Restaurant Website Design
Restaurant websites built to fill tables and take orders. We design and build custom websites for restaurants, cafés and bars across the UK, with menus you can change in minutes, table booking and online ordering built in, and the hours, directions, allergen details and hygiene rating a hungry visitor checks before they choose you.
A Hungry Visitor Wants Three Things: the Menu, the Hours and a Table
It is seven o'clock on a Friday and a couple are standing on a pavement with one phone between them, searching for somewhere to eat. Google shows them a map, star ratings and photographs, and they tap through to your website to see the menu, the prices, whether you are open and whether they can book right now. If the menu is a PDF that will not open, the hours are wrong or booking means ringing a restaurant in the middle of service, they walk into the place next door.
That is why a restaurant website is a different design problem from a brochure. The menu is a living document that changes with the seasons, the specials and the suppliers' prices, so it has to be a real page you can edit, not a file you re-upload. Allergen information has to be available for every dish. Booking and ordering have to work on a phone at the busiest moment of the week. And the photography has to do what a shop window does for a shop.
DigitalPod is a UK web design studio that designs and builds custom websites for independent and growing businesses, working with you entirely online from the first call to launch. Every site is designed from scratch around your food, your room and your brand, and hand-coded so that menus and booking pages load quickly on mobile data outside the restaurant. Restaurant websites start from £2,400, with the price fixed before any work begins.
What We Build Into a Restaurant Website
Menus as Real Pages
Lunch, dinner, drinks, Sunday, children's and set menus each built as a page with prices, dietary tags and allergen flags, updated in minutes through your dashboard and readable by Google and by screen readers, with no PDFs anywhere.
Table Booking on Every Page
Your reservation system embedded so a visitor can book from any page without leaving the site, with deposits for large parties and Christmas bookings if you take them, and a book button fixed to the screen on mobile.
Orders From Your Own Site
Click-and-collect and delivery ordering connected to your kitchen through an ordering system of your choosing, so regulars can order from you directly instead of only through the delivery apps, and you keep the customer relationship.
Hours That Are Always Right
Opening hours with bank holiday and Christmas overrides, last orders, kitchen closing times and directions, marked up so Google shows them correctly and kept in step with your Google Business Profile.
Photography That Sells the Table
A design built around real photographs of your dishes, your room and your people rather than stock images, with galleries that load fast and a layout that gives the food the space it deserves.
Private Dining, Events and Vouchers
Pages for private hire and parties with capacities, sample menus and an enquiry form, Christmas menus that appear when they should, and gift vouchers sold online for the weeks when they matter most.
The Pages a Restaurant Website Needs
- Home. What kind of place you are and where, today's hours, a book button and a menu link in the first screen, three or four photographs that set the tone and a line of recent reviews.
- Menus. A page per menu with prices, dietary markers and allergen flags, written so a visitor can decide on their phone in a queue, and an allergen page that explains how to ask about any dish.
- Book a table. The embedded reservation widget, your policy on large parties, deposits and no-shows, what to do about walk-ins, and a phone number for the people who still prefer to call.
- Order online. Collection and delivery ordering with your zones and times, the menu available to order, and a clear note on when the kitchen stops taking orders, so expectations are set before anyone pays.
- Private dining and events. Each space with its capacity, photographs, sample menus and minimum spends if you have them, plus an enquiry form that asks the questions you would ask on the phone.
- Our story. The chef, the owners, the suppliers and the idea behind the place, because people choose independents for the story as much as the food, and journalists look here first.
- Find us and contact. Address, map, parking, public transport, step-free access, hours, phone and the company details every business must display, with a privacy notice covering the booking and enquiry forms.
Not sure how many pages you need? Our guide to what pages a business website should have walks through each one, and every project starts with a page plan agreed before any design work begins.
Trust, Accreditations and Compliance for Restaurants
Diners trust a restaurant with their health as well as their evening, and some of what your website shows is decided by food law rather than by taste. The rules differ across the UK, so we check which apply to you and build them into the pages:
- Food hygiene rating. In Wales and Northern Ireland food businesses must display their rating sticker by law, while in England display is voluntary but encouraged by the Food Standards Agency. Showing a good rating, linked to the official listing, answers the question before it is asked.
- Allergen information. You must be able to tell customers which of the 14 regulated allergens each dish contains, in writing or verbally. We build allergen flags into the menu pages so the website, the printed menu and the kitchen work from one set of data.
- Natasha's Law. If you sell food packed on the premises before it is ordered, such as sandwiches or cakes in a café fridge, each item needs a label with its name and full ingredients, allergens emphasised. The same ingredient lists can be shown online for pre-orders.
- Calorie labelling. Large food businesses in England must show calories on their menus, including online menus, under the 2021 regulations. Smaller independents are exempt, but we build the menu so a calorie field can be switched on if you grow into the rules.
- Reviews and prices. Google and Tripadvisor reviews shown as they are, marked up so search engines understand the rating, and prices shown including VAT with any service charge policy stated plainly, because consumer law now treats hidden mandatory charges as a serious matter.
How People Find Restaurants Online
Restaurant searches are local, mobile and usually for tonight. "Restaurants near me", "[cuisine] restaurant [town]" and "Sunday roast [town]" bring up Google's map results first, with ratings, photographs, price level, a menu link and often a reserve button, and most people decide from there. Your Google Business Profile is therefore as important as the website: hours, menu link, booking link, photographs and attributes such as dog friendly or outdoor seating have to be complete and must match what the website says.
Occasions behave differently. A birthday dinner, an anniversary or an office Christmas party is researched over days, often on a laptop, with Tripadvisor and Google reviews read in full and menus compared for price. Those visitors want depth: sample menus, photographs of the room, capacities, the deposit policy and some sense of the service, and the restaurant whose website answers all of that gets the booking.
Delivery apps, reservation platforms and Tripadvisor bring customers too, but on their terms. The apps take a commission on every order, the platforms list you beside your competitors, and all of them own the customer's details rather than you. A website that takes bookings and orders directly keeps the margin and the relationship, and it makes the listings and social posts work harder, because people check the website before they commit.
Every website we build includes the search engine foundations: page titles written around the searches your customers make, fast loading, mobile-first layouts, a sitemap and a structure that matches your Google Business Profile. Our guide to getting found on Google explains what to do after launch.
Already Have a Website? Signs It Needs Replacing
Many restaurant websites were made by a friend years ago, came free with the booking or till system, or are really just a Facebook page. If any of these sound familiar, the site is sending diners elsewhere:
- The menu is a PDF or a photograph of the printed menu, unreadable on a phone and six months out of date.
- The hours on the website, on Google and on the door disagree, and last year's Christmas menu is still up in March.
- Booking means phoning, and the phone rings unanswered through every service while the people who called book elsewhere.
- Every takeaway order comes through a delivery app because the website cannot take one itself.
- Allergen information is nowhere online and the hygiene rating is missing, so cautious diners cannot check before they arrive.
- The photographs are stock images or dark phone shots, and the site is slow on mobile data.
Our website redesign service replaces dated or underperforming sites while protecting the search rankings you have built up, and the website redesign guide explains how to decide between a refresh and a rebuild. Launching a new restaurant instead? Start with our startup restaurants website design page.
What Clients Say
"I would recommend Digital pod as I am very pleased with the website they designed for me."
"Matthew is very professional, helpful and talented in creating an excellent website. Thank you."
"We are so pleased we used Digital pod to design our website and our branding, logo, stationery etc. From the very beginning Matthew was amazing. He listened to our ideas and perfectly translated them into designing the look and feel of our site, and our branding. He worked with us patiently despite our indecisiveness and happily changed and adapted elements at our request as we went along. He took the time to answer all our questions promptly, and made the whole project run smoothly. We are beyond delighted with the outcome and can't thank him enough."
Restaurants Website Design Questions
Can you connect our table booking system?
Yes. We embed whichever reservation system you use so that it works from every page and looks like part of the site, and we can recommend one if you are choosing. Deposits for large parties, pre-orders for set menus and waiting lists are handled by the booking system itself. Simple embedding is within the starting price, and deeper online booking work is quoted on scope.
Can customers order takeaway from our website instead of through the delivery apps?
Yes. We integrate an online ordering system for collection and delivery that sends orders to your kitchen and takes payment, so regulars can order from you directly and their details stay with you. Ordering, delivery zones and payments sit in the website with admin dashboard package, from £3,900. You can keep the apps running alongside for the customers who find you there.
How do we update menus and prices ourselves?
Through the admin dashboard, where each menu is a list of dishes with descriptions, prices, dietary tags and allergen flags. Change a price or add a special and it is live in minutes, from a phone during service if need be. If you would rather not touch it, our hosting plan includes quick changes to hours and menus when you send them over.
Do we have to publish allergen information online?
The law requires allergen information for every item to be available to customers, and it may be given in writing or verbally, with a clear sign saying how to ask. Online menus with allergen flags are a strong way to meet that, and many diners will not book without them. We build the flags into the menu system, and we recommend checking the current Food Standards Agency guidance, especially if you also sell food packed on the premises.
We run a café and a bar as well as the restaurant. One website or three?
Usually one. Separate sections for each venue, each with its own menus, hours and booking, under a shared brand, is cheaper to build and simpler to maintain, and it lets regulars of one venue discover the others. Separate websites make sense only when the venues are genuinely different brands with different customers. Either way, a dashboard lets one manager look after all the menus.
More answers in our FAQ. See what a restaurant website costs on our restaurants website design prices page, or, if you are just starting out, read about startup websites for restaurants.
Guides to Planning and Costing Your Website
Other Sectors We Work With
We design websites for established businesses and new ventures across the UK. See how we approach other sectors.
Get a Fixed Quote for Your Restaurant Website
Tell us about your restaurant, your customers and what the website needs to do, or book a call with our senior software engineer to talk it through. Everything runs online, wherever in the UK you are based, and we reply personally with a clear, fixed price.