Most restaurant websites are shop windows. The good ones are booking machines. Having designed sites for restaurants and bars, and run a few ourselves, here is what separates them.
It has to be fast on a phone
Nobody books a table from a desktop at work. They book from the sofa, from the bus, from the group chat where someone said "where are we going Saturday?". If your site takes more than a couple of seconds to load on a phone, the group chat has moved on. Speed is not a technical nicety. It is the difference between a booking and a bounce.
The booking button goes everywhere
One booking button in the top corner is not enough. The button belongs in the header, after the menu, under the photos and at the end of the page, because you do not know which part of the site convinces someone. When the urge arrives, the button should already be under their thumb.
Menus are pages, not PDFs
A PDF menu on a phone means pinching, zooming and giving up. It is also invisible to Google, which means you lose everyone searching for "bao buns Preston" or "bottomless brunch near me". Menus built as proper pages are readable with one thumb and work as bait in search results.
Photography sells the table
People choose with their eyes. Real photographs of your food and your room will outsell any stock image, every time. If the budget only stretches to one thing this year, make it a photographer for an afternoon.
The boring local search stuff pays the bills
A Google Business Profile with fresh photos and steady reviews, opening hours that are actually right, and a site with proper titles and structured data. None of this is glamorous. All of it decides whether you show up when someone searches "restaurant Preston" at 6pm on a Friday.
Social feeds the site, the site takes the booking
Instagram starts the craving but it is terrible at taking bookings. The job of the feed is to get people to the site. The job of the site is to close. When the brand, the feed and the site all look like one thing, that handover is seamless. When they do not, people hesitate, and hesitation kills bookings.
We designed The Tipsy Chef's brand and website around exactly these principles. If your restaurant site is more shop window than booking machine, see how we build restaurant websites or get in touch.