A restaurant website has one job: turn a hungry person into a seated one. Menu, hours, location, photos, and a way to act — fast, on a phone. Everything else is decoration. Here's the honest guide.
The menu as real text (not a PDF — phones and search engines both struggle with them), current hours that match your Google profile exactly, one-tap directions and calling, photos of actual food from your actual kitchen, and the action button: reserve, order, or call. A site that nails these five on a phone beats any amount of parallax and video backgrounds.
Template builders run $0–$50 monthly; a freelancer commonly builds a proper restaurant site for a few hundred to a few thousand; agencies charge more for largely the same five jobs. The trap to avoid: platforms that lock your menu into their system and charge monthly forever. A fast static site with a text menu costs near-zero to run and is exactly what search engines and AI assistants read best.
When someone asks Google or an AI assistant “best tacos near me,” the answer is assembled from what those systems can read: your site's text menu, your schema markup, your hours, your reviews. A PDF menu and a photo-only site are invisible to that process. Structure the site so machines can read the menu, and pair it with a video of the food — a restaurant promo video and a readable site reinforce each other.
No. PDFs are slow on phones, painful to pinch-zoom, and largely unreadable to search engines and AI assistants deciding whom to recommend. Put the menu on the page as real text with prices. Keep a print-ready PDF for the printer, not the website.
Only if you do takeout volume — then yes, and preferably a system where you keep the customer data rather than a marketplace that owns it. If you're dine-in first, a reservation link and a phone button do the job without the monthly fees.
Commonly three to five: home (with the essentials above the fold), menu, and contact/location — maybe about and catering/events if real. One great page beats ten thin ones; hungry people don't browse, they decide.
Commonly: the Google Business Profile is incomplete or hours mismatch the site, the menu is a PDF, or the site has no schema markup saying what and where you are. All fixable without ads — and fixing them is exactly what makes AI assistants able to recommend you.