Most are built to look good in a meeting and fail on a phone in a car park.
Most restaurant websites are built to look good in a meeting and fail on a phone in a car park. Here is what actually earns its cost.
THE FIVE THINGS THAT MATTER
A menu that isn't a PDF. A PDF cannot be read by search engines, cannot be read aloud by an assistant, and pinches to nothing on a phone. Your menu is the most-visited page on your site and the most common thing to get wrong. It should be text on a page.
Your hours, correct, in one place. Wrong hours are worse than no hours. Every restaurant has at least two sources — the website and Google — and they disagree more often than not. Every hour of disagreement is somebody arriving at a locked door, or not arriving at all.
A way to book that takes under thirty seconds. Not a form with twelve fields. Not "email us". A phone number that dials on tap, or a booking flow with a date, a time and a number of people.
Photographs of your actual room. Stock photography of a generic restaurant is detectable and it costs you trust at the exact moment somebody is deciding. A phone photo of your real room at seven in the evening beats a beautiful photo of somewhere else.
Speed on a mid-range Android on 4G. Not on the designer's laptop. Most of your traffic is a phone on a mediocre connection, and every second of load time costs you visitors who never tell you they left.
WHAT DOESN'T MATTER AS MUCH AS YOU THINK
Animations. A carousel of six hero images. A page explaining your philosophy. An our-story longer than four sentences. These are not wrong, they are simply not what determines whether the phone rings.
THE TEST
Open your site on your own phone, on data rather than wifi, standing outside. Time how long until you can read something useful. Then try to book a table in under thirty seconds without pinching or zooming.
Most owners have never done this on their own site. It is the most useful ten minutes you will spend on it.