How to Sell Websites to Restaurants

Call a restaurant at 12:15 on a Friday and you'll learn fast. The phone gets answered by someone holding three plates, they hear "website," and they hang up. Not because they're rude. Because there's a ticket rail full of orders and you are not one of them.

Restaurants can be great clients, but only if you respect their schedule and pitch the things they actually deal with every day: hungry people on phones trying to figure out if they're open and what's on the menu.

Timing is the whole game

There are two rushes a day, lunch and dinner, and you stay out of both. The sweet spot is usually mid-afternoon, around 2:30 to 4:30, when lunch is done and prep for dinner hasn't gotten crazy yet. Mid-morning before they open can also work, especially at places where the owner comes in early to do prep or ordering.

A few more things to know:

• Many independent restaurants are closed Monday or Tuesday. Check the hours first.
• Fridays and weekends are bad. Just skip them.
• Walking in during the afternoon lull works really well for restaurants. Order a coffee, ask if the owner's around, and show the preview on your phone.

For more on timing across different kinds of businesses, see the best time to call small business owners.

What's usually broken

Most independent restaurants have one of three setups: no website at all, a Facebook or Instagram page doing the job, or a site that was built once and never touched again. That last one is where you find the fun stuff. Hours from before they changed them. A "seasonal" menu from two seasons ago. A phone number for a location that closed.

The most common problem of all is the PDF menu. Somebody scanned the printed menu and uploaded it. On a phone, a customer has to download it, pinch, zoom, and scroll sideways to read it. Plenty of people just give up and pick somewhere else.

Run their current site through the Website Checkup to see what else is wrong: slow mobile load, no https, no tap-to-call, an old copyright year. Then check their Google Business Profile. If the hours there don't match the hours on the website, that's an easy, specific thing to bring up.

The preview: menu first

Restaurants are about food, so the preview should open with a great food photo from their Google listing and then get straight to what people want:

1. Hours, right at the top. Including holiday hours when relevant.
2. The menu as real text on the page, organized by section, readable on a phone without zooming. Prices if they want them shown.
3. Order and reserve buttons. If they use an online ordering or delivery app, or a reservation service, link straight to it. You don't need to replace their system. Just make it one tap to reach.
4. Address with a map link and parking notes.
5. A call button.
6. Photos of the dining room, the food, and the people.
7. Catering or private events, if they do them. That's often a meaningful chunk of revenue and deserves its own section.

Keep it simple. A restaurant site with five pages of "Our Story" isn't helping anyone at 5:45 PM decide where to eat. For a broader checklist, see what to include in a small business website.

How to open the conversation

Mentioning that you tried to look at their menu as a customer is honest and relatable. Every owner has heard a customer complain about something like that.

As always, only text after they say yes, take anyone off your list who asks, and don't claim to be with Google or any ordering app.

What restaurant owners say back

"We have Instagram." Good, and they should keep it. But Instagram doesn't show hours clearly, the menu is buried in old posts, and people who search Google for a place to eat land on websites and listings first. Link the Instagram from the site.

"We're on the delivery apps." Those apps work for delivery. But they also show customers a lot of other restaurants right next to theirs. A site with a direct order link (to whatever system they choose) gives customers who already like them a straight path.

"I don't have time to keep a website updated." This is the real objection, and the best one to hear. It means you get to explain that you handle updates: new menu items, price changes, holiday hours. They text you a photo of the new menu, you update it.

"Business is fine." Then don't argue. Leave the preview with them and check back in a few weeks.

Pricing it around updates

For restaurants, the monthly is the main product. Menus change, prices change, hours change, specials come and go. A site that's wrong is almost worse than no site.

Many freelancers quote a modest setup fee and a monthly that includes a set number of updates. You might offer a lower tier that covers hosting and small edits, and a higher one that includes regular menu changes and seasonal updates. Price the monthly so it's clearly less than what they lose from a few customers going elsewhere, and be clear about what's included so there are no surprises. Bakeries and cafés work almost the same way; the bakery guide covers custom order forms in more detail, and the food truck guide covers businesses that move around.

When you use Rover, restaurants with no website or an outdated one come up first on your list. One tap builds a preview with their name, colors and photos, and it writes the call script, voicemail, text and email so you're ready for that 3 PM window.