Web design agency for restaurants: Websites for the hospitality industry.

How much does every booking through a platform cost you?

We start here because it’s the conversation no restaurant should put off any longer.

Booking portals and delivery apps solve a real problem: they bring you customers who didn’t know you existed. The price of that convenience is commissions eating a considerable slice of a margin that’s already thin in hospitality, and something that hurts more over time: the customer becomes theirs, not yours. You don’t have their email, you don’t know how many times they’ve returned, and you can’t tell them anything. If tomorrow the platform decides to show the restaurant next door first, there’s nothing you can do.

This isn’t about cutting the platforms off overnight, because for many businesses they’re a genuine source of discovery. It’s about having a channel of your own that captures whoever already knows you and already intends to come. That customer, the one searching your name in Google, shouldn’t be costing you commission. And right now, in an enormous number of restaurants, they are.

At DigiAcción we build hospitality websites with that idea at the centre: recovering the direct booking and the direct order, and with them the margin and the customer relationship.

Digital menus for restaurants: why a PDF is the worst mistake

It’s the most widespread and the most damaging, and it deserves explaining properly because most restaurateurs don’t realize what they’re losing.

A PDF posted on your site has four serious problems. On a phone it forces pinching and dragging, which is exactly what a hungry customer won’t do. Google barely reads its contents, so all your dishes are invisible to search: nobody will find you searching for a specific dish or a gluten-free menu if it lives inside a file. Changing one price means re-editing the whole document, so in practice it doesn’t get updated and ends up lying. And it can’t carry accessible allergen markings or be translated.

A properly built digital menu is content on the site itself: each dish with its name, description, price, and allergens, in navigable sections, editable from a phone in thirty seconds, and translatable into each language. That turns your menu into the single biggest search-capturing asset on the whole site, because people search for food, not for restaurants in the abstract.

And one detail that matters more every month: well-described dishes are what allow a search engine or an AI assistant to know you have vegan options, gluten-free choices, or a set lunch. If it’s inside a PDF, as far as they’re concerned it doesn’t exist.

Why does Google Maps decide more than your restaurant’s website?

Worth accepting without taking offence: in hospitality, the Google listing is the main shop window. Somebody walking down a street looking for lunch doesn’t visit your website, they check the map.

What decides it there is concrete and entirely in your hands. Photographs, which should be yours and current, of the premises and of real dishes rather than stock images. Recent reviews, and replying to all of them, including the bad ones, politely and without taking the bait. Exact opening hours, including closing days and public holidays, because nothing annoys people more than arriving to a locked door. Attributes properly set: terrace, accessible, dog friendly, takeaway, vegan options. And live posts with the set menu or the seasonal dish.

The website and the listing feed each other: the details have to match exactly, and the booking link on the listing should point to your system rather than a third party’s. That work is the most profitable part of search optimization for any restaurant.

What a restaurant website should be: mobile, hunger and two minutes

This is the real usage context and it explains every design decision on a hospitality website.

Your visitor is on the street, low on battery, with patchy reception, and with people waiting on their decision. That’s why speed matters so much: a restaurant site taking six seconds has already lost. And that’s why four things have to be visible without scrolling: what food you serve, whether you’re open now, how to get there, and how to book.

It sounds obvious and almost no restaurant website manages it. The norm is a homepage with a heavy background video, a dropdown menu where the food menu sits three levels down, and a phone number you have to hunt for. Each of those obstacles is an empty table.

And photography here is what built work is to an architect: a mediocre photograph of a dish does more damage than no photograph at all. If there’s no good material, it’s worth resolving, and short video production of a dish leaving the pass is among the best-performing content on social for this sector.

How do you take bookings and orders online without commissions?

An in-house booking system doesn’t have to be an enormous build. What matters is that it does four things: lets the customer book in under a minute without calling, locks the table in real time to prevent overlaps, sends an automatic reminder (which is what reduces no-shows, the quiet drain on any restaurant), and delivers the booking somewhere your team will actually look.

The same applies to takeaway and delivery orders. Building direct ordering from your own site with online payment is entirely manageable, and every order arriving that way is margin kept whole. The strategy that works isn’t banning yourself from the platforms, it’s giving people reasons to order directly: something extra available only on your site, better terms, or simply saying so on the menu and at the till.

One practical piece of advice that saves money: don’t build a full ordering system if you sell three things to take away. Start with what you genuinely use and expand when volume calls for it.

Multilingual restaurant websites: tourists decide before they arrive

If your restaurant sits in an area with visitors, an enormous share of your clientele is searching for you from another country in another language, sometimes days before travelling.

That customer looks for different things than a local: they search in their own language, want to see the menu before coming, check whether there are options for their diet, and look for whether they can book without phoning a foreign number. A website existing in one language only loses all of those people in the first second.

Multilingual done properly isn’t translating the navigation menu: each language needs its own URL, its own metadata, and correctly cross-referenced hreflang tags to rank in each market. And translating a menu has its own difficulty, because traditional dish names often aren’t translated so much as explained. Machine-translating a menu produces results ranging from confusing to comical.

Does AI recommend your restaurant when someone asks where to eat?

It’s a recent shift and in hospitality it’s moving fast: more and more people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations directly, with questions along the lines of where to eat well nearby with gluten-free options.

Those models don’t invent anything: they answer with businesses whose information they find clear, structured, and consistent across several sources. A restaurant with its menu in real text, allergens marked, an impeccable listing, and recent reviews has a great deal in its favour; one with the menu in a PDF and details that don’t match between the site and the map simply doesn’t appear. That’s the work of our AI chat visibility service, and in hospitality the difference between doing it and not doing it shows up quickly.

To fill tables from month one, social media campaigns are this sector’s natural channel because food is bought with the eyes, and search campaigns work very well for searches with immediate intent. And if you also sell your own products, preserves, or wines, an online store opens a revenue line that doesn’t depend on covers. A coherent visual identity across the printed menu, the premises, and the website is what turns a good restaurant into a brand people remember.

How much does a restaurant website cost?

A professional restaurant website, with an editable digital menu, local SEO as standard, and speed resolved, starts at 1,500 euros.

What moves the budget:

• The number of languages, usually the main factor in tourist-facing hospitality.
• The booking system and its integration with whatever you already use front of house.
• Online ordering with payment, if you need it.
• The size of the menu and whether several are needed (set lunch, dinner, seasonal, events).
• The state of the photography and whether new material has to be produced.

We give you a fixed proposal after understanding how the business runs, with no surprises midway through.

How long does it take to build a restaurant website?

Four to eight weeks for most projects, depending on languages, menus, and integrations. What most affects the calendar here is having the menu organized and the photography ready, so that’s the place to start.

And if you already have a site appearing in Google, it doesn’t get touched carelessly: we build the new site in a parallel environment and launch with redirects mapped, to preserve what you’ve already built. Less talk, more action.