What Makes a Good Restaurant Website?

We’ve built a lot of them. Here’s what we keep coming back to.

We build websites for restaurants. It’s a big part of what we do at Mithril Media. We’ve worked with multi-location chains like Sombrero Mexican Food, breweries like Novo Brazil, single-unit restaurants, franchises. And across all of those projects, regardless of the size, there are a few things we always come back to that make the biggest difference.

These are the fundamentals. The things we build into every restaurant project because we’ve seen, over and over again, what actually moves the needle.

Stop using PDF menus

This one might be my biggest pet peeve as a web designer.

Think about when someone is searching for a restaurant. They’re probably on their phone. The data backs this up. Roughly 60% of visitors to restaurant websites are on mobile devices. For our own restaurant clients, we regularly see that number climb to 70 or 80%.

Now think about what it’s like to interact with a PDF on a phone. Pinching to zoom, scrolling sideways, losing your place, squinting at small type. PDFs were designed for print. They’ve been around long before mobile devices existed. They’re not responsive, they don’t display images well in that context, and they give you absolutely zero SEO benefit.

When we built the site for Sombrero Mexican Food, this was one of the first things we addressed. They’ve got a big menu and 17 locations across Southern California. We needed a clear way to structure that menu and make it easy for someone on their phone to browse through categories without any friction.

The benefit of building the menu directly into your website is compounding. You’ve improved the user experience for both mobile and desktop visitors, and you’ve given yourself an opportunity to build significantly more SEO-rich content. Every item on your menu can have a dedicated page on the website. Through a CMS (content management system), you build a single template for your menu items and then fill in the blanks. Once everything is in the proper categories, you’ve built a hierarchy that Google can actually index.

On top of that, you can load those pages with local keywords. “Best burrito in San Diego.” “Best fish tacos in Los Angeles.” These are opportunities to show up for the searches that matter most to your business. A PDF simply can’t do that.

And one more thing: a native menu gives you a place to show off your food. You can feature images of your actual dishes right alongside the descriptions. Which brings us to a point we’ll come back to shortly.

Build a dedicated page for every location

This is especially important if you have more than one location, but the principle applies even if you’re a single-unit restaurant.

A well-built location page gives Google all the details it needs to properly display your restaurant in search results. We’ve talked about structured data in previous videos, and this is one of the places where it matters most. Local business structured data tells Google, in a language it understands, exactly what your restaurant is, where it is, and when it’s open.

Using Sombrero as an example again: 17 different locations means 17 different neighborhoods, 17 different sets of hours, 17 different phone numbers. There’s no way to effectively show all of that on a single page. And attempting to would sell you short.

Each location page acts as a kind of homepage for that specific spot. When someone searches for “best Mexican food near me” or looks for your restaurant in a specific neighborhood, having a dedicated location page with structured data makes it far more likely that you show up in those results.

The specificity matters. Google rewards it.

Make online ordering easy and prominent

If we’re being honest, Covid changed the game here. A lot of restaurants used to get by without online ordering as a primary call to action on their website. That’s not the case anymore.

When it comes to online ordering, there are two paths: first-party and third-party. First-party means the order comes directly through your website or a platform like Toast. Third-party means DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates.

We always recommend having a strong first-party ordering option. A recent study from NCR Voyix found that about 67% of consumers prefer to order directly from the restaurant whenever possible. The reasons include lower fees, loyalty programs, and honestly, I think a lot of people just prefer to support the business directly.

That doesn’t mean you should ignore the third-party platforms. DoorDash and Uber Eats are important discovery channels for a lot of diners. The approach we take is to make first-party ordering the most visible option on the page while making it clear that third-party platforms are available too. You’re meeting people where they are and gently guiding them toward the option that benefits your business the most.

Use real photos, not stock imagery

Your actual dishes, plated the way they’re going to be served to your customers. Your actual space. Your actual team.

This is something we care a lot about for our restaurant clients because it’s one of the best ways they can represent what they have to offer.

Take Novo Brazil, for example. Novo is a Brazilian-inspired brewery in the San Diego area with a very distinct vibe. Bold, colorful, full of energy. If you’ve seen their cans on the shelf at a liquor store, they stand out. That kind of personality can’t be captured with stock photography. When we built their website, we made sure to feature high-quality images of their actual menu items and their space.

74% of diners say that social media influences where they eat, and visual content is the main driver. If we apply that same logic to a website, it’s clear that quality images of your food, your atmosphere, and your people carry real weight in the decision-making process.

Stock images are generic by definition. They have their place in certain use cases, but a restaurant website isn’t one of them.

My recommendation is to invest in a local photographer or videographer to come in and capture content for your restaurant. Not just the food, but the overall vibe, patrons enjoying their meals, staff showing hospitality, the overall setting. A single day of shooting can produce a library of content you’ll use for years across your website, social media, email newsletters, and ordering platforms.

Put reviews on your website

We know how important reviews are as trust signals. Restaurants might be one of the places where they matter most. And the numbers back this up: 88% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as they would a personal recommendation.

Most restaurant owners think of reviews as something that lives on Google or Yelp. But your own website is where reviews can do the most work for you, because someone who’s already on your site is already interested. They’re close to a decision. Seeing that other people had a great experience is often the thing that tips them over.

The practical setup is straightforward. There are free plugins and widgets that connect directly to the platforms you already use, like Google Business and Yelp. You configure it once, drop a small snippet onto your pages, and your latest reviews appear in real time. No manual work required.

The takeaway

These five things show up in every restaurant website we build. Native menus instead of PDFs. Dedicated location pages with structured data. Easy online ordering through first-party and third-party channels. Real photography of your food and space. And social proof embedded right on your site.

The details change with each project, but these fundamentals are consistent because they’re what actually makes a difference for restaurants online. Whether you’re running a single location or managing seventeen of them, these are the building blocks.

If you want to see where your restaurant’s website stands, we run a free website audit that covers all of this and more. And if you want to watch me walk through each of these in more detail, the full video is on our YouTube channel.