What Should a Restaurant Website Include? 5 Things Customers Need Before They Choose Where to Eat
Someone lands on your restaurant website at 11:40 a.m. looking for somewhere to have lunch with a client in downtown DC, while another person is trying to find somewhere their family can eat that evening, and someone else is organizing dinner for eight people next weekend. They could all be looking at the same restaurant, but they are not trying to make the same decision.
The person meeting a client wants to know whether the restaurant is close enough to the office, what the dining room looks like, and whether the setting works for a business lunch. The parent needs to see the menu, prices, and whether there is something the children will eat, while the person organizing dinner for eight may be looking for reservation availability, dietary information, parking, and whether the restaurant can comfortably accommodate the group.
Most advice about restaurant websites starts with the features themselves. Search for what a restaurant website should include, and you will find familiar recommendations: publish your menu, add your opening hours, use good photographs, make the site mobile-friendly, show reviews and make it easy to book or order.
All of that is useful. But looking at those elements only as a checklist can obscure why they need to be there in the first place. A prospective customer may not even discover your restaurant through your website. Recommendations, Google, social media, and review platforms all play a role in how people find restaurants. In one Toast survey, word of mouth was the most commonly cited source of restaurant discovery among respondents, followed by Google, social media, and online review sites.
That means someone can reach your website halfway through a decision rather than at the beginning of one. They may already know your rating, have seen your food on Instagram, received a recommendation from a colleague, or found you on Google Maps and opened the website because there is one thing they still need to know before choosing you.
For a restaurant owner, that changes the question from simply “What should I put on my website?” to “What does someone need to know to decide whether my restaurant works for what they have in mind?”
The distinction matters even more for a local restaurant. A restaurant in Bethesda, Arlington, or DC does not need its website to persuade every person who could conceivably find it online. It needs to give the people who could realistically become customers enough useful information to evaluate the restaurant, feel confident about the choice, and take the next step.
So yes, your restaurant website needs a menu, photographs, opening hours, location information, reviews, and a clear way to reserve a table or place an order. But whether those elements actually help you win the customer depends on what they tell them, how easily they can find the information, and whether it answers the decision they came to your website to make.
What should a restaurant website include?
A restaurant website should give prospective customers enough information to decide whether the restaurant suits what they have in mind. At minimum, that means an up-to-date menu with prices, photographs that show the food and experience, accurate hours and location information, useful customer reviews, and clear information about reservations, ordering, takeout, or delivery where those services are available.
1. Make your menu useful for decision-making
Having a menu on your website sounds like the most basic requirement on this list, but simply having one does not necessarily give a customer the information they need. That is because customers do not necessarily open a restaurant menu simply to see what food is available; they use it to make a series of decisions about whether the restaurant works for them.
Someone planning dinner for two may be checking what you serve, what appeals to them, and roughly what the evening will cost, while the person organising dinner for eight has to make that judgement on behalf of several people. A parent may be looking for something their children will eat, and someone with a food allergy or dietary restriction has a more fundamental question to answer: can I safely or realistically eat here at all?
The menu therefore has a bigger job than listing dishes. It needs to give a prospective customer enough information to assess whether your restaurant fits the meal they are planning, which means details such as current prices, useful descriptions, dietary information where relevant, and clear distinctions between menus available at different times can influence whether they continue considering you or return to the other restaurants they already have open.
Price is particularly worth paying attention to in the current market. In the National Restaurant Association’s Q2 2026 consumer survey, 36% of consumers said they were spending less at restaurants than they had in the previous quarter, with some responding to financial pressure by choosing less expensive menu options or cutting back on extras. In that environment, a customer checking your prices is not necessarily looking for the cheapest restaurant but may simply be trying to work out whether the experience they have in mind fits the amount they are prepared to spend.
The same principle applies to dietary information. A diner who cannot tell whether there is anything suitable for them has a different problem from one who simply has not decided what to order yet. Research published in the Journal of Food Protection in 2025 found that allergen information was limited across the online menus of the non-chain restaurants studied, with only one in ten using allergen symbols and 16% including allergen statements. The study examined restaurants in Toronto, so those figures should not be treated as a description of the DMV restaurant market, but they illustrate how information that can be essential to one customer’s decision may still be largely absent from an online menu.
How customers reach that menu matters too. Someone may discover your restaurant on Google, look through your Instagram account, and then visit your website specifically because the menu is the missing piece of their decision. If they then encounter an outdated menu, prices that are missing, dish names they cannot interpret, or a PDF that is awkward to navigate on a phone, the problem is not simply that the website could be more user-friendly. You have made it harder for that customer to answer the question that brought them there.
For a restaurant owner in the DMV, it is worth thinking beyond whether the menu has been uploaded and asking what a prospective customer can actually learn from it. Are current prices visible? Are dishes described clearly enough for someone who has never eaten there? If you cater to common dietary requirements, can customers identify suitable options without calling first? If certain menus are available only at particular times, is that distinction obvious?
The goal is not to anticipate every possible question a diner could have, but to remove avoidable uncertainty around one of the earliest and most important decisions they have to make: whether there is something here for them in the first place.
2. Show the experience through restaurant photography
Good restaurant photography is often discussed as a way to make food look appealing, but a prospective customer can use photographs for much more than deciding whether a plate looks appetising. Before they have tasted the food, walked into the dining room or spoken to a member of staff, photographs can help them form an impression of the experience they would be choosing.
That impression can answer surprisingly practical questions. What do the portions look like? How is the food presented? Is the dining room formal enough for a client lunch, relaxed enough for dinner with friends, or lively enough for a birthday? What is the seating like? Is there outdoor space? Someone planning an anniversary dinner in DC may be looking for a very different atmosphere from someone choosing somewhere for a casual Sunday lunch in Bethesda, even if both customers like exactly the same menu.
There is evidence that diners actively use visual content when making these decisions. In Toast’s survey of 850 people who use social media at least weekly, 84% said they preferred seeing photographs of a restaurant’s food and drinks, while 57% said pictures of food were the type of restaurant social content most likely to influence their decision to visit. Almost half, 47%, also said they preferred seeing photographs of a restaurant’s décor and atmosphere.
More recent academic research has reached a similar conclusion about the informational role of restaurant imagery: a 2025 study of customer-generated restaurant photographs found that they influenced how informative and persuasive customers perceived restaurant content to be, as well as their intention to visit.
3. Make hours, location, and reservations easy to find
Once a customer likes what you serve and has a sense of the experience, there is still a more practical question to answer: can they actually make your restaurant work for the plans they have?
Opening hours and an address are the obvious starting points, but the information someone needs can depend on where the restaurant is and why they are going there. Someone trying to fit lunch into a working day in downtown DC may need to know how close the restaurant is to a Metro station and whether lunch service ends at a particular time, while someone driving to dinner in Alexandria or Hyattsville may care about parking. A group planning dinner may need to know whether reservations are required, whether larger parties can book online, and what happens if the booking size exceeds the restaurant’s standard reservation limit.
Some of this information may already appear before a customer reaches the website. Google Business Profiles, for example, can display a restaurant’s hours, dining and delivery options, contact information, menu, reservations and online ordering directly in Search and Maps. That makes consistency important. If Google says you close at 10 p.m., your website says 11 p.m., and Instagram contains a post announcing different seasonal hours, the customer is left to decide which version to trust.
The same applies when something about visiting the restaurant requires more planning than usual. Parking instructions, accessibility information, private dining details, policies for large parties or children, reservation requirements, and changes to service hours will not matter equally to every restaurant or every customer.
4. Use reviews to build confidence
There are parts of the restaurant experience that a prospective customer cannot properly assess from your own website, no matter how well the site is written. You can describe the service as attentive, the kitchen as consistent, or the experience as reliable, but those are claims about your own business. Before choosing you, customers will look for evidence from people who have already been through the experience.
A testimonial such as “Amazing food and great service” tells a prospective customer that somebody was happy, but it gives them relatively little to evaluate. This is one reason reviews become particularly useful later in the decision. A customer who already likes the menu and the restaurant itself may no longer be asking whether people generally think the food is good; they may be looking through recent reviews for evidence about the part of the experience that matters to their particular plans.
They may be trying to gauge how long people tend to wait during busy periods, whether service remains consistent when the restaurant is full, whether staff responds well when an order is wrong, or something else goes badly, and whether the experience described by customers broadly matches what the restaurant promises.
The restaurant’s website will not necessarily be where they look for those answers. Google reviews, customer photographs, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and other platforms can all become part of the evaluation, which means the customer’s impression of the restaurant is being assembled from information the business publishes and information other people publish about it. A restaurant cannot control every part of that picture, but it can pay attention to where customers repeatedly encounter uncertainty and whether the information it controls helps resolve it.
5. Account for customers dining in
Not every prospective customer visiting a restaurant website is deciding whether to book a table or walk through the door. Some are deciding whether to order delivery, collect a takeaway, use curbside pickup, or drive through on the way somewhere else. For those customers, the restaurant is still being evaluated, but the information they need and the experience they are buying can be very different from those of someone planning to dine in.
That is no longer a peripheral part of the restaurant business. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2025 Off-Premises Restaurant Trends research, nearly 75% of restaurant traffic now happens off-premises, while 47% of adults pick up takeout at least weekly and 37% order delivery weekly. The research covers takeout, delivery, drive-through, and curbside service, which makes the larger point important: a substantial share of customers may interact with a restaurant without having the conventional dine-in experience at all.
What those customers need from the website depends on how the restaurant actually serves them. For restaurants that offer them, drive-through and curbside pickup create different information needs from standard takeout or delivery.
Someone collecting an order may need to know where pickup happens and whether they should come inside, use a designated pickup area, or wait curbside, while a drive-through customer may need to know whether the full menu is available through that channel. Another person ordering delivery may need to know whether the restaurant delivers to their address, whether they can order directly or through a third-party platform, and what fees or minimums apply. Catering, family meals, meal bundles, and other off-premises services create their own questions where a restaurant offers them.
Technology becomes part of that experience as well. The same research mentioned above found that 94% of consumers consider speed critical to a good off-premises experience, while three-quarters of delivery customers said technology-enabled ordering and payment options are important to them. An “Order Online” button therefore needs to do more than exist: customers should be able to understand what kind of order they are placing, where it will be fulfilled, and what happens next without having to piece the process together across several platforms.
The website should ultimately reflect all the ways customers can actually buy from your restaurant, rather than unconsciously treating dining in as the default and everything else as an add-on.
Your customers can tell you what the website is missing
Some of the most useful information about a restaurant website may never appear in its analytics. It is sitting in the questions customers ask before they buy. If people regularly call to ask whether you deliver to their neighbourhood, message on Instagram about catering, confirm whether a particular menu is still available or repeatedly seek clarification about something you thought was obvious, those questions are useful data. The same applies when your staff find themselves explaining the same thing over and over again in person, on the phone, or in direct messages.
Over time, those questions can reveal a gap between the information your restaurant currently provides and the information customers actually need to make decisions. They can also reveal changes in customer behaviour that the website has not caught up with yet, particularly as the ways people discover, evaluate and buy from restaurants continue to change.
That makes customer questions useful input for the website itself. Keep track of what people repeatedly ask, where they ask it, and what they were trying to do when the question came up.