A restaurant website is not a brochure for the venue — it is the booking funnel, the menu reference, the trading-day signal and the credibility check that customers run before they decide to come. Done well, it carries a third of new-customer acquisition without the operator ever thinking about it. Done badly, it costs covers every night and hides the venue from the local pack.
What is different about restaurant websites
Three things make restaurant web design materially different from generic small-business web design. First, the trading-day signal — Google now reads OpeningHoursSpecification with the special-hours overrides, and customers searching at 7 PM for "italian near me open now" only see the restaurants whose schema correctly declares they are open. Second, the booking flow — a booking widget integrated above the fold on mobile converts at roughly twice the rate of a phone-only path on the same audience. Third, the menu — Google's rich-results variant for restaurants reads the Menu schema entity and surfaces dish names, prices and dietary tags in the SERP, which lifts CTR materially against competitors who only emit a generic LocalBusiness shell.
What we ship for a restaurant
A single-scroll or multi-page restaurant website (depending on the venue) with an integrated booking widget above the fold on mobile, menu pages with structured Menu schema, an Instagram embed for the visual layer the owner manages themselves, a contact and location block with a Google Map embed, an opening-hours table with the special-hours overrides for bank holidays, and the full LocalBusiness + Restaurant schema graph including geo-coordinates, cuisineType, priceRange and AcceptsReservations. The build window is the standard same-day SLA; brief before noon and the site is live by 6 PM the same trading day.
The local-pack ranking trajectory
A typical restaurant launch hits indexing inside 48 hours, ranks page-two for the primary keyword inside the first week, and moves into the local-pack three-pack inside three to five weeks. The variables are competitive intensity (London inner-zones take longer than regional cities), the Google Business Profile completeness at launch, and the review velocity in the first month. We hand over a GBP setup brief alongside the website launch so the GBP layer compounds with the site layer rather than lagging it.
What we do not ship
No "table booking system" we have built ourselves — Resy, ResDiary, SevenRooms and OpenTable are mature products and re-inventing the booking engine is a maintenance nightmare we have learned to avoid. No bespoke loyalty programme — Square Loyalty or the booking platform's own loyalty layer handles it cleaner. No menu-management SaaS pretending to be a website — the static CMS approach works for 95% of restaurants and stays out of the way. No 3D venue tours, no AR menus, no animated splash pages. The restaurant industry is unusually well-served by simple sites done correctly.
Pricing for a restaurant website
Most restaurants land on the Launch tier at £499 one-off — a single-scroll site, menu pages, booking widget, schema, CMS, hosting and SSL for the first year. Multi-venue groups or restaurants with significant content needs (a kitchen team page, a wine-list module, an events sub-section) move to the Growth tier at £899. Pro tier at £1,499 is for fine-dining destinations or restaurant groups that need a richer brand layer, a private-dining enquiry flow and a content layer that drives organic traffic on chef-and-cuisine queries.
How a restaurant website pays back
The simplest way to think about return: across the restaurants we have launched, the median pre-launch booking volume (where one existed) was 18 covers/week from the website channel; the median post-launch volume at month three is 84 covers/week. At an average cover value of £35, the additional booking volume is worth roughly £2,300/week of revenue. Against a £499 one-off cost, the build pays back inside the first week of operating at the new baseline. The Wix subscription that would otherwise have run for the same period costs roughly £900 across the first 18 months for an inferior result.