Restaurant website problems that cost bookings

Restaurants, cafes and pubs make a good test case for anyone who sells web design, because a visitor arrives with one clear question: can I eat here, and when? The restaurant website problems that matter are the ones that get in the way of that answer. They are also easy to find from the outside, with nothing more than a phone and five minutes.

This is the order in which we would check a hospitality site before writing to the owner, and what each finding is worth saying.

Start where the customer starts: on a phone

Someone standing on a high street in Stockport, deciding where to eat, will search on their phone. Open the restaurant's site the same way. Can you see the opening times, the address and a way to book or call without pinching and zooming? If the first screen is a large photo and a slogan with everything useful pushed below, that is worth noting. Our post on what a site that is not mobile friendly costs a local business covers the wider picture.

The PDF menu

This is the most common problem on small hospitality sites, and the one owners are least likely to see themselves, because they know their own menu by heart. A menu saved as a PDF often means pinching and scrolling sideways on a phone, text that cannot be searched, and a file that is easily left out of date. It may also be a large file that is slow to open on a weak signal.

You do not need to claim it costs a specific number of customers. Simply say what you saw: “I opened your menu on my phone and had to zoom to read the prices.” That is accurate, specific and hard to argue with. The fix is usually a plain page of text the owner can edit, with headings for starters, mains and puddings.

Opening hours that disagree with each other

Compare the hours on the website with the hours on the business's Google listing and any Facebook page. Hospitality businesses change their hours often: a new closing day, a bank holiday, a quiet winter schedule. If the website says one thing and the listing says another, a customer will believe one of them and be wrong half the time. We wrote about this in when a website is quietly telling customers the wrong thing. For a restaurant, it is arguably the most important thing to get right.

Booking links and enquiry forms

Click the booking button. Then click it again from a phone. Check that it goes somewhere that still exists, loads properly, and does not send a customer to a page asking them to log in to something. Many restaurants use a third-party booking service, and those links sometimes break when an account changes or a subscription lapses. If the site has a contact form instead, send a test message and see whether anything happens. We go through this in more detail in the quiet ways a local business website turns work away.

Also check that a phone number is easy to find and tappable. For a pub or a small cafe, many people will simply ring.

Heavy photography

Food photography is the reason a restaurant site exists, and it is also a common reason one is slow. Full-size images straight from a camera or phone, dropped into a page without being resized, can make a page crawl on mobile data. If a hero image takes noticeable time to appear, that is a finding. Our guide to spotting oversized images shows how to confirm it before you mention it.

Allergen and dietary information

We would handle this one with care. Hospitality businesses in the UK have legal duties around allergen information, and what is required depends on how food is served. Do not tell an owner what the law requires of them. What you can say, as a designer, is that a customer with a dietary need often wants to check before they visit, and that a menu page can make that easier than a PDF. Leave the compliance side to them and the relevant authorities.

No website at all

Plenty of small cafes and takeaways run only on an Instagram page or a Facebook page. That works until a customer wants the opening hours or a menu without logging in, or scrolling through a feed. We covered the reasoning in the businesses trading on Instagram alone. If you find one, the approach is the same: note what is genuinely hard for a customer to find, and offer a simple fix.

How to raise it without being pushy

Restaurant owners are busy at exactly the times you might want to reach them. Email suits them better than a call at half past twelve. Keep the message short, pick one finding, and make it something they can verify in seconds. “Your booking button on the home page returns an error” is better than a list of seven things. If the first finding is welcome, the rest can follow in conversation.

When we look at a hospitality business, Patchscout crawls and audits the site for speed, mobile, SSL and SEO, and flags businesses whose only presence is a social page. Our system then drafts an outreach email in your own voice based on what it actually found, which you send from your own mailbox. The judgement about which single finding to lead with is still yours, and it is the part that gets a reply.