What Every Restaurant Website Needs: a 12-Point Checklist

Before anyone tastes your food, 77% of guests have already seen your website: that's from MGH's survey of 1,101 US diners, which also found that 68% had been put off a restaurant by the website alone. The site answers three questions before you get a say: what do you serve, when are you open, and can I get a table.

Here is the twelve-point restaurant website checklist, grouped the way a guest actually moves through your site.

What guests check first

1. The menu as a web page, not a PDF. The menu is the first thing most visitors open, and in the MGH survey 36% of diners were discouraged by a menu that was hard to read, so this single point carries more weight than the rest of the list. A PDF forces zooming and scrolling on a phone and often shows last season's prices. Put the menu on the page itself, or better, connect it to the same digital menu your QR codes use, so it updates everywhere at once.
2. Prices on the menu. A menu without prices reads as an evasion, and many guests leave rather than guess. If prices change often, that's an argument for a connected digital menu, not for hiding them.
3. Opening hours that are true. Wrong hours cost more goodwill than almost anything else: someone stood in front of a locked door because your site said open. Check holidays, the summer terrace and kitchen closing time, and update the site the same day the hours change.
4. Address with a map link. One tap should open navigation. Add a line about parking or the nearest stop if arriving is not obvious.

Getting a table

5. A booking button, not "call us". Most guests plan evenings after your phone stops being answered. A booking widget takes reservations at midnight, confirms instantly, and spares your staff the phone during service. If all your site offers is a phone number, the bookings go to whoever answers online.
6. A clickable phone number. For everyone who still prefers to call: the number should dial on tap, not require copying into the keypad.

How the site looks on a phone

7. Real photos of the room and the food. Three to five honest photos beat thirty. Guests want to see the actual room and a few actual dishes; stock photography reads as stock photography within a second. In the same MGH survey, 35% of diners were put off simply because a site looked old or out of date.
8. The languages your guests speak. Match the site to the people who actually walk in. In most Baltic and European cities that means two or three languages, and the menu is the page where translation matters most.
9. Built for phones first. Most restaurant website visits happen on a phone, often while standing on the street. Check your own site on a phone: if any text needs zooming or any button misses on first tap, that's the priority fix.
10. Loads before the guest gives up. The usual culprit is photo files uploaded straight from the camera. Compress images before uploading; a page that appears while the guest is still willing to wait keeps them, and one that makes them watch a spinner sends them to the next tab.

How Google finds you

11. Your own domain, consistent with Google. A proper domain looks trustworthy in search results and on a business card. Keep the name, address and hours identical between your site and your Google Business Profile, so search and maps agree about you.
12. A title and description for search results. Each page has one line in Google: its title and description. Write them yourself ("Trattoria Otto, Italian restaurant in Kalamaja. Book a table online") instead of letting Google guess from page text.

What you can safely skip

A blog you won't maintain, autoplay music or video, animated intros, and a chat widget nobody staffs. Every one of these is a maintenance debt that outweighs its effect. A reservation-by-contact-form also belongs here: if the form isn't read until morning, it's a slower phone.

What should a restaurant website include?

Menu with prices, true hours, map, booking button. If those four are right, the rest is polish. Hollapp's website builder ships them as parts of one system: the menu and booking widget on the site are the same ones behind your QR codes and reservation calendar, so updating once updates everywhere.