A website for a restaurant: the essentials for filling the dining room

A restaurant site has only one judge: does it fill the dining room? The typical customer often searches at the last minute, on their phone, hungry. In a few seconds they decide where they are going to eat. Here is what your site has to get right to be the one chosen.

The menu, up to date and two clicks away

That is the first thing people look for. A clear menu, readable on mobile, with prices, kept current. Above all, avoid the PDF that is impossible to read on a phone, or the menu that has been out of date for three seasons: nothing drives people away faster. A menu that is easy to update saves you paying for a change every time the dishes change.

Booking without friction

Being able to book online, at any hour, without calling, has become a reflex. A simple booking module or a well-placed button captures the customers who would never have picked up the phone, especially in the evening and at weekends when you are mid-service.

Photos that make people hungry

We eat with our eyes first. Real photos of your dishes, the dining room, the terrace are worth more than any words. Not generic stock images: yours, the ones that show your atmosphere.

Local search and Google

Many customers never even reach your site: they type “restaurant” and the name of the town, and look at what Google offers. A well-built site, paired with an up-to-date Google listing and regular reviews, lifts you to where the decision is made.

On reviews specifically, the crux is collecting them continuously. An NFC stand placed on the tables or at the counter lets a satisfied customer leave a review with a single tap of their phone, while they are still there. That is exactly what the Le LB restaurant in Soulac uses, alongside its QR code keyrings.

Mobile display, non-negotiable

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often outdoors, sometimes on a middling connection. A site that crawls, or that needs zooming, is a customer heading elsewhere. Light and adapted to the screen: that is the baseline.

The false good ideas

• The site loaded with animations: pretty in a demo, slow in real life, and it distracts from the menu.
• Auto-playing music: nobody likes it, everybody closes the tab.
• The downloadable PDF: always prefer a menu as a real web page.

In short

An up-to-date menu, easy booking, beautiful photos, local search, reviews and mobile display: get those six right and your site works to fill the room. The rest is secondary.

To see those six points applied to a real project, we wrote up the site of La Bodega, in Soulac-sur-Mer, in detail: how we designed a seaside restaurant’s website, menu included.

We build restaurant sites on exactly this logic, with the booking modules and review tools that go with it. It is all set out on the website design page, and the quote is free within 24 hours.