It is 8pm, a couple are standing on a street in Málaga, and they are hungry. One of them has a phone out. They search for somewhere to eat nearby, glance at a few options, and pick one. The whole decision takes about thirty seconds and it is made entirely on a phone screen, often before they have walked past your door.
Restaurants live or die on that thirty seconds. Whether you win it comes down to a handful of practical things, and most local venues get at least two of them wrong.
The four questions a diner needs answered
Before anyone walks in, they want to know four things, and they want them in seconds:
- Are you open right now? The single most common reason someone abandons a restaurant listing is not knowing.
- What is on the menu, and roughly what does it cost? Nobody wants to sit down and then discover the price bracket.
- What does it look like? Food and room. This is what actually decides it.
- Can I book, right now, without a phone call? Increasingly the expectation, especially with international customers.
Your menu should be a web page, not a PDF
This is the most common and most costly mistake in restaurant websites, so it is worth being blunt about it. A PDF menu fails on three fronts:
- It is horrible on a phone. It downloads slowly, opens in a separate viewer, and forces people to pinch and zoom around A4 pages. A good share of visitors give up.
- Search engines struggle with it. Your dishes are effectively invisible. A proper menu page written as normal web text can appear in searches for the dishes themselves, so someone hunting for a particular local dish in your town can find you. A PDF almost never achieves that.
- It is a pain to update. Changing one price means editing a document, exporting and re-uploading, which is exactly why so many restaurant PDFs are two years out of date.
Put your menu on the site as a normal page with sections and prices in text. It loads instantly, reads perfectly on a phone, ranks, and you can change a price in seconds.
Photos are the deciding factor
For food, photos do the selling. A few rules that matter: shoot the actual dishes you serve rather than using stock images, include the room and terrace so people can picture the evening, use daylight where you can, and keep them current with your menu. Do not photograph a dish you took off the menu last spring.
Keep them properly sized too. Restaurant sites are the worst offenders for enormous unoptimised photos, which is a shame given how much they depend on images. See why a slow website is costing you customers.
For restaurants, your Google listing does the heavy lifting
More than any other trade, restaurants are chosen from the Google map and listing rather than from a website. That means your Google Business Profile deserves as much attention as your site:
- Accurate opening hours, including holidays. This matters more in Spain than almost anywhere, because seasonal closures and August shutdowns are normal. Wrong hours means someone arrives to a locked door, and that becomes a one-star review about something you could have fixed in a minute.
- Lots of current photos. Restaurant listings with plenty of photos get significantly more attention.
- A menu link pointing at your real menu page.
- Reviews, replied to. For restaurants, reviews are close to everything. Our guide on getting more Google reviews covers the method, and getting found on Google covers the rest of the listing.
Make booking a single tap
Whatever your booking method is, it should be reachable without scrolling and without typing. A tap-to-call button, a WhatsApp link, or a proper booking widget if you take a lot of reservations. What does not work is a contact form asking for a message, or a phone number written as plain text that someone has to copy out.
Which languages, on this coast
If you are anywhere near the coast, a meaningful share of your customers are searching in English, and often German or Dutch. A Spanish-only site is invisible to them at the exact moment they are choosing dinner. This is one of the clearest cases for a bilingual site anywhere in local business, and we went through what that properly involves in do you need a bilingual website on the Costa del Sol.
Delivery platforms are not a website
Being on a delivery or booking platform is fine, and for some venues it is good business. But it is renting an audience: they own the customer relationship, they take a commission on every order, and they can change the terms whenever they like. Your own site and your own Google listing are the assets you keep. Use the platforms, but do not let them be your only presence.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website if I have Instagram and a Google listing?
You can survive on those, and many venues do. But Instagram buries your menu and opening hours, and neither platform is yours. A simple site with your menu, photos, hours and booking link is the one place you control, and it feeds your Google listing rather than competing with it.
Can I just put my menu up as a PDF?
You can, and it is the option most likely to cost you customers. A text menu page loads faster, reads properly on a phone, can be found in searches for individual dishes, and takes seconds to update. If you must offer a PDF, offer it in addition to a real page, not instead of one.
Do I need an online booking system?
Only if reservations are a real part of how you operate. For a busy restaurant, yes. For a bar or a casual place, a phone and WhatsApp button is usually plenty, and cheaper.
Which languages should my restaurant site be in?
Spanish and English covers most of the coast. Add another only if you can see it in your actual customers and can keep it up to date.
How much does a restaurant website cost?
Our monthly plans start from £49 a month with a small setup fee, including hosting, maintenance and changes, which suits restaurants well since menus change. A one-off build from an agency typically runs into the low thousands.
A restaurant site does not need to be clever. It needs to answer four questions in about ten seconds and get out of the way. If you would like one that does that, with a menu you can update yourself and both languages handled, take a look at our websites or get a free consultation.