Restaurant website: the 10 mistakes that cost you bookings

A guest looking for a table does not read your website, they skim it, often on a phone, sometimes on the street. If they cannot find your opening hours, your menu and a way to book within a few seconds, they move on to the next restaurant. Here are the 10 restaurant website mistakes that cost you reservations, with how to spot and fix each one.

We promise no percentage of extra bookings. This guide gives you a checking method based on Google's and web.dev's official documentation, which you can apply tonight with your phone in hand.

Restaurant website mistakes 1 to 3: mobile, speed and the PDF menu

Mistake 1: a site designed for desktop and squeezed onto mobile afterwards. Google indexes and ranks your site from its mobile version (mobile-first indexing). Its documentation asks for equivalent primary content, titles, meta descriptions and structured data on mobile and desktop. If your mobile version hides the menu, the hours or the introduction text, Google does not see them either.

How to spot it: open your site on your phone and check that everything on desktop is there. You can fold content into accordions to save space, but not make it depend on an action Googlebot will not perform: Google's documentation states it does not load content that requires user interaction (swiping, clicking, typing).

Mistake 2: a slow site. web.dev defines three metrics, the Core Web Vitals, with "good" thresholds measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, separately for mobile and desktop:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint, when the largest element appears): 2.5 seconds or less;
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint, responsiveness to taps): 200 milliseconds or less;
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift, visual stability): 0.1 or less.

How to spot it: test your home page and your booking page with PageSpeed Insights, looking at the mobile tab first. The usual fixes are the same everywhere: images resized to their display size and compressed, background video not loaded on mobile, third-party scripts (chat, pixels, reviews) limited to those you really use.

Mistake 3: the menu as a PDF. This is the most widespread mistake in hospitality. A PDF opens in another window, forces pinch-zooming, downloads slowly on 4G and is often just an image of the printed menu. Google can index PDFs, as its list of indexable file types confirms, but a well-built web page gives you far more control: headings, prices, updates, links, readability.

How to fix it: publish the menu as text on a page of your site, with sections (starters, mains, desserts, wines), and keep the PDF only as a printable version if you want it. We cover the method in our guide on the online menu: HTML or PDF.

Restaurant website mistakes 4 to 6: practical info and the booking button

Mistake 4: practical information that is hard to find. Address, opening hours, phone, directions, closing days, group bookings: these are the reasons people open a restaurant website. They must fit in one glance, not sit in a banner image or behind a dropdown.

Simple rules:

• write them as text, not in an image, so Google and screen readers can read them;
• repeat address, hours and phone in the footer of every page;
• make the address a link to a map and the phone number tappable to start a call from a phone (a tel: link);
• show exceptions (bank holidays, annual closure, one-off closures) somewhere visible, with an end date.

Mistake 5: a booking button that is hard to see. This is the page that must make people book, not just inform them. If the button is grey on grey, buried at the bottom or labelled "Contact", you lose guests who had already decided.

Checking method, on mobile:

• the button is visible without scrolling on the home page;
• it follows the visitor (a fixed bar at the bottom or top of the screen) or repeats in several places;
• its label says what it does: "Book a table" beats "Submit" or "Learn more";
• its touch area is large enough: web.dev recommends roughly 48 × 48 pixels for a tap target, with about 8 pixels between neighbouring targets;
• it is the same everywhere: one main button per screen, not three competing links (booking, private hire, contact).

Mistake 6: a booking flow that is too long or never tested. Many restaurants install a booking module and never open it again. Problems hide there: a module that leaves your site for a page without your logo, useless fields, an unreadable error message, a button hidden by a cookie banner. If you use SevenRooms, our article on the SevenRooms booking widget in Webflow explains how to embed it without leaving the site.

How to spot it: book a table yourself, start to finish, on a phone, over 4G, and time it. Also have someone who does not know the site do it.

Restaurant website mistakes 7 and 8: Google Business Profile and structured data

Mistake 7: a site that does not say the same thing as your Google Business Profile. Your Google profile is often the first thing a guest sees. If it says you open at 7:00 pm and your site says 7:30 pm, you create doubt, and one booking fewer. Google's guidelines ask that your details represent your business as it exists in the real world: the name as shown on your storefront and website, a precise address, a phone number and website specific to the location, regular hours, special hours for holidays, and updates as soon as something changes.

What to do:

• compare, line by line, name, address, phone, hours and booking link across the profile, the site and your other presences (social networks, directories);
• use the profile's special hours for bank holidays;
• point the profile's link at the most useful page, for example booking;
• if you have several locations, give each its own page and its own profile.

We go into the profile in detail in our Google Business Profile guide for restaurants.

Mistake 8: no structured data. Structured data is invisible code that describes your business to search engines. For a local business, Google requires at least the name (name) and the address (address), and recommends opening hours (openingHoursSpecification), phone (telephone), URL (url), price range (priceRange), cuisine (servesCuisine) and the menu address (menu). It recommends using the most specific type, here Restaurant, in JSON-LD format.

Two cautions from Google's documentation:

• markup must reflect what is visible on the page: do not mark up an hour or a price visitors cannot read;
• following these guidelines does not guarantee enhanced display in results. It is hygiene, not a promise.

Check the result with the schema.org validator.

Restaurant website mistakes 9 and 10: missing tracking and outdated content

Mistake 9: not knowing where bookings come from. Without measurement, you cannot tell whether the site, the Google profile, Instagram or an ad campaign fills your tables. Google Analytics 4 calls a key event an action that is particularly important to your business, and any event you collect can become a key event. For a restaurant that will typically be a click on the booking button, a confirmed booking if your tool reports it back to the site, a click on the phone number or a private-hire request.

Method:

• list the 3 or 4 actions that really matter;
• have them measured, then mark them as key events in Analytics;
• tag your campaign links (emails, social, ads) to tell sources apart;
• with an embedded booking widget, check that the confirmation is tied to the original visit (a technical point to test with your developer);
• respect consent to trackers (GDPR): set up measurement in line with your cookie banner.

If you invest in advertising, this is the foundation: without this measurement, you cannot link a euro spent to covers.

Mistake 10: outdated content. Last season's menu, a past event still announced, summer hours in the middle of winter, a photo of a dish that no longer exists. Each inconsistency erodes trust, and a guest who finds a closed door keeps a bad memory.

Useful habits:

• a review date: each quarter, reread every page against the current menu;
• one person responsible for updates, with a simple tool to change the menu, hours and events without going through a developer;
• seasonal pages that you reactivate instead of recreating.

How to audit your restaurant website in 30 minutes

Take your phone, a 4G connection and this list. Go through each point:

• the home page loads without a noticeable wait and the "Book a table" button is visible without scrolling;
• the menu reads without zooming and without downloading a PDF;
• address, hours and a tappable number are text, in the footer;
• a test booking goes through to the end, without error;
• name, address, phone and hours are identical on the site and on the Google profile;
• Restaurant markup exists and matches the visible content;
• clicks on "Book" and on the phone number are measured;
• no page mentions an event or a menu that is out of date.

If fewer than six of the eight points pass, start with mistakes 3, 5 and 7: they are quick to fix and guests notice them immediately.

Restaurant website mistakes: frequently asked questions

Need help fixing your restaurant's website?

A restaurant website does not have to be spectacular to generate bookings: it must be fast, clear and measured. But between mobile, menu, booking module, Google profile and tracking, the settings overlap quickly.

māhie builds Webflow sites for restaurants and hotels (we are a Webflow partner agency, with more than 70 sites to our name). For your site, we can:

• audit your existing site: mobile, performance, booking flow, consistency with your Google profile;
• create or redesign a custom Webflow site, with built-in booking (SevenRooms or your own tool) without leaving the site;
• set up a simple back office, so your teams edit menus, hours and events themselves;
• take care of SEO and performance, with fast, well-indexed, measured pages;
• track your bookings, from click to table, to link ad spend to covers.

Discover our websites for restaurants and hotels, then Contact māhie: we review your site together and tell you what is costing you reservations.