Your customers are hungry and on their phones
Someone deciding where to eat tonight is standing in their kitchen with a phone, flicking between three options. They'll give each one a few seconds. They want to know three things: what do you serve, when are you open, and how do they book a table or order.
Most restaurant websites fail this test spectacularly. A full-screen video that takes ten seconds to load. A menu hidden inside a PDF designed for print. Opening hours buried on a contact page that hasn't been updated since the winter hours changed. The customer gives up and books the place whose website answered them - and never even registers that a decision was made.
This guide covers what a restaurant, cafe, or takeaway website actually needs. It's a shorter list than you'd think, and it has almost nothing to do with looking fancy.
The menu: your most important page, and the most abused
Your menu is the most-visited part of your website. It deserves better than what most restaurants do to it.
No PDFs. The PDF menu is the single most common restaurant website mistake. On a phone, a PDF means downloading a file (using the customer's data), then pinching and zooming around a document designed for A4 paper. Search engines and AI assistants also can't read them properly - which means when someone asks "restaurants with good vegetarian options near me", your PDF menu is invisible to the systems doing the answering. Your menu should be an ordinary web page: text on the page, readable on a phone, findable by search engines.
Keep it current. An outdated menu creates the worst kind of disappointment: the customer arrives wanting the dish they saw online, and it's off. If your menu changes often, that's an argument for a website you can update yourself in five minutes - not for giving up and pointing people at a photo of a chalkboard.
Show prices. Hiding prices doesn't make you look exclusive; it makes people assume they can't afford you, and it's exactly the information they came for.
Opening hours, address, and the basics
Put your hours, address, and phone number where they can't be missed - in the footer of every page and prominently on the homepage. Keep the hours accurate, including public holidays; South Africa has a lot of them, and every long weekend produces a wave of "are they open?" searches.
Your address should link to Google Maps for one-tap directions. Your phone number should be tappable. These sound trivial - they're the details phone-bound, hungry customers actually use.
And keep your Google Business Profile in step with the website - same hours, same phone number, current photos. For "restaurants near me" searches, the profile is usually your first impression, and the local pack is territory you want to hold.
Bookings: reduce the friction, keep the control
If you take bookings, make it possible without a phone call - a meaningful share of diners (and most tourists) simply won't ring. That can be a proper booking system showing live availability, or a simple request form with quick confirmation - fine for smaller places, as long as someone actually monitors it.
Be cautious about handing your bookings entirely to third-party platforms. They're convenient, but the diner relationship, the data, and sometimes a per-cover fee flow to the platform - and your regulars get marketed your competitors. We'll look at the own-website-versus-platform question properly in an upcoming post on online bookings; the short version is that your website should be the primary door, whatever else you plug into.
Online ordering: your margins will thank you
If you do takeaway or delivery, the delivery apps are a double-edged sword: real reach, at commissions that can consume most of the margin on an order. The maths that makes sense as a top-up channel stops making sense when the apps become your main channel.
Ordering built into your own website changes that arithmetic - no per-order commission, the customer relationship stays yours, and regulars can be nudged to order direct where both of you are better off. It's exactly what we build with online ordering for restaurants: collection and delivery flows, South African payment gateways, and a kitchen flow that keeps up on a Friday night.
Photos: appetite is visual
Food photography is where restaurant websites justifiably invest. Real photos of your actual food and your actual space - not stock images, which diners clock instantly. A phone camera in good natural light gets you surprisingly far if a professional shoot isn't in the budget; the priority is honest and appetising over polished.
What to skip: the autoplay background video. It's heavy, it's slow on mobile data, and it's usually the reason the menu takes eight seconds to reach.
What you can safely leave out
A blog you'll never update. A gallery of forty near-identical photos. A "philosophy" page longer than the menu. An events calendar that's permanently empty. Every page you add is a page to maintain - and stale content reads as a closed restaurant. A restaurant website can be five tight pages: home, menu, book or order, about, contact. Done well, that beats a sprawling site done badly on every metric that matters.
The test that matters
Hand your phone to someone who's never seen your website and ask them to find out whether they can get a table tonight and what they'd eat. If that takes more than thirty seconds, the website is costing you covers - quietly, every single day.
We build websites for Western Cape restaurants, cafes, and takeaways - fast, phone-first, with menus search engines can read and ordering that doesn't hand your margin to an app. Have a look at what we do for restaurants, or get in touch and we'll review your current site over a coffee.