Websites for Restaurants & Cafes

Your menu is a PDF. Your opening hours are wrong on Google. Your booking system is a phone that nobody answers during service. And your website still shows last year’s Christmas menu in March. Sound familiar? You’re not alone — most restaurant websites are afterthoughts, built once and abandoned. But your website is where people decide whether to eat with you tonight, and a frustrating experience there means an empty table.

The menu is everything

Let’s start with the single biggest mistake on restaurant websites: the PDF menu. A customer is standing on Milsom Street, hungry, trying to decide where to eat. They pull up your site on their phone and tap “Menu.” A PDF downloads. They have to pinch and zoom to read tiny text formatted for A4 print. They give up and walk into the place next door.

Your menu should be live text on the page — readable, scrollable, beautifully formatted, and easy to update. When you change a dish, swap a supplier, or adjust prices, you should be able to do it yourself in minutes, not wait for a designer to reformat a PDF. We build menus that look elegant on every screen size, with clear sections, dietary indicators, and allergen information accessible without cluttering the layout.

Speaking of allergens — Natasha’s Law and broader food information regulations mean you need to communicate allergen data clearly. We can build this into your menu in a way that’s genuinely helpful to diners with dietary requirements, rather than a wall of tiny icons nobody understands.

Booking that actually works

Online booking isn’t a luxury anymore — it’s expected. Whether you use ResDiary, OpenTable, Design My Night, or prefer a simpler enquiry form, we integrate your booking system seamlessly into your website. Not a clunky widget bolted onto the side, but a booking flow that feels like part of your site and reflects your brand.

The goal is to reduce friction. A diner should be able to go from “that looks good” to “table booked for Saturday” in under thirty seconds. Every extra click, every confusing step, is a potential lost cover. We design the journey to be as smooth as your front-of-house service.

Photography that makes people hungry

Food photography on a restaurant website walks a fine line. Too little, and the site feels cold and corporate. Too much, and it looks like a takeaway menu. The wrong quality, and it actively puts people off — nothing kills appetite faster than a badly lit photo of a steak.

We’ll work with your existing photography or help you commission new shots that capture the atmosphere of your restaurant — not just the food, but the room, the lighting, the details that make your place special. A worn wooden table set for dinner. Steam rising from a bowl. Candlelight on glassware. These images do more to sell the experience than any description could.

The practical details people are actually looking for

Restaurant websites often bury the basics in favour of flowery “about us” prose. But here’s what most visitors actually want to know:

• Opening hours — including any variations for lunch, dinner, weekends, and bank holidays
• Location and directions — with an embedded Google Map, nearest car park, and public transport notes
• The menu and pricing — current, readable, with allergen information
• How to book — online, by phone, or walk-ins welcome
• Private dining or events — if you offer them, make them easy to find
• Gift vouchers — increasingly popular and often overlooked online

We make sure these essentials are immediately accessible — not hidden behind clever navigation or buried three pages deep. Your website should answer the most common questions within seconds of landing.

Events, seasonal menus, and keeping things current

A restaurant’s website needs to feel alive. If your last blog post was from 2022 or you’re still advertising your Valentine’s Day menu in April, visitors assume you’ve stopped caring — or worse, stopped trading. We build sites that are genuinely easy to update, so when you launch a new tasting menu, announce a wine dinner, or open bookings for Christmas, you can publish it in minutes.

Your Instagram feed can be integrated directly into the site, bringing in fresh visual content automatically. Most restaurants are already posting regularly on social media — we make sure that energy feeds back into your website too, keeping it current without any extra work.

Designed to match the experience you’ve created

A neighbourhood bistro shouldn’t have the same website as a fine dining restaurant, and neither should look like a chain. Your site needs to feel like an extension of your restaurant — the same warmth, the same attention to detail, the same personality. Whether you’re relaxed and rustic or polished and precise, the design should set expectations accurately so that when guests walk through your door, the experience matches what they imagined.

We pay attention to typography, colour, spacing, and imagery because these details shape perception just as much as your table settings and plating do. The best restaurant websites feel like an invitation, not an information dump.

Bath is a city that takes food seriously, and your website should reflect that. If you’d like to talk about building something that does your restaurant justice — a site that’s as considered as your cooking — give us a call on 01225 667 977. We’re right here in Bath, and we’d love to hear what you’re working on.