What Hospitality Websites Need to Get Right

The menu must be text on a page

A PDF menu is unreadable on a phone, invisible to search engines and awkward to update. It is the most common and most damaging hospitality website mistake.

Someone deciding where to eat tonight will not pinch-zoom a PDF on their phone. They will look at the next restaurant.

Four things people came for

1. The menu, current, with prices and allergen information
2. Opening hours, correct, including holidays
3. Booking, in one tap, from any page
4. Where you are, with a map and parking information

Everything else is secondary. Those four are why people visit the site.

Photographs sell

• Real photographs of your actual food and room
• Taken in good light, ideally by someone who can
• Updated when the menu or the room changes
• Sized and compressed, because they are large by nature

Keep hours accurate everywhere

Your site, your business profile and your booking platform should agree. Customers turning up to a closed restaurant leave reviews about it.

Holiday hours especially — update them before the holiday, not during.

Private hire is often the missed revenue

Functions, parties and corporate bookings are higher-value and usually get one thin page or none.

Capacity, packages, pricing and photographs of the space, with a direct enquiry route, is worth building properly.

Frequently asked questions