then needs pinching to read. An image of a menu cannot be read by anyone using a screen reader, and cannot be searched. And Google reads text, so a menu as a web page is the thing that lets you appear when someone searches for a dish rather than for your name.
That last point is the one restaurants underuse. Nobody in Nepal is searching for your restaurant if they have not heard of it. Plenty of people search for a specific dish near them.
Say where you are like a person would
An embedded map is fine. A sentence is better, and most sites skip it. "In Jhamsikhel, on the road behind the Labim Mall, opposite the pharmacy" tells a Nepali visitor more than a pin does, because it matches how anyone here actually gives directions.
Include a phone number that dials when tapped. It sounds obvious. Half the restaurant sites we look at print the number as an image or as plain text that a phone will not recognise.
Opening hours, kept current
Hours that are wrong are worse than hours that are absent, because a customer who arrives at a closed restaurant does not come back to check the website next time.
This is also the field most often out of date, which is an argument for a site you can edit yourself in a minute rather than one that needs an email to your developer.
Online ordering: worth it or not
Delivery platforms bring you orders and take a commission on every one. Your own ordering page has no commission and no audience unless you send people to it.
The pattern that works: use the platforms for reach and your own site for the customers who already know you. Put the link on your receipts, your packaging, and your Instagram bio. Over a year, moving even a modest share of repeat orders off a commission is the difference the site pays for.
Be honest with yourself about whether you will run it. Online ordering means someone watching for orders during service. If nobody will, a clear phone number outperforms a checkout nobody answers.
What to cut
The autoplay video. The image carousel of the interior. The paragraph about your culinary journey. The popup asking people to subscribe to a newsletter before they have seen the menu.
None of these help a hungry person decide, and each costs load time on mobile data. Keep one good photograph of the food near the top and spend the rest of the page on the four things.
What it costs
A brochure site covering menu, location, hours and a booking form starts from NPR 25,000. Adding real online ordering with payment moves it into the online store range, from NPR 60,000, because taking money reliably is the work rather than the pages.
If you are choosing between the two, start with the first. A fast, current, honest menu page earns more than a checkout nobody has been told about.
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Written by
AntByte Labs
Engineering · AntByte Labs
AntByte Labs is a Engineering at AntByte Labs, sharing expert insights on technology, software development, and digital innovation to help businesses grow.