Open the Doors · Post-launch care plan
The site is live. Now keep it that way.
Sixteen lessons got you a deployed restaurant website. This page is the rhythm that keeps it from going stale — three checkpoints at 30, 60, and 90 days, with one specific action per checkpoint and the tool that does it.
Days 1–30
Settle the launch.
The first thirty days are about catching the small things — a typo, a wrong number, a holiday hours mismatch — before they compound. Four touches, each under fifteen minutes.
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Week 1 — open the site on three phones.
Day 7Yours, a friend's, and one with cellular data only. Tap every link. Tap the phone number. Tap directions. Open the menu. Anything that doesn't load in two seconds gets noted.
Run the mobile check → -
Week 2 — confirm GBP and site match.
Day 14Open Google Maps and your site side by side. Hours, address, phone, primary category, holiday hours — every field should match exactly. The diner who searches Google sees the GBP card first; the one who clicks through sees the site. They have to tell the same story.
Grade your GBP → -
Week 3 — ask for the first five reviews.
Day 21Hand five regular customers a QR postcard at the table. Same script as Lesson 13. Don't ask the unhappy ones; don't ask the ones who already left a review. The first five anchor your rating; subsequent reviews trend toward whatever the first five averaged.
Open the review log → -
Week 4 — read Google Search Console.
Day 30Open
Plain-English GSC guide →search.google.com/search-consoleand skim the four reports that matter: Coverage (any pages excluded?), Performance (which queries hit you?), Core Web Vitals (any reds?), Sitemaps (submitted? indexed?). Most operators discover one fix-it-now issue in their first read.
Days 31–60
Respond to the first signal.
By day sixty you have real reservation data, real GBP impressions, and a real review or two. The rhythm shifts from watching to responding.
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Respond to every review within 48 hours.
Every reviewFour archetypes — the glowing 5-star, the disappointed 3-star, the angry 1-star, the legitimate-complaint 2-star. Each has a template; each takes under 90 seconds. Reviews you don't respond to look like a restaurant that doesn't read its own reviews.
Open the response playbook → -
Update the menu page when the menu actually changes.
When triggeredA new dish, a price change, a section drop. Open the L14 generator, edit the menu widget, re-download, re-deploy. About 10 minutes end-to-end. The diner who arrives expecting the bucatini they saw online finding it 86'd from the printed menu is a leak you can plug.
Open the generator → -
One holiday-hours touch before each US restaurant holiday.
Every ~6 weeksSet the hours on the site AND in GBP simultaneously, two weeks before. Mother's Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, the December stretch, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras. Operators who skip this lose calls on every one.
Open store hours →
Days 61–90
Tune the rhythm.
By day ninety you have ninety days of data and a clear sense of where the site earns its keep and where it doesn't. Two moves — one quantitative, one qualitative — set the cadence for everything after.
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Re-run every grader you ran during the bootcamp.
Day 90Restaurant Audit, GBP Grader, SEO Grader, Schema Check, Page Health. The scores from day-zero baseline you against day-ninety reality. Where you improved, repeat the move. Where you slipped, do the lesson again.
Run the Restaurant Audit → -
Set the long-term cadence.
Day 90Lesson 16's rhythm-calendar widget exports an
Open Lesson 16 →.icsfile you import into Google / Apple / Outlook Calendar. The four recurring tasks — hours check (monthly), reviews triage (biweekly), regenerate + redeploy (monthly), SEO sanity (quarterly) — keep running on autopilot. Set them once, do them on autopilot.