Short answer
Restaurant website design is usually discussed as a visual exercise, but its real job is commercial: take orders and bookings directly so they do not arrive through a channel charging commission. Menu structure, mobile speed and accurate hours matter far more than photography.
Key takeaways
- 01Restaurant profit margins typically run between 2% and 6%, so commission lands hard.
- 02Before fee caps, delivery services could charge 30% or more per order.
- 03Google needs your menu and hours as structured data, not as a picture.
- 04A menu published as an image is invisible to search and to screen readers.
Start with the arithmetic, not the mood board
The New York City Council noted, when it capped third-party delivery fees, that restaurant profit margins typically run between 2% and 6%, and that before regulation delivery services could charge 30% or more per order. On a 4% margin, a commissioned order can be worth less than no order at all.
New York's permanent caps give a useful picture of what those fees are actually made of, even if your city has no cap at all:
| Fee | Capped at |
|---|---|
| Delivery | 15% |
| All other services | 5% |
| Transaction / payment processing | 3% |
That is the number your website is competing against. A direct order is not free — you still pay card processing — but the gap is the entire business case for the build.
Publish a menu machines can read
The single most common mistake in restaurant website design is publishing the menu as a photograph or a PDF. It looks right, it matches the printed version, and it is invisible to everything that matters — search engines, screen readers, and anyone trying to find out whether you do a gluten-free option at 9pm.
Google's structured data for a restaurant requires only `name` and `address`, but recommends the fields that actually drive results: `menu`, `openingHoursSpecification`, `telephone`, `servesCuisine` and `priceRange`. The hours markup handles late-night and seasonal closures properly, which a line of text in your footer does not.
The menu is also where accessibility breaks
WebAIM's 2026 study of one million home pages found detectable WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, averaging 56.1 errors per page. The two most common failures are exactly the ones restaurant sites collect: low-contrast text at 83.9% and missing image alt text at 53.1%.
Pale grey type over a food photograph is the house style of the entire category, and it is a contrast failure. So is a menu delivered as a JPEG with no text alternative. Neither requires a redesign to fix — they require someone to check.
Assume a phone, one bar of signal
Your visitor is standing outside, deciding where to eat, on a bad connection. Google's Core Web Vitals give thresholds worth writing into a brief: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP of 200ms or less, CLS of 0.1 or less, each measured at the 75th percentile of real visits.
The pre-launch list that actually matters
- Menu is real text, current, and reachable in one tap from the homepage
- Ordering and booking work on a phone without pinch-zooming
- Hours are correct on the page, in structured data, and on your Google listing
- Address, phone and directions are tappable, not typed out as an image
- Someone owns the accounts — the domain and listings are in your name, not the agency's
Delivery apps are a reasonable acquisition channel. They are an expensive default. A site built for web design that converts turns a repeat customer into a direct one — see our portfolio or talk to us at contact.
Frequently asked questions
Judge it against commission rather than against other websites. If direct ordering moves even a modest share of your volume off a channel charging 15–30%, the build pays for itself in months. Scope it to ordering, menu and hours before anything else.
Usually yes, but treat them as discovery rather than as your ordering system. The goal is that a customer who found you on an app orders from you directly next time — which only works if your own site is genuinely faster to use.
Yes. It cannot be read reliably by search engines or screen readers, it is awkward on a phone, and it goes stale because updating it means a design tool. Publish the menu as ordinary web pages and keep the PDF for printing.
Google requires only name and address for a LocalBusiness, but recommends menu, openingHoursSpecification, telephone, servesCuisine and priceRange. The hours specification is worth doing carefully — it handles late-night and seasonal closures that plain text cannot express.
They matter, but less than the basics and only if they do not break the rest. Large unoptimised images are the usual cause of a failing LCP, and text placed over them is the usual cause of a contrast failure. Compress them and keep type off them.
Sources
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