Most restaurant websites are built by people who have never stood behind a pass at 7pm. They're full of things that impress other designers and missing the four things a hungry person on a phone is looking for. Here is the honest list.
The seven things that matter
- Your menu as text, with prices. Not a PDF, not a photo of the menu board. Text can be read on a phone, found by Google, and quoted by ChatGPT when someone asks "where does good pho near Cabramatta cost under $20". A photo can't do any of that.
- Opening hours that match your Google listing exactly. Two different sets of hours online is the fastest way to lose a customer at 3pm on a Tuesday. One source of truth, updated in both places on the same day.
- A phone number you can tap. Half your website visitors want to call you. If the number is an image or buried in a paragraph, they call the place next door.
- Directions in one tap. Your address linked to Google Maps. That's it.
- Eight to fifteen honest photos of the food. Shot in daylight by a window, not under the ceiling lights. Owners can do this with a phone in twenty minutes; the trick is the light, not the camera.
- Structured data (schema.org/Restaurant). A block of code, invisible to visitors, that tells Google and AI assistants your cuisine, hours, price range and address in a format they read directly. In 2026 this is what gets you named in an AI answer. Most restaurant sites don't have it.
- Your own domain, registered in your own name. Not the agency's name, not a free subdomain. If you ever change providers, the domain goes with you.
The one-line test: open your site on a phone, on mobile data, in the car park. Can you see the menu, the hours and a call button within five seconds? If not, nothing else on the site matters yet.
The five things you don't need
- A blog. Nobody reads restaurant blogs, and an abandoned blog with a 2023 post looks worse than none.
- A 200-photo gallery. Fifteen good photos beat two hundred average ones. Galleries are slow and they bury the menu.
- A booking system, if you take bookings by phone. Add one when the phone becomes a problem, not before. Many small restaurants never need it.
- Animations, video backgrounds, "loading" screens. They cost seconds on mobile data, and seconds cost customers.
- Pages for the sake of pages. "About", "Gallery", "Events", "Press" — if you don't have real content for a page, it shouldn't exist. One good page beats six thin ones.
What it should cost
A site with the seven things above is a small job. In Australia, quotes for restaurant websites run anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, and the price mostly reflects how the agency works rather than what you get. What matters more than the number: you should be able to see the finished site before you pay for it, and you should own everything afterwards — domain, files, logins.
Written from our own build work with restaurants across Australia. No affiliate links, no sponsored recommendations.