Most restaurant websites win the meeting where they are presented. Then they fail on a phone in a car park at seven in the evening. Here are the five things that actually earn their cost.
The five things that matter
A menu that isn't a PDF
Google cannot read a PDF, assistants cannot read it aloud, and on a phone it pinches to nothing. Your menu is the most-visited page on your site and the most common thing to get wrong. It should be text on a page, updated the day the menu changes.
Your hours, correct, in one place
Wrong hours are worse than no hours. Every restaurant has at least two sources — the website and Google — and they disagree more often than not. Every hour of disagreement is somebody arriving at a locked door, or not arriving at all.
A way to book that takes under thirty seconds
Not a form with twelve fields. Not "email us". A number that dials on tap, or a booking flow asking three things: date, time and party size.
Photographs of your actual room
Stock photography of a generic restaurant is easy to spot. It costs you trust in the very seconds somebody is deciding. A phone photo of your real room at seven in the evening beats a beautiful stock photo.
Speed on a mid-range Android on 4G
Not on the designer's laptop. Most of your traffic is a phone on 4G, not wifi. Every second of load time costs you visitors who never tell you they left.
What doesn't matter as much as you think
Animations. A carousel of six hero images. A page explaining your philosophy. An our-story longer than four sentences. None of these four is wrong; they are simply not what makes the phone ring.
The test
Open your site on your own phone, on data rather than wifi, standing outside
Time, in seconds, how long until you can read something useful
Then try to book a table in under thirty seconds, without pinching or zooming
Most owners have never done this on their own site. It is the most useful ten minutes you will spend on it.
Want it measured for you?
See what Google — and AI — see when they look at your business.