Four Things a Restaurant Website Needs Above the Fold

Picture the person your website is actually for. They are on a pavement, one hand holding a phone, the other holding a bag. It is 19:40 on a Friday. They have tapped your name in Google Maps and landed on your homepage, and they want to know four things: are you open, where exactly are you, can I get a table, and what do you serve.

That is the whole job. Everything else on the page is decoration.

Most restaurant websites answer none of those four questions in the first screen. They open with a fifteen-second video of a chef plating something, a logo, and a scroll arrow. By the time the video has loaded, the person has closed the tab and opened the listing for the bistro two streets over.

The four things, in order

Opening hours, written out. Not "see our Facebook page." Not an image of hours that a screen reader and a search engine both ignore. Plain text, today's hours visible without scrolling, and a note when today differs from the usual (public holidays, kitchen closing earlier than the bar). If you close between lunch and dinner, say so in the same place. That gap catches people out constantly.

Location, with a tappable map link. Street address as text, plus a link that opens Maps. If you are inside a courtyard, on the first floor, or behind an unmarked door, write one sentence about it. "Entrance is through the passage next to the pharmacy" saves you three phone calls a night.

A booking link that works on a phone. One button, above the fold, that opens something a person can complete with a thumb in under a minute. Not a mailto link. Not a form that asks for a postal address before it asks for a date.

A menu you can read on a phone. Real text on a real page. Prices included. We will come back to this one because it is the single most common failure.

Add a phone number as text you can tap, and you have covered the honest majority of visits.

Failure one: the hero video

Video on a restaurant homepage feels like the premium choice. It is usually the most expensive mistake on the page.

A video hero pushes everything useful below the fold, adds weight that hurts you on a phone connection, and delivers information nobody asked for. Nobody arrives at your site wondering what your dining room looks like in slow motion. They arrive wondering whether you have a table at eight.

There is a mild version of the same problem: the full-screen still image with your logo centred on it and nothing else. It looks like a magazine cover and functions like a locked door. Use a photograph, absolutely, but let it sit behind or beside the information rather than instead of it.

If you love the video, keep it. Put it further down the page, where somebody who already knows they are coming might enjoy it.

Failure two: the PDF menu

Someone taps "Menu" and their phone downloads a file. The file opens in a viewer, at A4 proportions, zoomed to about eleven percent. They pinch. They scroll sideways. They give up.

PDFs are built for paper. On a phone they are hostile, and search engines struggle to make useful sense of them, so all those dish names you would love to rank for sit inside a document that reads like a fax. If someone searches for a specific dish plus your town, a PDF is not going to be what shows up.

The replacement is not complicated: a normal web page with headings for each course and text for each dish. It reflows on any screen, it can be updated in a minute when the fish changes, and it can carry allergen information properly rather than in a footnote at four-point type.

Keep the PDF if you want it for printing. Just do not make it the thing behind the Menu button.

Failure three: the buried phone number

A surprising number of restaurant sites hide the phone number in the footer, or worse, only inside a contact form.

Large groups still want to call. So do people with a question your booking flow cannot answer, guests who never took to booking online, anyone whose party size changed at the last minute, and the person standing outside who cannot find the door. Making them scroll to the bottom of a long page, or fill in a form and wait, does not modernise them. It sends them elsewhere.

Put the number in the header as tappable text. It costs you nothing and it catches the bookings your online flow would have lost.

The same logic applies to the booking button. It should be visible when the page loads and it should stay reachable as the visitor scrolls, either as a fixed element or repeated at each natural stopping point.

Failure four: nobody tested it on a phone

Your website was designed on a laptop, approved on a laptop, and is read almost entirely on phones.

The things that break are boring and specific. Text over a photograph that becomes unreadable at small sizes. A cookie banner covering the booking button. A hamburger menu where "Reservations" is the eleventh item. Buttons too small or too close together to hit accurately with a thumb. A booking widget that loads in an iframe sized for a desktop and gets cut off on the right.

None of that shows up in a desktop review. All of it shows up the first time you actually try to book a table on your own site while walking.

Run the test properly once a quarter, and always after any change to the site. Ask two people who do not work for you to book a table for four on Saturday and watch them without helping. You will learn more in five minutes than from any analytics dashboard.

What to fix this week

If you only touch one thing, make it the menu. Move it from PDF to a real page and you have improved the experience for the majority of your visitors and given search engines something to work with at the same time.

After that, in order: put hours and address in text above the fold, put a tappable phone number in the header, make the booking button the most obvious thing on the screen, and push the video down the page where it belongs.

All of this is rearrangement, and most of it can be done in an afternoon by whoever currently updates your site. No redesign, no agency retainer. The person standing outside at 19:40 will never tell you they nearly gave up. They will just be sitting at your table instead of somebody else's.