The UK has a strong restaurant scene. The food is good, the venues are varied, and people are actively looking for places to eat - especially in coastal towns and city centres where competition is high.
But a surprising number of restaurants have websites that work against them. Not because they look bad. Because they're not set up to convert a curious visitor into an actual booking.
We've looked at a lot of them - including venues here in Bournemouth and across the UK. Here's what comes up most often.
1. The booking button is hard to find
This should be the most obvious thing on the page. On many restaurant sites it's buried in the navigation, hidden in the footer, or simply absent on mobile.
If someone has to look for the booking button, some of them won't find it. They'll close the tab and try somewhere else.
Fix: Put a booking button in the header, above the fold on every device. Make it impossible to miss.
2. The menu is a PDF
We covered this in a previous article about restaurant websites but it keeps coming up so it's worth repeating.
PDFs are awkward on phones. They don't scale properly, they require pinching and zooming, and they don't tell search engines anything useful about what you serve.
Fix: A simple web-based menu page. Doesn't need to be fancy - just readable on a phone and easy to update when the menu changes.
3. The homepage loads slowly
Most people checking a restaurant website are doing it on a phone, on mobile data, while they're out. If the homepage takes more than three seconds to load, a significant number of those people will leave.
Large hero images, video backgrounds, and too many scripts are the usual suspects.
Fix: Compress images, cut the video background, and simplify the page structure. A fast, clean homepage converts better than a slow, impressive one.
4. No Google Business Profile, or one that's out of date
This isn't technically a website problem but it affects how people find the website. If your Google Business Profile shows the wrong opening hours, an old phone number, or no photos, that's what people see before they even visit your site.
Fix: Claim and complete your Google Business Profile if you haven't. Update it whenever hours, contact details, or the menu changes. Add photos regularly.
5. The site isn't mobile-first
A lot of restaurant websites were built for desktop and adapted for mobile as an afterthought. The result is text that's too small, buttons that are too close together, and a layout that requires horizontal scrolling.
Given that most hospitality browsing happens on phones, this is a significant problem.
Fix: If you're rebuilding the site, start with mobile and expand to desktop - not the other way around. If you're working with what you have, at minimum make sure text is readable and buttons are tappable without zooming.
6. No social proof visible on the site
People trust other people. If your restaurant has good reviews on Google or TripAdvisor, some version of that should be visible on your website. A simple quote or a star rating goes a long way for someone who doesn't know you yet.
Fix: Pull in a few recent reviews. Keep them current. Even a "As seen on TripAdvisor" badge with your rating is better than nothing.
7. Contact information is hard to find
Phone number, address, and a map. These should be on every page - or at minimum extremely easy to find from every page. It's surprising how often this isn't the case.
Fix: Add contact details to the footer and make the address a clickable link that opens Google Maps on mobile.
8. No way to take bookings directly
This is the bigger structural issue. If you're relying on phone bookings or a third-party platform that pulls guests off your site, you're losing some of those potential customers in the friction.
A booking system that sits on your own website - where guests can book without leaving your page - changes that.
Fix: Our Reservations platform is designed exactly for this. Customers book from your website, you manage everything from a single dashboard, and there's no commission on each booking.
Most of these fixes don't require a full rebuild. Some of them can be done this week.
If you want to know where your specific site is losing people, we offer a practical review for hospitality venues in Bournemouth and across the UK. We go through the site as a guest would and tell you exactly what's costing you bookings.