A hungry person gives your website about eight seconds. In that time they want three answers: what do you serve, where are you, and are you open right now. If any of those takes more than two taps on a phone, they are already looking at the next place on the map. This guide covers what a restaurant or cafe website actually needs, what is optional, and what it should cost.
The four jobs of a restaurant website
Strip away the trends and a food business website has exactly four jobs. Everything else is decoration.
- Show the menu, as real text on the page, not a PDF download. PDFs are slow on mobile, impossible to search, and invisible to Google.
- Answer the practical questions instantly: address with a map link, opening hours, parking, and a phone number that taps to call.
- Take the action: book a table, order for collection, or start a delivery order, whichever fits your model.
- Prove it is good: real photos of your food and your room, recent reviews, and your food hygiene rating, which UK customers increasingly check before visiting.
Cafe, takeaway or restaurant: what each one needs
A neighbourhood cafe rarely needs table booking. It needs the menu, hours, location, and a gallery that makes people want to walk in. One well-built page often does the whole job.
A takeaway lives or dies by ordering. The real decision is whether you rely on delivery platforms or add ordering to your own site. The platforms bring reach but charge commission on every order, often 15 to 30 percent. A direct ordering page pays for itself surprisingly fast for busy kitchens; many of our clients run both, using the platforms for discovery and their own site for repeat customers.
A sit-down restaurant needs table booking above everything. That can be a full reservation system or something as simple as a WhatsApp button that opens a pre-filled message. We used the same one-tap WhatsApp pattern on a Manchester logistics site (see the M.I.S Logistic case study) and it now drives most of their enquiries; the psychology for restaurants is identical. Remove friction, win the booking.
The mistakes that quietly empty tables
The most common failures we see when food businesses come to us are all fixable: a PDF menu that takes ten seconds to open on 4G, photos from a phone in bad lighting, opening hours that disagree with Google, and a homepage video that makes the whole site crawl. Speed is not a technical vanity metric; Google's Core Web Vitals data shows visitors abandon slow pages before they ever see your food.
One more that owners rarely think about: your website and your Google Business Profile must tell the same story. Same hours, same menu link, same phone number. Mismatches cost you both rankings and walk-ins.
What it costs and where to start
A single-page cafe site with a proper text menu, map, hours and gallery starts from around £300. A restaurant site with booking, multiple pages and photography direction typically lands between £950 and £2,500. Direct online ordering adds more, but calculate it against the commission you currently hand to delivery apps every month; the maths usually favours owning your own channel. Full pricing is on our services page, and our Manchester website cost guide explains what drives quotes up.
If you run a food business and want a straight answer about what you actually need, send us a message. The consultation is free and if a one-page site is enough, we will tell you exactly that.