Restaurant and cafe websites

Three questions, and nothing else matters as much

People arrive at a restaurant site hungry and usually on a phone, often standing on a sidewalk. Hours, menu, location. If those three are not immediately visible, the visit fails regardless of how good the photography is.

Your menu must not be a PDF

This is the most common and most expensive mistake in the category. A PDF menu pinch-zooms badly on a phone, cannot be read aloud, is invisible to search engines, and cannot be quoted by an AI assistant when somebody asks whether you have gluten-free options.

A menu written as actual text on an actual page is readable, searchable, quotable, and editable by you in thirty seconds when a price changes. It is also the part of a restaurant site that changes most often, which is exactly why it should not live in a file you have to re-export.

Hours that are wrong are worse than no hours

A customer who drives to a closed restaurant does not come back. Holiday hours, seasonal changes and a temporary closure all need to be changeable by you, from a phone, in under a minute. We build this as a field you edit, not a paragraph somebody has to re-code.

Bookings without the commission

The large reservation platforms charge per cover, per month, or both, and they own the relationship with your customer. For most independent restaurants a booking form or a direct booking page on your own domain captures the same reservations without the cut, and the customer's email belongs to you.

The trade-off is honest: the platforms bring discovery traffic you do not otherwise get. If most of your covers come from people who already know you, direct booking wins easily.

Ordering and delivery

The same logic applies. Third-party delivery is a marketing channel with a 20-30% price attached. A direct ordering page will not replace it, but it will move your regulars — your most profitable customers — off it. Link both. Let the customer choose.

Your website is competing with your own listing

For most restaurants, more people see the Google listing than the website. That is not a reason to skip the site — it is a reason to be clear about what each one does. The listing wins the search. The website closes the decision, and it is the only one of the two you control outright.

The practical consequence is that hours, address and phone must agree exactly across both. When they disagree, search engines have to guess which is right, and the guess is often the stale one. Anything printed on a menu board, a receipt or a delivery profile is part of the same problem, and the cost of getting it wrong is someone arriving at a locked door.

Photographs are the menu

People order with their eyes, and a restaurant site with stock photography of food you do not serve is worse than one with no photographs at all, because the mismatch is noticed on arrival. Photograph your actual plates, in your actual room, ideally near a window in daylight.

A dozen good photographs beats fifty mediocre ones. Include the room as well as the food — a lot of the decision is whether this is a place for a business lunch, a first date or a family with a stroller, and that question is answered by a picture of the space far faster than by any paragraph you could write about atmosphere.

Dietary information is a search in its own right

"Gluten free", "vegan", "halal" and "nut allergy" are among the most common things typed alongside a town name and a meal. If your menu handles any of them well, say so in text on the page rather than leaving it to be discovered in person.

Be precise rather than generous. "Gluten free options" and "dedicated gluten free fryer" are very different promises, and the second one is the one people with coeliac disease are actually searching for. Overstating it produces a guest who cannot eat what arrives, which is a worse outcome than never having appeared in the search.

Seasonal changes and the pages that rot

Restaurant websites decay faster than any other kind. Menus change, prices change, the patio opens and closes, and holiday hours arrive four times a year. Whatever you build has to be editable by whoever is actually there on a Tuesday, not by a developer you have to email.

That is a design decision, not a training problem. Anything that changes seasonally — hours, menu, closures, events — belongs in a small number of obvious places that can be edited in a couple of minutes. Anything requiring a layout change to update will simply stop being updated, and a menu that is six months out of date is actively costing you money.

Events, catering and private bookings

The highest-value enquiry a restaurant gets is rarely a table for two. It is a Christmas party for thirty, a wedding rehearsal dinner or a standing weekly catering order. Those enquiries are worth a dedicated page each, because the person searching for them is not searching for a restaurant — they are searching for a venue or a caterer.

Give them what they need to decide without a phone call: capacity, whether the room can be taken privately, a sample group menu, minimum spend if you have one, and how much notice you need. A page that answers those five things converts a browser into a deposit far more reliably than an invitation to enquire.

What it costs

Builds start at $99 one time (20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images, 2 hours of work) plus $10 CAD per month hosting. Past the allotment: $0.20 per 1,000 characters, $2 per extra image, $40 per hour. If you would rather build it yourself, maple.website is $50 one time.

Menus are the variable. A long menu with several sections can exceed the 20,000-character allotment; at $0.20 per 1,000 characters that is a small overage, and we quote it before starting rather than after.

Tell us what the business does and what it has to accomplish. We will tell you honestly if a cheaper option fits you better.