What should be on a restaurant website? The 7 pages that matter.

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Why seven?

Picture the guest who decides whether to eat at your place tonight. She's on the sidewalk a block away, phone in one hand, deciding between you and the spot with the line out front. She thumbs your name, the site loads, and in a few seconds she's either walking toward your door or tapping back to the map. What should be on a restaurant website is whatever answers her three questions before she gives up: what kind of food, where, and how to book. Seven pages carry that load. Everything else is weight.

This is a field guide, not a theory of websites. Each of the seven pages below has one job, and the test for every page is the same: does it move a real person from the sidewalk to a booked table, or does it just sit there. A "Careers" page nobody updates, an "Awards" list from three years ago, a "Gallery" of forty captionless photos — each one dilutes the pages that convert and muddies what Google thinks the site is about. If a page doesn't have a job, it doesn't earn its place on the nav bar.

1. Homepage

Job: answer three questions in under five seconds — what kind of food, where, and how to book.

Your homepage is not your autobiography. It's a decision tool. A first-time visitor is standing on the sidewalk, phone in hand, deciding between you and the place next door. They need: cuisine type, neighborhood, vibe, hours, and a reservation button. Everything else is below the fold.

• One-sentence pitch under your name (e.g., "Neighborhood Italian · Silver Spring · family-run since 1998")
• Today's hours, visible without scrolling
• Reservation or order-online button, visible without scrolling
• One hero photo that shows the room or the food — not a stock image, not a logo on black
• A short social proof signal: a review quote, a press mention, a star rating

2. Menu

Job: let someone decide what to eat before they arrive.

On nearly every restaurant site, this is the most-visited page — and the one most restaurants get wrong. The menu should be real HTML text — not a PDF, not a photo of a printed card, not an iframe from a third-party widget. Real text means: Google can crawl it, phones can render it at readable sizes, screen readers can read it, and you can update it in thirty seconds when you change the prix fixe.

• Dish names, descriptions, and prices in real text
• Organized by course or category with clear headings
• Dietary markers (V, VG, GF) if you have them
• A "last updated" date so customers know the prices are current

If your menu is a PDF, you've already lost the customer who's reading it on a phone in direct sunlight.

3. About / Our Story

Job: give a first-time customer a reason to choose you over the identical-looking restaurant next door.

This page is where you differentiate. Not with a wall of text about your "passion for food" — every restaurant says that. With specifics: where you source, who cooks, how long you've been here, what the room looks like, why this neighborhood. Two paragraphs and a real photo of the team is worth more than a thousand words of generic "our philosophy" copy.

4. Reservations / Order Online

Job: convert intent into action with the fewest possible clicks.

This might be a dedicated page or a persistent button that lives on every page — either way, the customer should never be more than one tap away from booking a table or starting an order. If you use OpenTable, Resy, Tock, or another platform, embed the widget directly in your page rather than linking out. Every click away from your site is a chance for the customer to get distracted.

If you do your own takeout or delivery, route orders through your POS (Toast, Square, ChowNow) rather than through third-party marketplace apps. The commission a marketplace keeps — often 15–30% per order — stays in the house on every order that comes through your own page instead.

5. Private Events / Catering

Job: capture high-value inquiries that have nowhere to live on Google.

This is the page most restaurants forget — and it's often the highest-revenue page on the site. Private events, buyouts, catering menus, and group bookings don't have a Google Business Profile field. If someone searches "private dining Bethesda" and you don't have a page with those words on it, you're invisible to that search entirely.

• What spaces you offer (private room, patio buyout, full restaurant)
• Capacity ranges
• A sample catering or events menu (even a simplified one)
• A simple inquiry form: name, email, date, party size, and a "tell us more" field

6. Location & Hours

Job: remove every possible friction point between "I want to go" and "I'm walking in the door."

This page should have: your full address as copyable text (not an image), an embedded Google Map, today's hours prominently displayed, parking information, public transit directions if applicable, and your phone number as a tap-to-call link. If you have multiple locations, each one gets its own section with its own map and hours.

7. Contact

Job: give people a way to reach a human without calling during dinner rush.

A working contact form, your email, your phone, and your social links. Keep it simple. The form should ask for name, email, and message — nothing else. If you want to capture different types of inquiries (press, events, general), a single dropdown is fine. Don't make people fill out a twelve-field form to ask when you open on Sundays.

Pages you probably don't need

Cut these unless you have a specific, active reason to keep them:

• Gallery. Put your best three photos on the homepage and your menu. A dedicated gallery page with forty unlabeled images is a bounce factory.
• Blog. Unless you're going to publish at least once a month with real content, an empty blog page with one post from two years ago hurts more than it helps. It tells Google and customers that the site is neglected.
• Awards / Press. Fold a short press mention into the homepage or About page. A full page dedicated to awards reads as self-congratulatory unless you're updating it regularly.
• Careers. Use your Google Business Profile or a jobs platform instead. A "Careers" page with no listings looks like you're either not hiring or not maintaining your site.

The structure that earns its keep

Build the page in this order. The sequence isn't about importance — every one of the seven matters — it's about unblocking the diner's walk earliest. Ship the pages that get a hungry stranger from the search result to a held table first; ship the pages that catch the off-the-walk inquiries last. Each step maps to a slot in your sitemap.

1. Build the Menu page first — real HTML, organized by course, priced, dated. It's the most-visited page; if nothing else ships, this one has to.
2. Build the Location & Hours page next — copyable address, embedded map, today's hours, parking, transit. This is the arrival; it removes the last friction before the door.
3. Wire up Reservations / Order — embed the widget, make it one tap, and put the button above the fold on every page.
4. Build the Homepage on top of those three — cuisine, location, vibe, today's hours, and the CTA, all answered in the first few seconds.
5. Write the About / Our Story page — sourcing, team, the room, one real photo. This is the tiebreak, so it can follow the conversion path, not lead it.
6. Stand up the Private Events page — spaces, capacity ranges, a sample menu, an inquiry form. It catches the high-value inquiry that has nowhere else to land.
7. Finish with Contact — a working form, email, phone, social. Keep it to name, email, and message.

Seven pages. Each one has a job. If your site has more than this, ask yourself what each extra page is doing. If the answer is "nothing," cut it. Your visitors and Google will both thank you.