You run a restaurant in Hackney. Your Google Analytics shows 500 visitors a week landing on your website. Your bookings haven't moved. The food is great, the reviews are solid, but something between "I found your site" and "I'd like a table for two" is broken.
It's almost always one of these seven things.
1. Your site loads too slowly on mobile
Seventy percent of restaurant searches happen on a phone. Someone's walking through Islington, hungry, Googling "Italian near me." Your site takes five seconds to load. They've already tapped on the next result.
Every extra second of load time costs you roughly 10% of visitors. A site loading in two seconds keeps most people. A site loading in five seconds loses half of them before anything renders.
Test yours right now: paste your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights and check the mobile score. If you're under 70, your site is actively costing you bookings.
The fix: compress your images (most restaurant sites serve 3MB hero photos that should be 200KB). Remove plugins and scripts you're not using. If you're on a slow template platform, this might mean rebuilding — but the performance gain pays for itself in weeks, not months.
2. No booking button above the fold
Open your site on your phone. Can you book a table without scrolling? If the answer is no, you're losing the people who are ready to book right now.
The booking button should be the first thing someone sees. Not your story. Not your awards. Not a carousel of food photos. A clear, obvious button that says "Book a Table" in a colour that stands out.
The fix: add a sticky booking button that stays visible as the user scrolls. Link it directly to your reservation system — OpenTable, Resy, or even a simple email/phone link. Remove friction. One tap to book.
3. Bad photos of food
This is painful to hear, but phone photos of your dishes taken under kitchen lighting are hurting your bookings. Customers eat with their eyes first. A dark, blurry photo of an otherwise beautiful plate does the opposite of what you want.
One excellent hero photo is worth more than twenty mediocre ones. Show the food and the space — people want to know what it feels like to eat there, not just what arrives on the plate.
The fix: spend £300-400 on a professional food photographer for a two-hour shoot. You'll get 30-50 images you can use on the site, social media, and Google Business for the next year. It's the highest-ROI investment most restaurants can make.
4. Missing schema markup
This is the technical one. Schema markup is code that tells Google what your business is: a restaurant, with a menu, at this address, with these opening hours, at this price range, with this rating.
Without it, Google shows your site as a plain blue link. With it, Google can show your star rating, price range, address, and a "Reserve a Table" button directly in search results. Restaurants with proper schema see 20-30% higher click-through rates.
The fix: add Restaurant schema to your site. This includes your name, address, cuisine type, price range, opening hours, and menu URL. A developer can set this up in under an hour. If you're doing it yourself, Google's Structured Data Markup Helper walks you through it.
5. No Google Business Profile (or it's not optimised)
Here's a number that matters: 65% of restaurant discoveries happen on Google Maps, not on your website. People search "restaurants near me," scroll the map, and pick from the listings.
If your Google Business Profile is unclaimed, has no photos, or shows outdated hours, you're invisible in the channel that drives the most foot traffic.
The fix: claim your listing at Google Business Profile. Add 20+ high-quality photos. Make sure your hours, phone number, and address are accurate. Respond to every review — positive and negative. Post weekly updates (specials, events, new dishes). This is free and takes about two hours to set up properly.
6. Your menu is a PDF download
PDFs are invisible to Google. Your menu — the most important content on your restaurant website — is locked inside a file that search engines can't read, mobile users can't easily navigate, and you can't update without re-exporting from InDesign.
Someone on a phone taps "Menu," waits for a 4MB PDF to download, pinch-zooms to read it, and gives up. You've lost them.
The fix: convert your menu to an HTML page with real text. Every dish name, every description, every price — as text on a webpage, not embedded in an image or PDF. This lets Google index your dishes (people search for "wagyu burger Soho" — your menu page should rank for that), and it means you can update prices in two minutes without touching a design tool.
7. No mobile CTAs anywhere
Open your site on your phone and try to do three things: call the restaurant, get directions, and book a table. If any of those require more than one tap, you're losing customers.
The most common failures:
- —Phone number displayed as text but not clickable
- —Address shown but not linked to Google Maps
- —Booking button hidden in the navigation menu
- —"Contact us" page with a form instead of a phone number
The fix: make your phone number a clickable phone link. Make your address an Apple Maps or Google Maps link. Add a sticky "Book" button. Put a "Call us" button in the footer. Every page should have at least two ways to take action without scrolling.
Quick audit checklist
Run through these ten questions on your own site. If you answer "no" to more than three, your site is leaving bookings on the table.
- —Does the site load in under 3 seconds on mobile?
- —Is there a booking button visible without scrolling?
- —Are the food photos professional quality?
- —Does Google show your star rating in search results?
- —Is your Google Business Profile claimed and updated?
- —Is the menu an HTML page (not a PDF)?
- —Is the phone number clickable on mobile?
- —Does the address link to a maps app?
- —Are your opening hours visible on the homepage?
- —Can someone book a table in under two taps?
Want me to audit your site?
Send me the URL at alvaro.teran97@gmail.com with "restaurant audit" in the subject line. I'll reply within 48 hours with a short video showing you exactly what to fix. No charge, no strings.
If you want me to do the fixes, pricing starts at £1,500 for a full rebuild with everything on this list handled.
Want to know what a proper small business website costs? Read the full pricing breakdown for London in 2026.