Restaurant website design built around your menu, your hours and how guests order

Who is restaurant website design for?

Restaurant website design is the planning, writing, design and build of a restaurant’s site, and the running of it after launch. We offer website design for restaurants at three levels. A local restaurant has one dining room or kitchen, and the owner decides. A regional group runs several locations, with managers between the owner and the line. A national brand sells in many states.

The level changes the work: more locations, more menus and more tools to connect. The market’s ranges for each level are in the pricing section on this page, and the full picture is on what a website costs. If you want the general case first, start with web design.

What changes when the site belongs to a restaurant?

The menu does. A restaurant site is mostly a menu with prices, and two rules can reach it. Both shape the build.

FDA’s menu labeling rule, 21 CFR 101.11, defines a menu to include “menus on the Internet,” and it requires calories for each standard menu item at a covered establishment: a restaurant that is part of a chain of 20 or more locations doing business under the same name and offering substantially the same menu items. And in California, the Attorney General’s page says a restaurant’s mandatory fee is exempt from the hidden-fee law’s rules so long as the fee is clearly and conspicuously displayed wherever prices are shown.

So each menu page we would build has a fee line beside the prices and a calorie field on each dish, filled with wording you or your counsel supply. Whether a rule applies to you is for your counsel to decide, and the rules themselves, with their section numbers, are set out on our restaurant marketing page.

Which pages does a restaurant website need?

Start with the menus: one page for each you serve, such as dinner, brunch, drinks and catering. Google’s guidelines for Business Profiles say a full menu can be meal-specific and link to other menu pages, and a page for each menu fits that. Then the locations. Each gets a page with its address, hours and any difference in what’s served.

Around those, a page for private dining and catering with its request form, an about page that shows the people guests will meet, and a contact page. A restaurant inside a hotel gets a page of its own, as well as its own Business Profile, since Google’s guidelines list a restaurant, cafe or bar inside a hotel among the co-located businesses that should each have one.

Keep the pages distinct. Two location pages that say the same thing help no one, and the search side of that is covered on restaurant SEO.

How should the site keep the menu and hours right?

The menu first. We would enter each dish and price once, in one list, and let the dinner page, the catering page and the markup read from it. A price changes in one place, and the pages agree. Who updates the list, your team or ours, is settled in your proposal.

Hours need the same care. Google’s guidelines for restaurants say to use the hours when diners can sit down and dine in; if that isn’t possible, takeout hours, then drive-through hours, and delivery hours only as a last resort. They also allow special hours for particular days, like holidays. The site shows the same hours as the profile, so a guest sees one answer wherever they look. Google’s structured data page shows seasonal hours with a start and end date, and it has fields for the start and end of a seasonal closure, so a closed stretch can be told to search engines as well as printed on the page.

How do guests order and book from the site?

There are three paths, and we plan each one separately. Ordering goes to the tool you already use, whether it is your own or a delivery app’s, through a button on the menu page. Tables go to your reservation tool. Requests for catering and events go to a form that reaches the person who prices them. This page names no product, because the tool is your choice.

For the markup, schema.org lets a food establishment say whether it accepts reservations, with a URL at which they can be made as one of the values. And where a guest books something that has open times, such as a tasting or a walk-through of the private room, they choose from the open times you set.

What goes into the build that guests never see?

The site is built in our own system on Astro. Each page carries structured data. Google’s local business markup uses the Restaurant type, and its example for a restaurant carries the cuisine, price range, telephone number, opening hours and the address of the menu. Schema.org describes a Menu as “A structured representation of food or drink items available from a FoodEstablishment,” with sections and items. We write the markup to match what the page says.

A sitemap, IndexNow and robots rules that let search and AI crawlers read the site come with it. Launch checks hold back any page whose facts are still unconfirmed, so a draft fee line or a holiday-hours line can’t reach the live site.

What does web design for wineries add?

A winery sits close to a restaurant in what its site needs: a menu or wine list, hours, and a way to book a table or a tasting. Schema.org has a type for it, Winery, defined as “A winery,” and it sits under FoodEstablishment, so the reservation and menu properties apply.

Wine adds a federal advertising rule. In 27 CFR part 4, section 4.60 names a person in business as a producer, rectifier, blender, importer or wholesaler of wine; it doesn’t name a retailer. Section 4.61 says an advertisement includes statements in “menu, wine card” and “any other media.” Section 4.62(a) requires the advertisement to display the responsible advertiser’s name, city and State, or the name and other contact information, such as a telephone number, website or email address.

Whether part 4 covers a given page is for your counsel to decide. On a winery site we would leave a fixed place for the advertiser’s name and contact details, and for any statement your counsel wants on the page.

What does catering website design involve?

Catering website design is three things: a menu, a request form and a route to the person who prices the job. The catering menu is a menu of its own, so it gets its own page, built from the same list as the others. The form asks what you would ask on the phone: the date, how many people, where, and any dietary needs your kitchen should know about.

Each request goes to the person who quotes it, and a group with several locations can route it by location. Events held in your space are a close cousin of this work, and the buyers for them are covered on event planners.

What happens to our current website, domain and email?

If you have a site now, moving it is a site migration. Each old address, menu and event pages included, gets a permanent redirect to its new page, so a link from a food blog or a QR code on a table card still lands.

Your domain stays registered where it is. Before launch we save a copy of your DNS records, then change only the records that point the domain at the new site. The registrar, the nameservers and your email settings stay as they are.

Will a new restaurant website rank on Google?

A site can be built so search engines read it easily. Where it ranks depends on the restaurants around you, on links from other sites and on your Business Profile and reviews. Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO says it plainly: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” We do not guarantee search rankings, traffic, or uninterrupted uptime.

What we control is the site: a page for each menu and location, clear headings, structured data and fast pages. The monthly search work after launch, from the Business Profile to links earned, is set out on restaurant SEO.

How do Google’s AI features treat a restaurant website?

The build needs nothing special for them. Google’s guide to AI features and your website says a page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and that you don’t need new machine readable files, AI text files or markup. There’s no special schema.org data to add either.

Search Console has one setting to know about. The Search generative AI control reached all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026, with include as the default, and Google says it isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of Search. Whether you stay included is your call. Our GEO work makes a site easier for AI answers to find, read and cite.

Can we see a website you’ve built?

One: the Alvy Logistics website, a 70-page rebuild on Astro in our own system, which we still run with Alvy. Alvy is owned by our co-founder Noah Alvarez, and DSI is an Alvy company. It is a freight site, so it shows how we plan, build and look after a site of that size. It tells you nothing about restaurant work, and we make no claim that it does. For a restaurant, this page says what we would build.

How does a restaurant website project start?

With a 15-minute call. Nicolas Perez or Noah Alvarez, our co-founders, will ask about your restaurant or group and how guests find and order from you now. Bring your current site’s address and your menu. A written proposal follows, then the research and page plan, the words, menu and design, a private preview you check, and the launch. After that, a monthly plan keeps the site running, and your proposal sets that plan’s scope.

We formed Midnite Systems in 2023 and work with businesses across the US from our office in Valencia. Book a 15-minute call, or read what a website costs first.