Web Design
for Restaurants & Catering.

Restaurant web design is one of the highest-leverage categories we work in because the decisions a site needs to support are short-cycle and decision-driven. A diner choosing where to eat tonight makes that decision in 4 to 8 minutes across 3 to 5 restaurant websites. Page speed matters because the diner bounces in 4 seconds. Menu visibility matters because they need to scan dishes before deciding. Photo authenticity matters because the food has to look like what they will actually eat. Reservation friction matters because they will book the easiest restaurant, not necessarily the best one.

The single biggest technical move on a restaurant site is killing the PDF menu. PDF menus are invisible to Google search, hostile on mobile (small text, requires zoom, downloads triggered), and produce zero conversion analytics. The fix is HTML rendering of the menu with proper Menu schema markup so Google can read dishes, prices, dietary information, and category. Once the menu is in HTML and schema'd, the restaurant starts ranking for dish-name queries ('pad thai near me,' 'wood-fired pizza [neighborhood]') that PDF menus could never address. Same indexability discipline we built for cannabis dispensaries where menu visibility drives the channel.

First-party online ordering is the second financial decision restaurants get wrong. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub take 25 to 35 percent commission on every order they bring in, which is unavoidable for the new-customer acquisition they provide. But repeat customers should be ordering through first-party channels — Toast, Square for Restaurants, ChowNow, Olo — where the commission is 0 to 3 percent and you keep the customer relationship. The economics on a busy restaurant doing $30,000/month in third-party delivery means $9,000+/month going to platforms. Moving 30 to 40 percent of that to first-party recovers $3,000+/month in margin.

Editorial photography is the third lever and the place where most independent restaurants under-invest. Stock food photos and 2015 iPhone shots of the dining room destroy credibility on a category where the visitor is deciding partly on aesthetic. Real editorial photography — the actual food shot properly, the actual room at dinner service, the actual team at work — costs $2,000 to $5,000 for a half-day shoot and pays back across years of marketing. We typically include photography production in restaurant rebuilds because it is the single visual decision that moves conversion most consistently. Same investment logic as wedding photographer sites where aesthetic-driven conversion is the entire game.