Restaurant websites that fill tables.

A restaurant's website is its front door, its brochure, its booking desk and increasingly its most important marketing channel. Diners decide where to eat in under a minute of scrolling, and the website that loads fast, looks beautiful and lets them book in three taps wins the cover. The website that's slow, dated and forces a phone call to book loses every time — even when the food is better.

What diners actually want from a restaurant website

A menu they can read on their phone without zooming. Real, recent photos of the food and the room — not stock images. Clear opening hours and how to get there. A booking widget that works in five seconds. Pricing or at least an honest sense of what dinner will cost. Allergen info. A reason to choose you over the three other restaurants on the same street. Most UK restaurant websites fail at half of these.

Bookings — own site vs marketplace

Marketplaces (OpenTable, ResDiary, DesignMyNight) drive discovery and you pay per cover (£1.20–£2.00 in most cases). Direct bookings on your own site cost you nothing per cover but require you to drive the traffic. Smart restaurants do both: embed a direct booking widget on the site (most use ResDiary, SevenRooms or Eveve, all of which sync covers to all channels) AND list on the major marketplaces. Direct bookings then dominate among returning guests.

Ordering, takeaway and gift vouchers

For takeaway, Deliveroo and Uber Eats take 25–35% commission and you don't own the customer relationship. Direct ordering through Flipdish, Slerp or Square Online costs 4–9% and gives you the customer data. We typically build both: marketplaces for acquisition, direct ordering for repeat customers, gift vouchers as a high-margin revenue stream (most venues sell £5,000–£40,000/year of vouchers through a simple Toggl, Stampede or Toast widget).

Local SEO for restaurants

'Restaurants near me', '[cuisine] [town]', 'best Sunday roast [town]' — these searches drive the majority of new diners and they're winnable for small independent venues with the right setup. We optimise Google Business Profile, add Restaurant schema, build city/cuisine landing pages where it makes sense, set up a review generation flow into Google, and target the queries your competitors are sleeping on.

Performance — actually matters

Restaurant websites are notorious for being slow — huge unoptimised hero videos, three booking widgets fighting each other, bloated themes. We build fast: optimised images, lazy-loaded media, minimal third-party scripts. Diners on 4G in a busy street get a working site in under 2 seconds — which is when bookings happen.

Pricing

Single restaurant brochure with booking integration: £1,500–£3,500. Restaurant with online ordering, gift vouchers and local SEO: £3,500–£6,500. Multi-site group or premium fine-dining brand: £6,500–£18,000. Care plans (maintenance + menu updates + SEO) from £80/month.