Restaurant website builder: what a small restaurant’s page needs

If you run a small restaurant, your website has a few jobs, and most of them are answered in one glance on a phone. Is it open tonight? What is on the menu and what does it cost? Where is it? How do I get a table? A restaurant website builder is only worth using if it gets those four things in front of people fast. Here is what I would put on the page, and where I would be honest that we stop.

Start with the hours, and write them as you say them. "Lunch Monday to Friday 11 to 14, dinner Thursday to Saturday 17 to 22, closed Sunday and Monday." Then add the exceptions people forget: the kitchen closes an hour before the door, the lunch menu ends at 14 sharp, the place shuts for the first two weeks of July. A guest who walks across town and finds a dark window does not blame the hours. They blame you.

Next, the menu, and here I have one firm opinion. Put it on the page as text. Many restaurants upload a PDF, and on a phone that means pinching and zooming a file that looks like a scan. Text loads at once, reads at any size and is easy to change. Dish, a short line on what is in it, price. If you have a lunch menu and a dinner menu, give them separate headings so nobody reads the wrong one. If a dish contains something that matters to guests with allergies, say so in plain words next to the dish, and have a line that tells people to ask staff.

You also need to be able to change the menu without a fuss. A kitchen changes by the day. With a Klarhimmel page you ask for a change in a sentence, such as "replace the fish of the day with cod, 175 kr", and the page changes. You do not need a developer, a login you have to remember or a free afternoon. Check the result, as you would with anything that goes in front of guests. A price typed wrong is still wrong.

Then say where you are, in the way a person would give directions. The street, the town, and the thing that helps: "across from the bridge", "down the steps, the door with the green lamp". Put the phone number at the top, not at the bottom. A hungry person with a thumb over the screen will look for a number to tap, and will not scroll for it.

Now booking and ordering, which is the part owners ask about most. A Klarhimmel page does not take table bookings today, and it does not take orders or payments online. There is no calendar and no basket. I would rather you know that before you put the link on your door sign than find out afterwards.

What small restaurants do in the meantime is plain. Many take bookings by phone, and write "Call to book a table" with the number right there, and the hours when someone picks up. Some keep a few tables for walk-ins and say so. If you already use a booking or takeaway service, write its address on the page so guests can find it there. It shows as text, not a button, and the booking happens where it does today. If you do takeaway, say how: "order by phone, ready in 20 minutes". That is better than a button that does nothing.

A few smaller things are worth the space. One or two photographs of the room or the food, if they are yours and look like the place. Not a stock plate of pasta. A line about who you are, in the voice you use at the pass. And your Instagram name, written out as text, if you keep it up, because many guests will check the last post to see if you are open.

One more honest point. A kept page goes live at a Klarhimmel address, free, with a small "Made with Klarhimmel" line at the bottom. It does not have your own domain yet; that comes with the paid plan, which is not open. And a page by itself does not make you appear when someone searches for restaurants near them. That is a separate job, with a Google profile and reviews, and I wrote about it in the piece on getting found. So think of the page as the place you send people from your Instagram, your window and your menu card, where the hours and the menu are always right.

If you want to see what you would get, paste a few sentences about your place into the box on our Business Launcher page. The link below fills it with a made-up example, a restaurant that does not exist. Change the name, the dishes and the hours to yours, and press Enter when you are ready. Nothing is built until you do.

Try a restaurant description in the box

The restaurant type page shows what a first page looks like: restaurant. For getting found, read the article on getting found.