What a restaurant website needs

Almost everyone who lands on a restaurant site wants three things: the menu, the hours and how to get there. Most sites lead with a video of the chef and bury all three in a submenu. That's the order to reverse.

The context that changes everything: nearly everyone arrives on a phone

Someone is out on the street, hungry, deciding between your restaurant and the one next door. They have their phone in hand and thirty seconds of patience.

Everything below follows from that. If your site looks good on a monitor but needs pinching to read on a phone, you're losing at exactly the moment of the decision.

The six things, in order

1. The menu, with prices, as text

The most looked-for thing by a wide margin. And the most common mistake is publishing it as an image or a PDF: it's heavy, it can't be read without zooming, and Google can't index what it says — so you'll never come up when someone searches for a specific dish.

The menu goes in as text, with prices visible. Without prices, plenty of people assume it's expensive and leave.

2. Hours, and whether you're open right now

A table of opening times isn't enough. Ideally the site says "open now" or "closes in 40 minutes". And keep the holidays up to date: nothing annoys people more than arriving at a closed door because the site said otherwise.

3. How to get there, in one tap

Address visible and a button that opens Google Maps directly. Not an embedded map that takes its time loading: a link that fires up navigation.

4. Phone and WhatsApp as buttons

It should dial when tapped. A number you have to copy and paste loses calls. If you take bookings or deliveries over WhatsApp, that button is the most important thing on the whole site.

5. Real photos of your own dishes

Real ones, not stock. People notice, and a generic photo of pasta says exactly the opposite of what you want it to. You don't need a professional photographer to start: good natural light and a decent phone go a long way.

6. Bookings or orders, if they apply

If you take bookings, make them possible from the site. If you deliver, say clearly whether it's through your own channel or an app, and which areas you reach.

What doesn't belong

• A background video on the home page. It's heavy, it burns the customer's data and it delays what they came for.
• Autoplaying music. They're either in a noisy restaurant or in an office. Neither one wants music.
• A splash screen. One more click between the customer and the menu.
• "Our story" first. Put it in, but further down. They eat first; who cooks matters after.
• A PDF menu. Worth repeating, because it's the most frequent mistake and the most expensive one in SEO terms.

What almost nobody does and does bring customers

A restaurant competes in local searches, and there are two levers there worth more than the design:

1. A spotless Google Business profile, linked to your site. For "restaurants near me", that profile counts for more than the site. Current photos, correct hours, and replying to reviews.
2. A page per signature dish or per category. If you're known for one dish, a page about it can rank for "that dish in [your city]". A PDF menu will never manage that.

Add schema.org's Restaurant markup with hours, price range and cuisine type. That's what lets Google show the information straight in the result.

Test your own site: open it on your phone on mobile data, not wi-fi, and count how many taps it takes to see a price. If it's more than two, there's your problem.

What something like that costs

A properly resolved restaurant site falls in the corporate-site range: between $2,500,000 and $6,000,000 COP depending on whether it includes bookings or online ordering. The full breakdown is in how much a website costs in Colombia.

And if your restaurant lives off passing trade and you're not sure you need your own site yet, read does my business need a website? first — there are cases where the Google profile is enough for now.

The other half of the job is showing up when someone searches for where to eat with the city name next to it. That's local SEO and it has its own budget: how much SEO costs in Colombia explains it, and if your restaurant is on the coast, how I work it is in web design in Cartagena and in Barranquilla. The monthly work, with what it includes and what it doesn't promise, is in SEO; and the site itself, in web design.