The restaurant & cafe website guide.
Every night in Blackpool, thousands of people stand on the Prom or sit in a hotel room and have the same conversation: where shall we eat? It gets settled on a phone, in about ninety seconds, and most restaurants lose it before anyone reads a review - because the menu wouldn't load, the hours looked wrong, or the photos didn't sell the room. This guide is about winning that moment.
The ninety-second decision
Restaurant websites get talked about as if they were brochures, but the real event they serve is short and brutal. A couple, a family, a table of friends - somebody says "what about that Italian near the Tower?", somebody else searches it, and the group decides in the time it takes to walk a block. In a town like Blackpool the stakes are compounded by volume: millions of visitors a year, most of whom know nothing about your street, deciding dinner from a phone screen with your competitors one thumb-swipe away.
In those ninety seconds, the searcher needs four answers: are you open, what's on the menu and what does it cost, what's it like in there, and how do we get a table. Any answer that's missing, wrong or slow, and the group defaults to somewhere that answered - usually whoever had the clearest menu and the most alive-looking photos. Nothing else on your website matters remotely as much as those four answers, which is why the sections below are about little else.
The menu is the website
If a restaurant website did nothing but present the menu perfectly, it would be doing most of its job. Diners read menus before choosing a restaurant the way guests read photos before booking a hotel - it is the decision. And it's where most restaurant sites fail, in one of three ways: the menu is a PDF, the menu is a photo of the printed menu, or the menu is out of date.
The PDF deserves its own paragraph, because it's everywhere. On a phone it loads slowly, opens microscopic, and demands pinching and dragging to read - a genuine, measurable reason people give up. It's also close to invisible to search: a menu built as a normal web page can surface you for the searches people actually make ("seafood restaurant Blackpool", "dog friendly cafe Cleveleys", "gluten free fish and chips"), while the same dishes locked in a PDF mostly can't. The fix is simple and unglamorous - the menu as a fast, readable page, sections in the order people eat, prices shown plainly, dietary notes where they belong.
Out-of-date is the other killer, and it's an operations problem more than a design one. Menus change - that's the business - so the website has to be changeable without friction, invoices or a wait. It's why menu changes are covered by the monthly fee on our plan: new prices or tonight's specials go up the same day you send them, so the site never shows a dish the kitchen dropped in March. Whatever website you end up with, from whoever, ask one question first: what does it take to change the menu? If the answer involves a developer and a fee, the menu will rot, and the site with it.
Hours, location and the practical answers
Unglamorous, decisive, and the easiest section to get right:
- Opening hours that are actually true - including seasonal changes, which on the coast are the rule, not the exception. Illuminations-season hours, winter hours, the Tuesday you close: on the site and on Google, matching. A visitor who walks to a closed restaurant doesn't come back the next night; they tell the hotel breakfast room.
- Where you are, in visitor terms - a map, the street, and honest walking references: "two minutes from the Tower", "just off the Prom at North Pier". Blackpool's diners are largely from out of town; they navigate by landmarks, not street names.
- The practical questions - parking nearby, kids and dogs, accessibility, big-table policy, card or cash. Every one answered on the site is a barrier removed; every one missing is a reason to pick the place that answered.
- A tappable phone number on every screen - because for a fair share of diners, especially older ones, the phone is still how a table gets booked, and a number that needs zooming to read costs bookings nightly.
Bookings, orders and the delivery apps
Getting the table booked or the order placed is where the website turns from information into revenue, and the honest answer varies by what you run. For a bookings restaurant: if you use a system - ResDiary, OpenTable, an EPOS add-on - embed it properly in the site so booking feels like part of the same evening, not an ejection to a third party; the late-evening booking made after you stopped answering the phone is this feature's entire business case. For a walk-in cafe: skip the machinery, perfect the hours and menu instead.
The delivery apps deserve the same fair treatment we give booking portals elsewhere on this site. Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats reach hungry strangers you'd never reach alone, and for some kitchens that reach is worth every point of commission. But the commission is real and recurring, the customer relationship stays theirs, and the apps answer nothing about your actual room. The pattern that works is the hotelier's: keep the apps for reach if the maths works, and stop paying commission on the people who already chose you - the name-searchers, the repeat customers, the hotel guests your waiter told to come back. They should land on a website good enough to order from or book with directly. If direct online ordering ever makes sense for your volume, it can be added to our builds; for most rooms, nailing bookings and the menu comes first.
Photos that fill tables
Food is bought with the eyes at every stage - the plate, the room, the window. The website's photography carries three jobs, and all three want real photos, not stock:
- The food: a handful of your best-selling dishes, shot in daylight or warm light on your actual plates. Six honest, appetising photos beat sixty. Diners recognise stock food photography instantly, and it reads as "the real thing must not look like this".
- The room: the single most under-photographed thing in hospitality. People choosing where to spend an evening are choosing an atmosphere; show the lit-up evening room, not the empty afternoon one.
- The outside: so visitors recognise you from the street, and so the place looks open, warm and alive - in a seaside town, the glowing shopfront photo at dusk is practically a genre, and it works.
A modern phone in good light is genuinely enough to launch with. When you're ready, a short professional shoot pays for itself several times over, because the same photos upgrade the website, the Google profile and the delivery-app listings at once - and if you refit or reshoot the menu seasonally, updating them is covered by unlimited edits on our plan.
Being found: local search for food businesses
Alongside the name-searchers there's a second stream deciding dinner generically - "restaurants near me", "breakfast Blackpool", "best fish and chips near Pleasure Beach". Those searches are dominated by the Google map pack, which makes your Google Business Profile as important as the website itself: the right categories, hours that match the site (especially seasonal ones), a menu link pointing at your readable menu page - not a PDF - photos posted steadily, and reviews answered, the gracious and the grumpy alike. The full setup is in our guide to getting your business on Google.
The website's role in this stream is to be worth clicking through to and to say clearly what and where you are - "seafood restaurant on Blackpool promenade" in real sentences, dishes named on a crawlable menu page, structured data telling Google your hours, menu and location machine-readably (invisible to diners, built into every hospitality site we ship). Profile and website reinforce each other, and reviews feed both: the habit of asking happy tables for a Google review, gently and consistently, compounds into the ranking signal that's hardest for a lazier competitor to fake. It's the same local-SEO spadework as any coast business, applied with a restaurateur's specifics - and it's how the "near me" diner becomes a table before ever seeing a delivery app.
What this costs, and what it saves
The wider market for hospitality websites runs from DIY builders to four-figure agency builds - the full, even-handed picture is in our website cost guide. Our own answer is the plan we build everything on: £99 setup, then £29.99 a month, including the design, hosting, your domain, email, booking-system integration and unlimited edits - which in hospitality means the menu, prices, hours and photos never rot behind an invoice. The site and domain become yours after 12 months, and you can cancel anytime with 30 days' notice.
Against that, run your own numbers: a couple of tables a week won from the where-shall-we-eat moment, or a modest slice of orders shifted off app commission, covers the plan and then some. We've been building on the coast since 2016, we're rated 5.0 on Google, and the hospitality approach is laid out on our restaurants & cafes page.
Restaurant & cafe website FAQs
Is a PDF menu on my website really that bad?
For the person opening it, yes. On a phone a PDF loads slowly, opens tiny, and has to be pinched, zoomed and dragged around to read - and most diners are checking your menu on a phone, often on the walk over. A menu as a normal web page loads instantly, reads at a glance, and can be found by Google, so "gluten free fish and chips Blackpool" can actually surface you. The kitchen-side fix matters too: menus done as pages can be updated in minutes, so the website never shows dishes you stopped serving in March. On our plan, menu changes are covered by the monthly fee - send the new prices, they go up the same day.
Do I need online booking, or is a phone number enough?
Depends on your room and your customers. A cafe doing walk-ins needs accurate opening hours more than it needs a booking system. A restaurant that fills on weekends benefits enormously from one, because the table that would have been booked at half ten at night - after you stopped answering the phone - is otherwise a table somewhere else. If you already use a system like ResDiary, OpenTable or a booking add-on on your EPOS, the website should embed it properly rather than linking out; if you don’t, a prominent tap-to-call number and honest note about when you answer is a perfectly respectable start.
I’m on Just Eat and Deliveroo. Doesn’t that cover the online side?
The apps are a channel, not a website - and an expensive one, with commission commonly in the double digits per order plus the fees diners see. They do reach hungry people who’ve never heard of you, which has real value. But they answer none of the questions that fill your actual room - can we sit in, can you do a table of eight, what are the hours, what’s it like inside - and every repeat customer they keep is commission you keep paying. The pattern that works mirrors what hotels do about booking sites: stay on the apps for reach if the maths works for you, and give the people who search your name a website good enough to order from or book with you directly.
What photos does a restaurant website need?
Three kinds, all real: the food (a handful of your best dishes, shot in daylight or warm light, on your actual plates), the room (so people can picture the evening - couples check this more than the menu), and the outside (so they can find you, and so the place looks open and alive). Phone cameras in good light are honestly enough to start; stock photography is worse than nothing, because diners recognise it and read it as "the real thing must not look this good". If you refit or change the menu seasonally, reshoot - old photos set expectations the visit then has to argue with.
How much does a restaurant or cafe website cost?
The wider market is covered honestly in our website cost guide - DIY builders, freelancers and agencies all vary. Our own plan is £99 setup then £29.99 a month including design, hosting, your domain, email and unlimited edits - which for a food business specifically means menu changes, new prices, seasonal hours and fresh photos are always included, never invoiced. That last part matters more in hospitality than any other trade we build for, because the menu changing is not an exception - it’s the business.