Restaurant Web Design: Building Websites That Fill Tables

When someone’s deciding where to eat tonight, your restaurant’s website might get just fifteen seconds of their attention. In that short time, it needs to answer the basics: what’s on the menu, where you’re located, and whether they can get a table. At the same time, it should make your restaurant feel inviting enough to stand out from the ten other options in their search results.

At White Label Agency, we’ve built websites for various industries through our agency partners, and restaurant projects have shown us how different food service clients are from other businesses. We’ve learned some practical approaches to restaurant website development that seem to work well, and we’d like to walk through them.

Restaurant Websites Need to Answer Questions Fast

Most business websites can afford to take their time explaining things. A consulting firm might guide visitors through multiple pages about their methodology. A software company can nurture leads over weeks. Restaurant websites rarely get that luxury.

People who land on restaurant sites usually come looking for quick answers. They want to see the menu, find the address, maybe make a reservation. If any of these takes more than a few clicks, they’ll just try the next place. We’ve found this affects nearly every decision in restaurant web design, from navigation structure to how prominently you display contact information.

The other unique aspect is how visual these sites need to be. A law firm can explain its expertise through text. A restaurant needs to show the food, and those images need to look genuinely appetizing. 

Most Restaurant Traffic Comes from Mobile Devices

Something like 60% of restaurant website traffic comes from phones, and that percentage jumps during lunch and dinner hours. This makes sense when you consider the context: someone’s out, getting hungry, searching for nearby options on their phone.

For restaurant web design, this means treating mobile as the primary experience, not an afterthought. The most critical information goes right at the top: restaurant name, a good photo, and clear buttons for reservations or ordering. Phone numbers should tap to call. Addresses should open in maps. Hours need to be visible without scrolling, ideally with a note about whether they’re currently open.

Navigation on mobile gets tricky because restaurant sites often have a lot of sections: menu, about, reservations, ordering, gallery, contact. Trying to fit all of that into a mobile header creates a bit of a mess. We usually suggest simplifying to three or four main items, with less critical pages accessible through a secondary menu.

High-Quality Food Photos Can Slow Down Mobile Sites

Restaurant websites need great photos, but high-resolution images can affect mobile performance. A gorgeous 3MB photo of a signature dish won’t matter if people leave before it loads.

This requires some technical work: compressing images without visible quality loss, using modern formats like WebP, and implementing lazy loading so images only download as people scroll to them. WordPress plugins can automate most of this. The goal is keeping that initial page load under three seconds even on a mobile connection.

Online Ordering and Reservations Drive Most Conversions

Let’s talk about what restaurant websites genuinely need versus what sounds good in theory but rarely gets used.

Online ordering has become expected rather than optional for restaurants doing takeout or delivery. The system needs to integrate with the restaurant’s existing setup: their point-of-sale system, their kitchen workflow. We typically work with plugins like GloriaFood or connect to established platforms like ChowNow. The choice depends mostly on order volume and how hands-on the restaurant wants to be with managing online orders.

Reservation systems are where things get interesting. Some restaurants link to OpenTable or similar platforms, which works but sends people away from the site. Others use contact forms and handle bookings manually, creating extra work. The middle option (plugins like Restaurant Reservations that keep the booking process on-site while still connecting to external platforms if needed) tends to work well for most clients.

Ellie, one of our Account Managers, sees this pattern repeatedly: “Restaurants that make customers leave their website to book a table see lower conversion rates. People get distracted or find it annoying. Even if you’re using a third-party booking system, keeping that process on your own site makes a real difference.”

Menu display seems simple but causes surprising amounts of debate. Some restaurants want PDF menus they can update quickly. Others prefer the menu built into the page design. PDFs are easy to change but don’t work great on mobile and don’t help with SEO. Built-in HTML menus look better and perform better but can be harder for restaurant staff to update without help.

We often suggest menu plugins that split the difference: easy for the restaurant to update, good mobile display, and search engines can read them. Five Star Restaurant Menu or Food and Drink Menu are solid options that give restaurant owners a simple interface for menu changes without needing to understand code.

Why WordPress Works for Restaurant Projects

We recommend WordPress for restaurant website development mainly because of the ecosystem of plugins. A casual Italian place might need online ordering but not reservations. A fine dining restaurant wants reservations but no online ordering. A food truck needs a simple menu and location updates but minimal other functionality. WordPress accommodates all of these without rebuilding everything from scratch each time.

Here’s how some common restaurant needs map to WordPress solutions:

What the Restaurant Needs	How We Usually Handle It
Online ordering	GloriaFood or RestroPress for simpler setups, WooCommerce for more complex needs
Table reservations	Restaurant Reservations plugin, or integrations with Resy or OpenTable
Menu updates	Five Star Restaurant Menu or Food and Drink Menu plugins
Multiple locations	Custom post types for locations, WP Google Maps for displaying them
Customer reviews	Site Reviews plugin to pull in Google and Yelp reviews

The other advantage is that restaurant staff can realistically handle routine updates themselves. Menu prices change, specials get added, holiday hours need updating. These shouldn’t require calling the agency every time. A well-set-up WordPress site with proper training lets restaurant owners manage these updates while agencies handle bigger changes and strategy work.

The Importance of Professional Food Photography for Restaurant Websites

We’ve all seen restaurant websites with dim, poorly lit food photos or obvious stock images that have nothing to do with the actual place. Those sites make people suspicious about what they’ll actually get. Professional food photography is worth the investment. One good photo shoot producing forty or fifty quality images gives the website authentic content that can be used for months. The alternative (amateur phone photos in bad lighting) makes even excellent food look unappetizing.

Elie, our Account Manager, has worked extensively with hospitality clients, and emphasizes this point: “The biggest disconnect we see is restaurants investing in a nice website design but using low-quality photos. It’s like building a beautiful frame and putting a bad painting in it. The photos are what people actually look at and what makes them want to visit.”

Beyond food shots, showing the space helps people understand the atmosphere. Interior photos tell potential customers whether this is a romantic date spot, a family-friendly casual place, or a lively bar scene. Action shots of staff or the kitchen (when appropriate) add authenticity.

Design Choices Should Match the Restaurant’s Atmosphere

Design choices matter too. Colors affect appetite: warm reds and oranges stimulate hunger, earth tones suggest natural ingredients, blues feel fresh and work for seafood. Typography needs to balance personality with readability, especially on mobile. A fancy script font might look elegant in headers but becomes frustrating if used for menu descriptions.

Local SEO Helps Restaurants Show Up in Neighborhood Searches

Most restaurants depend on nearby customers. A downtown lunch spot needs to appear when office workers search for “sandwich near me.” A neighborhood pizzeria wants to rank for “[neighborhood] pizza delivery.” This makes local SEO very important. The basics here include:

• Optimizing the Google Business Profile;
• Keeping name, address, and phone number consistent everywhere online;
• And creating location-specific content.

For single-location restaurants, the homepage should clearly state the address and neighborhood. Many sites bury this in the footer, making it harder for search engines and visitors to understand where the restaurant is. Featuring location information prominently helps with local search.

Multiple locations need individual pages with unique content for each spot, not just duplicating the same page and changing the address. Each location page should include neighborhood details, nearby landmarks, parking information, and delivery areas.

Restaurant Websites Need Regular Updates

Restaurant websites need more frequent updates than most business sites. Menus change seasonally, specials rotate, hours shift for holidays. This creates ongoing maintenance needs that should be planned from the start.

Two approaches work: train restaurant staff to handle routine updates themselves, or offer a maintenance package where the agency handles updates regularly. For restaurants managing their own updates, WordPress provides a simple enough interface for common tasks like adding menu items or updating hours. The site needs to be built with this in mind, using plugins that non-technical people can work with.

Maintenance packages create recurring revenue while keeping the restaurant website accurate. These might include monthly menu updates, seasonal photo changes, regular backups, and security updates. A restaurant paying for ongoing maintenance is more likely to have a current, accurate website than one where every small change requires a separate project quote.

WLA Can Help You with Your Restaurant Website Development Projects

When agencies partner with us, they can take on restaurant website projects confidently without having WordPress specialists in-house. We handle technical implementation: setting up WordPress, integrating ordering or reservation systems, optimizing performance, while the agency maintains the client relationship and focuses on strategy and local marketing.

This works well for restaurant projects because the agency brings understanding of the local market and client’s goals, while we handle the technical execution. The agency directs food photography, develops content strategy, and plans local SEO, and we build the WordPress site that brings it together. The agency presents everything as their own work; we simply execute behind the scenes.

Get in touch with our sales team today and learn more about how we can help your agency grow.