A restaurant website has exactly one job: turn someone who is hungry and nearby into an order or a booking. Everything else is decoration. Most sites get this backwards — they win a design award and lose the customer who just wanted to see if you are open and order a pad thai.
Here is the actual list, in priority order. If your site nails the first five, it is already ahead of most.
1. It loads in under three seconds on a phone
More than half of restaurant traffic is someone on their phone, on data, standing on a sidewalk deciding where to eat. If your homepage takes six seconds and a giant video to load, they are already at the place next door. Fast, light pages are not a nice-to-have — they are the whole game on mobile. Strip the heavy slideshow. Compress the photos. Measure it.
2. The menu is readable in one tap — and it is not a PDF
The single most common mistake: hiding the menu behind a PDF that opens in a clumsy viewer, pinch-to-zoom, tiny text. Your menu is the most-visited page on the entire site. It should be real text on the page, fast, searchable, and legible at arm’s length. If a customer has to fight to read what you serve, you have lost the order before it started.
3. Hours, address and phone — above the fold, no clicks
People come to a restaurant site to answer three questions fast: Are you open? Where are you? How do I order? Put the answers where the eye lands first. A clear “Order” button, current hours, a tappable phone number, and a map link. Do not make anyone hunt.
4. Ordering and booking that you control
If you are sending every order through a delivery app, you are paying 15–30% on customers who would happily order direct. Direct ordering and reservations on your own site keep the customer and the margin. (We go deep on the commission math in the delivery-apps guide — it is worth the seven minutes.) This is the difference between a brochure and a business tool, and it is the part most “website packages” quietly skip.
5. Local SEO so you actually show up
A beautiful site nobody finds is a postcard in a drawer. When someone nearby searches “Ukrainian food near me” or “best ramen in Markham,” you want to be in those results. That means proper local SEO: a complete and accurate Google Business Profile, your name, address and phone consistent everywhere, real on-page text about what you serve and where, and structured data so search engines understand you. This is unglamorous and it is where the orders come from. We took Borscht Kitchen to #1 for Ukrainian food in Toronto on exactly this kind of work.
6. Real photos of your actual food
Not stock photos. Not the supplier’s catalogue shot. Your food, your room, shot in decent light. People order with their eyes, and they can smell a fake photo from a mile off. A few honest, well-lit shots beat a gallery of generic ones.
7. It works for the people you actually serve
If half your neighbourhood reads a second language, a site that only speaks English is leaving orders on the table. If your customers are older, the text needs to be large and the buttons obvious. Accessibility is not a compliance checkbox — it is whether the person who wants to give you money can actually do it.
What you can safely ignore
- A blog you will never update. An abandoned blog is worse than none.
- Autoplaying video with sound. It is 2026. Stop.
- A chatbot for a 30-seat restaurant. Answer the phone.
- Trendy effects that slow the page down. See item 1.
The short version
Fast, mobile-first, menu in plain text, hours and ordering up top, ordering you own, and local SEO that gets you found. That is a restaurant website that earns its keep.
If you want one built that way — or your current one fixed — that is what we do all day. Our restaurant practice handles the site, the ordering, the delivery-app setup and the local SEO, and the first 30-minute call is free.