Restaurant Website Design: What a Restaurant Site Needs in 2026

Good restaurant website design answers four questions within seconds on a phone: are you open, where are you, what is on the menu, and how do I book or order. Put hours, address and one booking or ordering button on the first screen, keep the menu as text, and let the photos sell the food.

The Pages a Restaurant Website Needs

Most restaurants need six pages, and two of them do most of the work: the home page and the menu. The rest answer the questions a guest has before they book a table, order a meal or plan a private event.

Add a Gift Cards page if you sell them, and a Jobs page if you hire often. Keep the menu bar to five or six items, with Book or Order styled as a button so it stands out on a small screen.

The home page works like a landing page with one job. The structure in how to make a landing page applies, with "book a table" or "order now" as the single action.

Put the Menu in Text, Not a PDF

Publish the menu as live text on its own page, not as a PDF or a photo of the printed card. Text loads faster on a phone, can be read by screen readers and search engines, and takes a minute to update when a dish or a price changes.

• Split by service: lunch, dinner, drinks and desserts, with the hours each one is served.
• Show prices: guests compare before they book, and a missing price reads as an expensive one.
• Label dietary options: vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free markers, with a short key at the top.
• List allergens or say how to ask: a line such as "Tell your server about any allergies" is the minimum.
• Date seasonal menus: write "Autumn menu, from 1 October" so a guest knows it is current.
• Offer a printable copy as well, linked under the text menu, never in place of it.

Calorie labelling in the US. The FDA's menu labeling requirements apply to restaurants that are part of a chain with 20 or more locations, doing business under the same name and offering substantially the same menu items. Those restaurants must show calories for standard items on menus and menu boards. The FDA page doesn't say how this applies to online menus, so a chain should check with its own advisers.

A text menu also suits a CMS. Store each dish as an entry with a name, description, price, section and dietary tags, and the menu page builds itself. When a dish changes, you edit one entry instead of redesigning the page.

Reservations and Online Ordering

Use a dedicated tool for bookings and orders, and let the website send guests to it in one tap. A website can show a menu and a button; a booking system handles table times, covers and no-shows, and an ordering system handles payment, tickets and the kitchen.

Bookings. Embed your reservation provider's widget on the Book page, or link to it from a button in the header. Show the party size you take online and a phone number for larger groups, so a guest doesn't hit a dead end.

Ordering. The channel you send guests to changes what each order costs you. Uber Eats publishes its rates on its merchant pricing page: marketplace delivery fees of 20%, 25% or 30% depending on the plan, against a 2.5% processing fee plus $0.29 per order for its own-website ordering tool.

The pattern is the same with most providers: orders that start on your own website cost less and leave you with the guest's details. Put an Order button on your site that goes to your direct ordering page first, and keep the marketplace apps as a second route for people who already use them.

Hours, Location and Local Search

Guests check the hours and the address before they set out, so the hours and address on your site must be correct, identical everywhere and readable by machines. Write them as live text on the home and contact pages and in the footer, and mark them up with structured data so search engines can read them without guessing.

schema.org has a Restaurant type, a kind of FoodEstablishment and LocalBusiness. It supports the properties a restaurant needs:

• openingHoursSpecification for regular hours, with separate entries for each service if you close between lunch and dinner
• hasMenu for the menu page URL
• acceptsReservations as true, "Yes" or the URL of your booking page
• servesCuisine for the cuisine, such as "Neapolitan pizza"
• address, telephone and geo, matching your Google Business Profile word for word

When hours change for a holiday, update the website, the structured data and your Google Business Profile on the same day. A guest who arrives at a closed door because the website was wrong rarely gives it a second try.

Photos, Speed and Accessibility

Food photos sell a restaurant, but large photos are also what makes a restaurant site slow. Use a few strong images, compressed and sized for the screen, and build the page so the hours and the booking button appear before the photo gallery has finished loading.

• Speed: Google's guidance is a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. The hero photo is usually the largest element, so compress it first.
• Video: a looping kitchen video on the first screen costs more load time than it earns. Put it lower on the page or behind a play button.
• Contrast: WCAG 2.2 asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for body text and 3:1 for large text. Menu text laid over a dark food photo often fails this.
• Tap targets: WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum target size of 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or enough spacing around smaller targets. Phone number, map and Book buttons should be well above that.
• Alt text: describe each dish in a few words, such as "Wood-fired margherita pizza", so screen readers and image search understand it.

Use your own photos of your own dishes and room. Stock food photography sets an expectation the kitchen then has to meet. The photography website design guide covers image sizing and galleries in more depth.

Building It: Platforms and Costs

A single restaurant can run a good website for the price of a hosting plan, because the booking and ordering tools carry the heavy features. The real decisions are whether the menu lives in a CMS and who on the team will update it each week.

Framer's Free plan runs on a Framer domain, and a restaurant needs its own domain, so budget for a paid plan. For domains, design time and the full cost picture, see how much a website costs. If you are still choosing a platform, the Webflow vs Framer comparison covers editing, CMS and hosting side by side.

Whatever you choose, give two people access, write down how to change the hours and the menu, and check the site against the printed menu once a month.

Waida Templates to Start From

Waida Studio doesn't make a restaurant template, so these two are our own templates whose structure adapts well. You would add the menu collection, the booking widget and the ordering link yourself, or have us do it.

Greencore

Greencore was designed for sustainability and agriculture brands, so its natural palette suits a farm-to-table restaurant or a café that talks about its producers. It has 15 pages and CMS-powered sections that map to a menu, events and stories. It is free on Framer with a Waida account, $79 on Webflow and $39 to $49 as code.

Check out Greencore template

Camp

Camp is a code template for outdoor shops, with product pages, a slide-out cart and a three-step checkout across 41 pages. It suits a restaurant that sells packaged goods online, such as sauces, coffee or gift boxes, next to its dining pages. It comes as HTML for $39, or Next.js or Astro for $49.

Check out Camp template

Every Waida licence covers unlimited projects for one person with no attribution required, as set out in the licence terms. Browse the business templates for more starting points, or the e-commerce templates if the shop matters as much as the dining room.

Restaurant website design comes down to a few things done well: hours and the address on the first screen, a menu in text with prices and dietary labels, one button to book or order, direct ordering before the delivery apps, and photos that load fast. Get those right and keep them current, and the design can stay simple.

If you want a head start, the free Framer templates cost nothing with a Waida account, and paid versions of our templates start at $39. If no one on your team has time to adapt one, our template customisation service does it for $499, delivered in 7 days.