The menu, as text
Real pages, not a download. Readable on a phone held one-handed, indexable so a dish name can find you, and editable by someone in the building.
Restaurants
Restaurant websites that stay true
A restaurant site is not a brochure. It is a live answer to four questions: what do you serve, what does it cost, are you open, and how do I order. Every one of those changes without warning.
A restaurant website is a maintenance problem disguised as a design problem. The design gets decided once. The menu, the hours, the specials, the ordering links and the photos change constantly, and every one of them goes stale the moment nobody owns it.
So the questions that matter are not about layout. They are: who can change the menu, how long does it take, does the site agree with what Google is telling people, and does the ordering link still work today?
What actually goes wrong on restaurant websites
These are the faults that show up over and over. None of them are exotic and none of them are about taste.
The menu is a PDF
It made sense at the time: the designer had the file, exporting a PDF was free, and it looked right. On a phone it is a download that opens at the wrong width, and a customer standing outside your door has to pinch and drag to find out whether you do a vegetarian option. Search engines cannot use it as part of your site, so nobody searching for a dish by name finds you. Worst of all, changing a price means going back to whoever owns the source file.
A menu built as real pages is text: readable at any width, indexable, and editable without a design tool.
The menu is right but stale
The kitchen dropped a dish six weeks ago. The site still sells it. A server apologises for it eleven times a night, and every one of those is a small tax on the meal. This is not a design failure. It is a question of who has the keys and how much friction stands between "we are 86 the short rib" and the site saying so.
Hours drift, and holidays are worse
Regular hours are easy. The damage happens on the days that matter most: the holiday you close early, the Monday you open for a private event, the week you change the kitchen closing time. If the site, the door and the Google Business Profile disagree, the customer trusts Google, drives over, and finds the lights off. That is not a bad review about hours. That is a bad review about you.
Ordering links break silently
Third-party ordering providers change their URLs, retire their old links, and rebrand. Your buttons keep looking like buttons. Nothing on your end goes red. A dead ordering link is revenue leaving quietly, and the only way to catch it is for someone to actually click it on a schedule.
The photos are doing the selling, badly
People pick restaurants with their eyes before they read a word. A phone snap under a heat lamp will undersell food that took years to get right. This is the one part of a restaurant site that code cannot fix, and it is usually where the money is best spent.
The four things a restaurant site has to get right
Hours that match reality
Including the holiday you close early. One source of truth, agreeing with your Google Business Profile, changed on a checklist someone owns.
An obvious next step
Call, directions, or a working link to your ordering provider. One tap, above the fold, not buried under a photo carousel.
Photos worth showing
Your food, lit properly, at a file size that loads before the customer gives up. This one is worth paying a photographer for.
How we approach a restaurant site
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Find out what changes and who changes it
Before any design talk: how often does the menu move, who is holding the pen at 4pm on a Friday, and what happens today when a price changes? The answers decide the whole build.
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Get the menu out of the PDF
Rebuild it as pages: sections, items, prices and dietary notes as real text, structured so both a hungry person and a search engine can read it.
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Make the edits boring
The person who runs the floor should be able to pull a sold-out item without emailing anyone. If a change needs us, it should take minutes, not a project.
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Wire the outside world in
Ordering links to your third-party provider, directions, and a tappable phone number. We connect and maintain these; we do not build ordering or payment systems.
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Line the site up with local search
Your profile and your site should tell the same story. See local SEO for what actually moves this, and what does not.
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Keep checking the links
Ordering links and hours get checked, not assumed. Silent breakage is the whole problem, so somebody has to look.
Who this is for
- Restaurants whose menu changes more often than their website does
- Anyone still handing customers a PDF menu on a phone screen
- Operators whose Google hours and website hours have quietly diverged
- Kitchens that want to link out to the ordering provider they already use
- Owners who inherited a site and no longer know who can edit it
When this is not the right fit
- Anyone who needs an ordering system, checkout or point of sale built. We do not build or sell those. We link to the provider you choose and keep the link alive.
- Restaurants wanting a site nobody will ever update. A restaurant site that is not maintained is worse than none, because it lies confidently.
- Anyone expecting the website alone to fill tables. The site removes friction. The food, the photos and the reviews do the persuading.
What SolvenceHQ can help with
We treat a restaurant site as an operational system, not a portfolio piece. The test is not how it looks at launch. It is whether it is still true in November.
- Menus rebuilt as real, editable, indexable pages instead of a PDF
- Hours structured so holiday changes are a two minute job
- Clean links out to your third-party ordering provider, checked so they do not rot
- Fast loading photo handling, so good photography actually reaches the customer
- Local SEO and profile consistency so the map and the site agree
- Ongoing care and restaurant technology support once it is live
Common questions
Can we just put our menu up as a PDF?
You can, and it will cost you. A PDF opens as a separate download on a phone, loads at desktop width, and forces the customer to pinch and drag to read a price. Search engines can read text inside a PDF, but they cannot treat it as a page of your site, so your menu items are effectively invisible to anyone searching for a dish by name.
The bigger problem is upkeep. A PDF gets updated by whoever has the original file, which is usually a designer nobody has spoken to in a year. A menu built as real pages gets edited in minutes.
How do we stop the website hours and the Google hours from disagreeing?
You do not stop it by trying harder. You stop it by deciding, once, that one of them is the source of truth and by putting holiday changes on a checklist that someone actually owns.
In practice your Google Business Profile is what most people see before they ever reach the site, so it cannot be an afterthought. The site should agree with it, and both should get updated in the same five minutes, not in the same month.
Do you build online ordering or take payments?
No. We do not build ordering systems, checkout, or point of sale, and we do not sell payment systems. What we do is link your site cleanly to whichever third-party ordering provider you already use, keep those links working, and make sure the handoff is obvious rather than buried.
Broken or outdated ordering links are one of the most common faults we see on restaurant sites, and they are silent: nothing looks wrong on your end.
An item has been out of stock for a month. Is that a website problem?
It is a support problem wearing a website costume. The site is doing exactly what it was told; nobody told it. That is why we care about who can edit the menu and how quickly. If the only path to removing a sold-out item runs through an email to an agency, the item stays up and the server keeps apologising for it.
How much do photos really matter?
More than the design does. People choose a restaurant with their eyes, and a phone photo of a good plate under bad light will undersell food that took years to get right. Photography is usually the highest-leverage spend on a restaurant site, and it is the part we cannot do for you with code.
Related services and guides
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Multi-location business websites
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Google Business Profile vs a website
What each one does, and why most businesses need both.
Outdated business website
Decide whether to refresh, rebuild, or leave it alone.
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Menu out of date again?
Tell us what changes most often and who changes it. We will tell you what it would take to make that a two minute job instead of a phone call.