What Should a Café or Restaurant Website Actually Do?
It should answer three questions in ten seconds
Someone searching for lunch in Surry Hills or dinner in Fremantle is not browsing — they are hungry, on a phone, and have about ten seconds of patience. Your website has to answer three questions straight away: are you open, what do you serve, and how do I book?
If those answers are buried three clicks deep, hidden inside a PDF, or only on your Instagram, you have already lost people. We test sites the way a customer would: phone in one hand, car keys in the other. The sites that win make the next step obvious. Not clever. Obvious.
Your menu has to work on a phone, in the car park
Here is the scene we see again and again. A couple sits in the car outside your place, checking the menu before they walk in. If the menu is a scanned PDF that needs pinching and zooming, or a photo of a chalkboard taken in bad light, they give up and pick somewhere else.
Put the menu on the page itself, in plain text that a phone can read. List the dishes, the prices, and the things people actually ask about: vegetarian and gluten-free options, and whether you do takeaway. Keep it current — nothing sours a visit faster than ordering a dish that left the menu months ago.
Bookings should take less than a minute
A booking form that asks for a life story will not get filled in. Name, phone number, date, time, party size — that is enough for most tables. If you take bookings through a platform, link straight to it. Do not make people hunt for it, and do not send them to a contact form and hope someone replies in time.
And say what happens for bigger groups. A table of twelve is a different conversation from a table for two, and one short line — "groups of eight or more, please call us" — saves your staff a dozen back-and-forth emails. If you do not take bookings at all, say so plainly, and say whether walk-ins should expect a wait on a Saturday night.
Opening hours, location and parking — no guessing
Opening hours belong at the top of the page, not on a separate page nobody finds. If your kitchen closes earlier than the bar, say that too. Public holiday hours deserve a line of their own, because that is exactly when people check and get caught out.
Directions should be practical, not just a map pin. Which street is the entrance on? Is there street parking or a car park nearby? Are you near the station? A customer who circles the block twice looking for the door arrives annoyed, and that is a hard mood to turn around with good coffee.
One more detail that matters: your phone number should be tappable on mobile. A number shown as an image, or buried in a footer, quietly costs bookings every week.
Google will send people to you — if it can read your site
Most new customers do not start on your website. They start on Google, searching for something like "café open now near me" or "best dumplings Brisbane". Your site needs to help Google understand what you are: a café or restaurant, in a specific suburb, serving a specific kind of food.
That means the suburb name, the cuisine, and the key details should appear in real text on the page — not trapped inside images. A short, accurate description does more work than a page of adjectives. "Neighbourhood Italian in Paddington, woodfired pizzas, walk-ins welcome" tells both Google and a hungry human exactly what they need to know.
Keep your Google Business Profile hours and details matching the website. When the two disagree, customers trust neither, and they go elsewhere.
Photos and updates should match real life
A handful of honest photos — the room, a couple of signature dishes, the coffee — will do more than forty polished shots that could belong to anyone.
Keep photos current: if you renovated or changed the menu, update them too. A customer who walks in expecting the bright, airy room from the website and finds something different feels misled, even if the food is excellent.
A website is not a set-and-forget job. Menus change, hours change, chefs change. A site that still shows last summer's menu tells visitors the business is not paying attention — and that impression sticks. You do not need to post every day. Update the menu when it changes, update the hours before public holidays, and check the site on your own phone once a month.
If keeping on top of it feels like one more job on top of running a kitchen, that is fair — it is also why many owners hand the updates to someone else. For example, our $350 AUD a month social media package (2 reels, 8 posts and 6 stories, with no lock-in) can keep your online presence ticking over while you focus on the floor.
The test is simple. Open your own website on your phone and try to book a table for tonight. If you cannot do it in under a minute, your customers cannot either. Fix that first, and everything else — the design, the photos, the copy — starts to matter a lot more.
Contact our team
Email: info@codepacesolutions.com
