Web Hosting for Restaurants

The menu is the website

Look at where people go on a restaurant site and the pattern is the same everywhere. They open the menu, they check the hours, and a smaller number look for the address or book a table. Everything else on the site is furniture.

That matters because it tells you where to put your attention. Not the photography, not the story of the building, not a homepage carousel. The menu. And the single most common mistake in this industry is publishing that menu as a PDF.

Why a PDF menu costs you money

• It opens badly on a phone. The reader zooms, drags sideways, gives up. Most of your traffic is a phone.
• Its contents are close to invisible to a search engine. Somebody searching for a dish you are known for will not find you through a PDF.
• It cannot be read aloud reliably, which shuts out customers using a screen reader.
• It goes stale silently. The website shows last spring's prices because updating it means finding whoever has the original file.

A menu written as ordinary web text fixes all four at once. It costs nothing extra to host, it is faster than the PDF was, and you can change a price in a minute without opening design software.

A photograph of a chalkboard menu is the same mistake wearing a different hat. If the words are inside an image, they may as well not be on the site.

Ordering platforms, and who ends up owning your customer

If you take orders through a third-party platform, the transaction happens on their website, under their branding, on their terms. That can still be the right decision. It is not free, though, and the cost is not only the commission.

The part that gets overlooked is the data. The customer's name, their address, what they order and how often is held by the platform. If you leave, or they change terms, that list does not come with you.

• Link to the platform from your own site rather than making the platform your only presence.
• Keep the menu on your own site regardless. Platform menus rarely rank, and they are not yours.
• If you also take direct orders, make that the more obvious option on your own page.
• Know what happens to your customer list if you stop using them. Ask before you sign, not after.

None of this argues against using a platform. It argues for the site you own being the thing you build on, with the platform as one route into it.

Who should not spend more than the minimum

This is most single-location restaurants, and it is worth being direct about it.

If you have one dining room, a reservation book that fills without help, and no online ordering of your own, your website has one job and a small plan does it. Money spent on a bigger tier buys you nothing you can taste.

• You do not need a managed plan for a site that is a menu and four other pages.
• You do not need extra storage. A restaurant site is measured in megabytes.
• You do not need a security product to protect a site with no logins and no payments on it.
• You may well need somebody to move the menu out of that PDF, which is a one-off job.

Where spending more does make sense: you run several locations on one site, you take orders and payments directly rather than through a platform, or your site carries the booking system rather than linking to one. Those are real reasons. Volume of diners is not.