A website for your café or restaurant. Built to fill tables.

The menu is a web page, not a PDF.

A café or restaurant menu should be a web page, not a PDF. The PDF is the most common mistake on a restaurant website, and it costs more custom than anything else here. It opens in a separate viewer, loads slowly on a phone and arrives at the wrong zoom.

The UK government’s digital service reached the same verdict for its own documents. It found PDFs “generally require a lot of zooming in and out, and scrolling both vertically and horizontally”, and that they are “less likely to be actively maintained” (Government Digital Service, 2018). A menu has both problems. Last spring’s prices in a file nobody reopens are how a customer ends up arguing at the till.

A PDF also hides the menu from search. A search engine reads a page easily; it does not reliably read a scanned card someone exported from a design tool. Every dish you serve is a thing somebody nearby is searching for, and in a picture of a menu none of them count.

Opening hours somebody can trust.

Wrong opening hours are worse than no hours. Somebody who walks over on a Monday to find you shut does not check again, and they tell the person they walked over with. It is the one error a café website makes that actively loses you a customer, rather than failing to win one.

So the hours go where they are read, near the top, with the kitchen time beside them if that closes earlier. Google asks restaurants for the same distinction on their listing: the hours to give are the “hours when diners can sit down and dine” (Google Business Profile guidelines).

The two dates that catch everyone out are bank holidays and the week between Christmas and New Year, and they are worth a line of their own. Google suggests confirming your hours for official holidays “even if they’re the same as your regular hours”, because it “makes it clear to customers that your special hours are accurate” (Google Business Profile Help).

The website and the Google listing have to agree. Most people never reach the website at all - they see the listing, and it is the listing that says open or closed. We connect them so you change it once. The guide to your Google Business Profile covers the listing side.

Photographs of the actual room.

A café website needs photographs of its own room, not a stock photograph of a cortado. Somebody choosing between you and the place across the road is trying to picture sitting there. Is it loud? Is there a table for four? Can they bring the dog or the pushchair?

A phone is fine. Shoot in daylight, shoot the room empty before service and full during it, and include the front of the building from the pavement. That last one is what people match against when they are looking for your door.

If you take bookings, the button sits beside those photographs and on every other page. The moment somebody can picture the table is the moment they want to book it. There is more on that in making it easier to book.

Nobody has ever walked past a café because the website was not beautiful enough.

What a café’s site comes with.

Four to five pages, built for the way your customers actually arrive - written for this trade, not adapted from a template someone else used. The pages we would build are Home, Menu, Find us and About.

• Menu and today’s hours, up top
• Book a table in two taps
• Directions that open in Maps
• Photos of the room and the food
• Your Google listing kept in sync

All of it for £570, paid once. Analytics, Search Console and your Google listing connected, hosting free, and you own the site. There is no monthly fee and nothing here is an upgrade.

What to have ready.

None of this has to be polished. It has to be current, and it is what lets a build start rather than stall for two weeks on emails asking whether you still do the Tuesday roast.

• Your menu as text, with prices, however it is written down now.
• Your hours, including the kitchen if it closes earlier.
• Where booking should go - your own form, or the system you already pay for.
• Ten photographs of the room and the food, originals from the phone.
• The dietary lines you want stated, and the ones you would rather discuss in person.

0 of 5 checked

Anything left unticked is a question we would have asked anyway. Sending it up front is what turns a three-week build into a one-week one.

Questions cafés and restaurants ask.

When you pay, why hosting is free, what happens if you want changes later - those are answered on the home page.