What should a restaurant website actually have?

The five things, done properly

The menu must be real text on the page, with prices and dish names. Not a PDF. Not a photograph of a printed card. Text is searchable, readable at any screen size and understandable by Google, which is exactly how you start showing up when someone nearby is hunting for your signature dish and typing it straight into a phone.

Address with an embedded map and a directions link. Include the landmark people actually use. ‘Opposite the metro gate 2’ helps far more than a plot number ever will.

Hours, kept accurate, including the days you close. A guest who drives across Delhi to a shut restaurant will tell you about it in a review.

A phone number that dials on tap, visible without scrolling. And one booking or ordering action, not four competing ones.

What to add once those work

Photographs of your actual food and your actual room, shot in the very light you serve in, because stock images of generic pasta break a guest’s trust the instant they walk in and see something completely different on the plate. Shoot your own room.

A short page for each thing you want to be found for. Private dining. A rooftop. A birthday package. A Sunday brunch. These short pages become the ones that rank for specific searches like private dining near a landmark or a Sunday brunch in your neighbourhood, and that kind of narrow, high-intent search is where most of the genuinely useful restaurant traffic comes from.

Structured data marking the restaurant, its menu, hours and location, so search results can display your details directly. Most restaurant sites skip this, and it is a straightforward technical win for the ones that do not.

Speed. A page that takes six seconds on mobile data loses a big share of the people who asked for it. Compress the images. That one fix usually beats a full redesign.

What to delete

Full-screen intro videos. Background music. A splash page asking which city you want. Popups that arrive before the menu does. Long paragraphs about the chef’s philosophy sitting above the fold. Social feeds that add three seconds of loading and then carry the visitor somewhere else entirely.

Test it honestly. Open your own site on your own phone, on mobile data, and try to find tomorrow’s opening time in under ten seconds. If you cannot, no customer will either.