Restaurant mobile websites: menu, booking and directions

Key takeaways

A restaurant mobile website is opened by people deciding where to eat, often within the hour, usually standing in a street or sitting on a sofa with a phone. They want the menu, the opening times, a way to book and directions. A site that delivers those four in under a minute fills tables. Everything else is decoration.

• Four tasks: see the menu, check hours, book a table, get directions.
• The menu should be a web page with prices and allergens in text, not a PDF.
• Booking should take under a minute on a phone, or be one tap to call.
• Photos sell the food, and unoptimised photos are what make the site slow.

What do diners want from a restaurant site on a phone?

Diners want to complete one of four tasks: look at the menu, confirm you are open, book, or find you. A hospitality site is unusual in that almost every visitor arrives with the same short list. The design problem is not persuasion. It is getting out of the way.

That makes the first mobile screen simple to specify: the name and type of food, whether you are open now, and four clear buttons. A full-screen video of the dining room may express the brand. On a phone on mobile data it delays every one of those tasks.

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How should the menu work on mobile?

The menu should be an ordinary web page: sections for starters, mains and so on, each dish with a short description and a price, and allergen and dietary information in text. It reads at a comfortable size on any phone, loads quickly, can be found by Google dish by dish and takes a minute to update.

A PDF or a photograph of the printed menu fails on all four counts. Food businesses must be able to provide allergen information to customers, and a text menu is the easiest place to keep it accurate. If a dish changes, you edit one line instead of re-exporting a design file.

• Section links at the top: jump to starters, mains, desserts, drinks.
• Prices on every item.
• Dietary and allergen markers, with a key and a note to ask staff.
• Sample or seasonal menus dated, so customers know they are current.
• The PDF offered as an optional download, never as the only version.

• PDFs on a mobile website: why menus and brochures fail
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How should booking work on a phone?

Booking should take under a minute: date, time, party size, name and phone number. Most restaurants use a third-party booking system, and the quality of its mobile screens varies. Test yours on a phone as a customer. If it opens in a tiny frame, needs an account or shows a calendar that is hard to tap, it is costing you covers.

Always offer a second route. A tap-to-call button and, for many venues, WhatsApp let customers book large parties, ask about access or check a dietary need. State when the phone is answered, so people do not call during a closed afternoon and give up.

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How do you get people to the door?

Show the address as a tappable link, a 'Get directions' button that opens the customer's maps app, and today's opening hours in text. Add the nearest station or car park. Keep those details identical to your Google Business Profile, because many diners will see the profile first and the site second.

Opening hours are the detail most often wrong. Update the site and the profile together for bank holidays, private hire and seasonal changes. A customer who arrives at a closed door after checking your website does not come back.

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How do you keep a photo-heavy site fast?

Use fewer, better, smaller images. Food photography sells, and a dozen 4MB photos straight from a camera will make a phone wait. Resize each image to the size it is displayed, compress it, use a modern format, and load images further down the page only as the visitor scrolls.

One strong photo at the top does more than a five-image slider. Nielsen Norman Group advises against auto-rotating carousels on mobile, where visitors have usually scrolled past before the second image appears.

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What can a restaurant site do without?

It can do without an app, in almost every case. It can do without a pop-up asking for an email address before the menu has loaded, a music player, a long founder's story on the homepage and an embedded social feed. Each slows the page or sits between the customer and the four tasks.

The trade-off is atmosphere against utility. A destination restaurant sells an experience and deserves more imagery and story. Put it below the practical information, where interested visitors will find it and hungry ones are not delayed by it.

• Mobile website vs app: does your business need an app?

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see repeatedly in UK hospitality: a handsome site with a full-screen image, a small menu icon and, behind it, a link labelled 'Menus' that opens a PDF. Opening hours are in the footer as an image. The booking widget opens in a new tab and asks the customer to create an account.

Every one of the four tasks takes several taps and some patience. Rebuilding the homepage around four buttons, with the menu as a page and hours in text at the top, does not change the look. It changes how many visitors get as far as booking. Global Bridge Labs (GBL) times each of the four tasks on a phone as the first step of any hospitality review.

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Restaurant mobile checklist

• Show cuisine, location and 'open now' status in the first screen.
• Add four buttons: Menu, Book, Call, Directions.
• Publish the menu as a web page with prices and allergens.
• Time a booking on a phone and remove any forced account.
• Match hours and address to your Google Business Profile.
• Compress every photo and drop auto-rotating sliders.
• Re-check hours before every bank holiday.

Next step

Stand outside your own restaurant with your phone on mobile data and try all four tasks. Time each one. Anything over thirty seconds is a customer deciding to eat somewhere else.