FOR RESTAURANTS
Website care for restaurants
A restaurant website has one job most of the time: tell someone hungry, right now, whether you are open, what you serve, and how to get a table. Most restaurant sites fail at least one of those, usually quietly, because nobody checked after the person who built it moved on. Here is what actually breaks.
WHAT BREAKS ON RESTAURANT SITES
Five things that lose a table or an order
Menus that live as a linked PDF are the single easiest thing on a restaurant site to go quietly wrong. Prices change, a dish gets dropped, the PDF does not, and now the website is actively telling people something false about what you serve and what it costs.
A holiday closure updated on your Google Business Profile but not on the website, or the reverse, sends someone to a locked door. It is one of the fastest ways to turn a hungry customer into a one-star review that has nothing to do with the food.
A third-party ordering widget that takes ten seconds to load, or a reservation button that opens a separate site with a different look and a login wall, is where a decided customer gives up. The handoff needs to feel like it is still your restaurant, not a detour.
Food photography is the one thing a restaurant site should not skimp on, but it is also usually the heaviest asset on the page. 76% of checks so far have found an oversized HTML document, and 67% found images published with no width or height set, which on a menu page full of dish photos is a slow, jumpy scroll on a phone.
Structured data is how Google and AI assistants confirm your hours, price range and cuisine without guessing. 40% of checks so far find no LocalBusiness structured data, and 43% find no link to a Google Maps listing, both of which matter more for a restaurant than almost any other business type, because so much of the decision happens on a map or in an AI answer before anyone lands on the site.
The menu and hours check themselves
The free health check will not read your menu for you, but it will catch the technical side: whether the page is fast on a phone, whether your hours and address are published in a way search engines and AI assistants can actually parse, and whether the Google side and the website side of your business are saying the same thing. That is the part that is easy to fix once somebody points at it.
Bill
By Bill Belcamino · Last updated