5 Biggest Restaurant Website Mistakes to Avoid

Key Takeaways:

• 33% of diners abandon sites with confusing navigation.

• Outdated and static menus frustrate customers while limiting online discoverability.

• Long reservation forms and unnecessary redirects kill conversion.

Trying to find a restaurant’s opening hours or make a reservation on a mobile device shouldn’t feel like a challenge.

But unoptimized websites do exactly that, costing restaurants customers and revenue.

This guide highlights the five biggest website mistakes and shows how to fix them before they hurt your bottom line.

Let’s dive in!

Confusing Navigation

If your guests have to hunt for essential information, your website is already working against you. 

Research indicates that the first 10 seconds on a website determine whether a visitor will continue exploring or not. 

For restaurants, where most visits are quick checks for menus, hours, or reservation options,  clear and intuitive navigation becomes even more important. 

The consequences of poor design are evident in the MGH’s recent restaurant consumer survey, which found that 33% of diners are turned off by difficult website navigation.

Illustration: Tablein / Data: MGH

Another data point reinforces the same pattern.

According to Digital Web Solutions, the average bounce rate for restaurant websites sits at roughly 62.5%.

This is a clear sign that users have a specific intent in mind, and won’t dig through clutter to find what they need.

Purpose-driven traffic can work in a restaurant’s favor, but only if the design supports it. 

Instead of using overcrowded menus, animations, or stylized fonts that slow down load times, stick to a clean template and limit your navigation bar to a small, clear set of items.

But while fewer and fewer websites fall into those kinds of traps, there are still several issues that frustrate visitors and hurt conversion rates, namely inconsistent labeling and hard-to-find CTAs.

For example, Restaurant Dubrovnik’s website illustrates one potential issue with CTAs.

Their site has a single “Book a Table” link tucked into the left-side menu button that blends with the background. This makes it very easy to miss.

Source: Restaurant Dubrovnik

Visitors who don’t immediately notice it will inevitably end up scrolling downward, and with no additional touchpoints for bookings, they may very well abandon the process altogether.

On the other hand, the KOL restaurant in London shows how details make a difference. 

Reservations and private dining options sit clearly on the left, opposite a small cluster of social links and a newsletter CTA on the right. 

Source: KOL

KOL uses blue sparingly but strategically, with just enough color to signal importance without overwhelming the minimalist layout. 

Moreover, the essential information is listed just a few lines below, and the navigation bar remains visible as users scroll. 

Content Marketer Ben Toalson covers this common mistake in a comprehensive video on website navigation mistakes, underlining how usability improves dramatically when fonts are chosen for clarity and key elements use contrasting colors.

Illustration: Tablein / Quote: Podia on YouTube

In the end, the rule is simple: simplicity beats cleverness. 

The smallest detail can cost you reservations and online orders, which is why you need to put clarity first and keep your navigation as predictable and intuitive as possible.

Lack of Mobile Optimization

With most customers discovering, checking, and booking restaurants directly from their phones, mobile optimization is non-negotiable today.

If or when the mobile experience fails, your entire digital journey and margins are impacted accordingly.

It’s helpful to frame the importance of website optimization the way digital marketing expert Samuel Sewodo does: by likening it to your actual storefront. 

Illustration: Tablein / Quote: LinkedIn

Mobile optimization is a key subset of overall website optimization, which requires its own attention.

But unlike a physical storefront, these improvements aren’t just visual and should reliably deliver three outcomes: 

• Faster loading 

• Better mobile responsiveness 

• Smoother navigation

In other words, just refreshing your content or uploading new images isn’t enough. 

Without testing how those updates behave on a smaller screen, you risk small text, awkwardly cropped images, and buttons that are nearly impossible to tap.

The negative impact is evident in the aforementioned MGH survey.

While more than half of surveyed diners consider mobile-friendly restaurant websites essential, 36% claim they gave up on ordering altogether because the restaurant’s website wasn’t mobile-friendly enough.

Illustration: Tablein / Data: MGH

What does that tell us? 

Even minor mobile issues like slow load times, tiny buttons, or overlapping elements can directly remove revenue from your pipeline.

Let’s explore this further by taking a closer look at one Chicago restaurant’s website.

While Shoeless Joe’s Ale House and Grille’s website theme looks pretty outdated, the site is perfectly functional on desktop. 

Navigation is simple, the intro to the family-owned business is clear, and key details like events and location are easy to find.

Source: Shoeless Joe’s Ale House

However, the problems start as soon as you switch to a mobile device.

The navigation collapses into a barely noticeable menu button, the header photo is improperly cropped, and worst of all, the “about” section turns into a long chunk of text.

Source: Shoeless Joe’s Ale House

Contrast this with another Chicago example, The Palm, where the difference in the browsing experience is evident at a glance, and not just thanks to the navigation bar.

Source: The Palm Restaurant

As soon as you scroll, you see hours, locations, and direct links to menus, delivery options, and events, and the layout looks even better on mobile devices.

The photo scales perfectly, navigation remains accessible in the upper right corner, and essential information is right there in the forefront.

Source: The Palm Restaurant

Most importantly, a floating bar with “Reservations” and “Order Online” appears instantly, mirroring actual user behavior, where visitors arrive with a clear intent.

To achieve this level of consistency, testing across devices is essential. 

Website templates are also very useful here, because they’re mobile-friendly by default and eliminate the need to design separate desktop and mobile versions.

The main takeaway here? If your website doesn’t work on mobile, it effectively doesn’t work at all.

Outdated Menus

Leaving old or incomplete menus online damages credibility and frustrates customers. 

As restaurateurs well know, nothing invites disappointment and poor reviews faster than guests looking forward to a dish that’s no longer available, or discovering a price that doesn’t match what was advertised. 

This came up clearly in a Reddit thread where a former employee of a small farm-to-table restaurant recalled how outdated menu listings left guests irritated and confused.

Source: Reddit 

Although the example referred to Google Maps rather than the restaurant website specifically, the same principle applies: customers rely on online menus to make decisions, and outdated information derails that process instantly.

But how do outdated menus happen in the first place? 

One common culprit is the use of PDF menus.

As shown with the Taureaux Tavern’s example below, PDFs look polished and structured, allowing restaurants to present dishes in one compact format.

Source: Taureaux Tavern

However, PDFs require careful layout work to remain readable across devices. 

PDF menus are harder to update internally, meaning edits often get postponed, and they can’t highlight specific items as effectively as alternatives.  

Last but not least, they hurt both SEO and accessibility because search engines and assistive technologies can’t easily extract the information.

Fortunately, digital menus solve these issues.

When menus are embedded directly into the website, browsing on any screen size becomes smoother, and making updates or seasonal adjustments becomes much easier.

Staff can add or remove dishes, change prices, or refresh seasonal offerings without having to reformat an entire document. 

Source: Tablein

These formats are also SEO- and accessibility-friendly, which makes your site more discoverable. 

This is especially significant given that AI-powered summaries pull structured information from websites. 

And in the absence of reliable sources or too many conflicting ones, they may share information on non-existent deals. 

In other words, a single change improves:

• Discoverability 

• Inclusivity

• Usability

• Internal workflows

So, how does this look in practice?

Kiren, Lokys, and Habitus all use digital menus effectively, but in different ways to create the experience they want.

Source: Kiren, Lokys, Habitus

Kiren relies on a simple text-first layout without pictures, Lokys uses photos selectively to create a sense of the dominant cuisine and atmosphere, while Habitus pairs every dish with an image.

Despite their differences, all three examples demonstrate the same benefit: diners can scan, compare, and decide faster.

Of course, this only works when the menu editor itself is intuitive. 

You need a system that allows quick updates without requiring technical expertise.

But the core idea holds: updating your menu regularly cultivates customer trust and actively drives more diners to your door.

Poor Reservation UX Design

A confusing or buggy reservation widget can completely derail an otherwise great website. 

Imagine this scenario: a guest visits your site on their phone, scrolls through your homepage, checks your menu, finds a time that works, but then abandons the process right before booking. 

What happened?

To put the stakes in perspective, let’s look at the numbers.

Toast research shows that 65% of customers go directly to a restaurant’s website to book a table.

Illustration: Tablein / Data: Toast

This means that most visitors with booking intent skip aggregators and third-party sites entirely and come straight to you. 

And while it’s possible their mood changed, or nothing on the menu appealed at that moment, it’s just as likely that the issue was bad UX.

Poor user experience is one of the silent and costly conversion killers, with typical culprits including:

• Overly long reservation forms 

• Unclear booking policy 

• Confusing time slots

One restaurant professional highlighted this problem in a ResDiary support thread, raising concerns about how diners were being redirected to Dish Cult and required to create an account. 

Source: ResDiary Support

This created unnecessary steps and even threatened to drive guests to other restaurants.

Even if that specific issue has since been resolved, the broader lesson is clear: diners expect to book in seconds, and poor reservation widget design leaves lasting damage. 

To avoid a maze of redirects or sign-ups, it’s essential to choose a booking system that prioritizes simplicity. 

Tablein’s reservation management solution, for example, comes with a customizable widget that allows restaurants to define exactly how light or detailed the booking experience should be. 

You can stick to the essentials like time, party size, and additional notes, or expand it with custom fields such as allergies, special occasions, and guest tags.

Source: Tablein

Beyond functionality, customization options let you match the widget to your brand through color palettes, preset themes, or venue photos, ensuring visual consistency. 

Source: Tablein

In this way, the booking widget is like a natural extension of your website. 

Of course, even the most polished widget benefits from an outside perspective. 

That’s why content and marketing expert Lucy Vinestock emphasizes the value of asking someone else to test the booking flow, especially if they’re removed from day-to-day operations.

Illustration: Tablein / Quote: LinkedIn

Whether it’s placing an order or reserving a table, the principle stays the same: 

The booking experience must feel as seamless and trustworthy as the dining experience itself. 

When it doesn’t, poor UX becomes one of the most damaging website failures a restaurant can make.

Low-Quality Photography

Restaurant websites are highly visual, and high-quality imagery often determines whether someone makes a booking or not. 

It’s why low-quality photography remains one of the most persistent, but fixable, branding mistakes.

Recent TouchBistro research shows that 24% of diners of all ages would be deterred from visiting a restaurant because of unappealing photos, with the number peaking among millennials at 28%.

Illustration: Tablein / Data: Touch Bistro

Those percentages underscore the simple truth: your photography often speaks before your menu does. 

Dull lighting, blurry images, or unappetizing angles can make food and interiors look flat, sterile, or even unclean, none of which reflects the true dining experience.

In practice, many restaurants today invest in their official website and social media photography, but are plagued by blurry, user-uploaded images on Google Maps.

The more common issue with websites is the use of stock or stock-like photography, which can create a subtle but damaging disconnect. 

While it’s not on the same level as laminated, tourist-trap menus, generic photos create uncertainty and instantly lower expectations.

Source: Nordsee

And that doubt and lack of enthusiasm rarely translates to bookings.

A more viable approach is to follow the playbook of restaurants that treat photography as part of their brand experience. 

The Hot Stone Steakhouse in Budapest is a good example. 

Their gallery features a mix of photos: close-ups of food, atmospheric shots of table setups, and images of real diners enjoying the space. 

This variety creates energy, and the consistency in lighting and warm color tones makes the brand feel deliberate and cohesive.

Source: Hot Stone Steakhouse

Even without opening and comparing all the images up close, consistent lighting and warm hues signal they belong together. 

That’s not accidental. 

Professionals rely on thoughtful composition and subtle post-production to create a polished, unified look that strengthens brand identity. 

As food photographer Wendy Taylor notes:

“As professionals, they will provide advanced post-processing services to enhance the images, correcting any imperfections and ensuring the final product is polished and has a consistent look and feel, which is crucial for your marketing.”

And every type of venue, from street-food stalls to fine dining establishments, benefits from investing in strong photography. 

Poor visuals chip away at trust and make your restaurant forgettable in an industry where decisions happen in seconds.

In the end, if you don’t take control of your imagery, someone with better photos will, and often at your expense.

Conclusion

We hope this article has helped you see how small website missteps can quietly undermine your restaurant’s success. 

The good news is that each of these issues is fixable. 

Whether it’s confusing navigation and outdated menus or weak reservation flows, even modest effort creates immediate impact.

By tightening your website’s design, visuals, and user experience, you make it easier for guests to choose you with confidence. 

And given how many restaurants compete for diners' attention, that clarity can make all the difference!