Most Restaurant Websites Are Broken

I eat at restaurants whose websites I would never agree to build. Bad photos shot at terrible angles in fluorescent kitchen light. Menus locked inside PDFs that never load on mobile. Hours buried on a contact page. No reservation link. No way to order online. It’s depressing.

These are solvable problems. Most restaurants are leaving real money on the table because their website is treating itself like a brochure instead of a working part of the business.

What a restaurant website actually has to do

A potential customer searching for dinner on a Tuesday at 6:45 PM has exactly three questions:

1. Are they open right now?
2. What do they serve and what does it cost?
3. How do I book a table or order food?

If your website can’t answer those three questions inside ten seconds on a mobile phone, you’ve lost the customer. They’re going to the place down the street that has all three on the homepage.

The mistakes I see most often

Hours are missing or wrong. Hours need to be on the homepage. Visible at the top, mobile and desktop. If you have different lunch and dinner hours, both go up. If you close for a holiday, update it the same day. This is not optional.

The menu is a PDF. PDFs are slow to load on phones. They don’t get indexed by Google. They can’t be styled to match your site. They feel like 2008. The menu should be an HTML page with actual prices and item descriptions. Bonus: Google will pull dishes into search results.

No photos that look like real food. The hero photo on your homepage shouldn’t be a stock image of a candle on a table. It should be your actual food, shot in real light, by someone who knows how a camera works. If you can’t afford a photographer, a phone with decent natural light will outperform a stock photo every time.

Reservation system buried. OpenTable, Resy, Tock, whatever you use, the link goes on the homepage. Above the fold. Big button. Same for online ordering.

No location and parking info. First-time customers need to know how to get there. Show them. Include parking notes if relevant. A small map screenshot that links to Google Maps is better than nothing.

The simple version

If you have a Chattanooga restaurant and your website has hours up top, a real HTML menu with prices, decent photos of actual food, a visible reservation button, and clear directions, you’re already ahead of 80% of your competition.

If you don’t have those things, fix them this week. If you want help, get in touch. I work with a lot of local service businesses, and a restaurant website built right is one of the most satisfying projects I take on.