Hospitality · 7 min read
The Most Common Mistakes on Restaurant Websites – and How to Avoid Them
Over the past years we have examined a lot of restaurant websites before rebuilding them. The problems repeat with remarkable reliability, and they are almost never design questions. No guest stays away because they dislike your font. Guests stay away because they cannot find the answer to a simple question: are you open today, what does the schnitzel cost, and can I still get a table at eight? Here are the mistakes we see most often, sorted by how much they cost.
Mistake 1: the menu is outdated or a PDF
By far the most expensive mistake, because the menu is the most visited part of any restaurant website. According to a survey by the US agency MGH (2019, 1,101 respondents), 77 percent of guests look at a restaurant’s website before dining in or ordering, and nothing on that website sways their decision as strongly as the dishes on the menu. The two typical forms: either last summer’s menu is still online, complete with dishes that disappeared long ago, or the menu is a PDF that first has to load and then has to be zoomed and dragged around on a phone.
Both have the same root cause: changing the menu is too cumbersome, so it does not happen. Owners who have to go through an agency for every edit, or who wrestle with a site builder themselves, keep postponing the update. The fix is less about willpower than about tooling: a menu displayed as a normal web page that you maintain yourself in a dashboard. When a price change takes two minutes, it actually gets done.
Mistake 2: opening hours you have to hunt for, or cannot trust
Few things get looked up more often than opening hours, yet they are routinely hidden in the footer, tucked away on the contact page, or simply wrong. The nastiest variant: the website and the Google profile contradict each other. The guest does not know which one to believe, and rather than calling to check, picks the restaurant where things are clear.
Opening hours belong on the homepage, clearly visible, and they must be correct, including holidays and vacation weeks. A sentence like “We are on summer break from 4 to 18 August”, placed prominently on the homepage, saves your guests disappointment and saves you the phone calls of the unsure.
Mistake 3: there is no clear path to a table
A surprising number of websites never answer the question “How do I get a table?” The phone number sits somewhere in the legal notice, a reservation form is missing, or there is one that sends an email nobody reads before the next morning. The guest who wants to book for Saturday at 9:30 pm, which is a very common situation, is stuck.
The minimum solution: the phone number as a tappable link at the top of every page, so one touch is enough on a phone. The better solution: online reservations that work around the clock and confirm instantly. In both cases, visibility is the point. “Book a table” belongs in the navigation as a button, not as a line of text at the bottom of the page.
Mistake 4: the site is an ordeal on a phone
Most visits to restaurant websites happen on phones, often on the move with mediocre reception. Yet we regularly see pages with huge uncompressed photos, background videos, and slideshows that looked fine on the builder’s laptop and take ten seconds to load on a phone. After three seconds, a share of your visitors is gone, before they have seen anything of your restaurant. In the MGH survey mentioned above (2019), 33 percent said a hard-to-navigate website had already put them off visiting a restaurant; for 30 percent, an outdated-looking site was enough.
The second phone classic is navigation: tiny menu items, text running off the edge, buttons a thumb cannot hit. The most honest test costs nothing: open your own site on your phone over mobile data, not Wi-Fi, and try to find the menu, the opening hours, and the reservation in under a minute. Whatever annoys you there annoys every guest.
Mistake 5: photos that are not yours, or none at all
Stock photos of flawless burgers you never served are spotted faster than you would think, and they create the wrong expectation or, worse, distrust. The other extreme is the photo-free website of text and a logo. Food is a visual business; show nothing, and you hand the first impression to whatever random photos sit on Google. According to a survey by Bookatable by Michelin (2019), photos of food and dining room help 70 percent of guests in the German-speaking countries choose a restaurant; in Austria and Switzerland the figure is close to 90 percent.
You do not need thirty images. A handful of honest, well-lit photos of the dining room, the garden, and three or four signature dishes carries an entire website. How to get photos like that, with or without a professional, is a topic of its own; we will dedicate a separate post to it soon.
Mistake 6: the legal and technical items nobody sees until they hurt
Missing legal notice, missing privacy policy, Google fonts and maps embedded without consent: nobody notices these in daily business, until a formal complaint or a cease-and-desist arrives. On self-built site-builder pages in particular, the privacy page tends to be the one done last and half-heartedly.
Then there is the silent infrastructure: a domain registered to a former web designer, a hosting package whose credentials nobody can find, an expired security certificate producing browser warnings. Our advice: establish once who owns the domain and hosting and who has access in an emergency. That single hour of effort saves weeks when it counts.
What almost all of these mistakes have in common
Almost none of these mistakes happen when the website is built. They happen afterwards, in the months and years when nobody feels responsible. A website is not a project that gets finished; it is more like the chalkboard outside your door. Someone has to keep it current, and it has to be someone for whom that is not an obstacle.
That is exactly what GuestMaker is built around: you maintain the menu, opening hours, photos, and reservations yourself in the dashboard, while hosting, the technical side, and a privacy-aware setup stay with us. The website you can change in two minutes is the one that stays up to date.