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
- The menu, current, with prices and allergen information
- Opening hours, correct, including holidays
- Booking, in one tap, from any page
- 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.