What Your Restaurant Menu Page Actually Needs (And What It Doesn't)

After building restaurant websites around Auckland, the one thing I can tell you for certain is that the menu page gets more traffic than any other page on the site. More than the homepage. More than the about page. More than the photo gallery. People want to know what you serve and how much it costs, and they want to know before they leave the house.

Which makes it strange how many restaurant websites get this page wrong. A surprising number of places in Auckland have a menu page that's just a link to a PDF. Or a photo of their menu board taken on someone's phone. Or nothing at all, just a line saying "please visit us to see our menu." That last one is my favourite. You're asking someone to physically travel to your restaurant to find out if they want to eat there.

The PDF Menu Problem

PDFs made sense in 2010. They don't any more. Here's why: over 70% of people checking your menu are on their phone. A PDF on a phone means pinching, zooming, scrolling sideways, losing your place, and eventually giving up. The text is tiny. The formatting is designed for A4 paper, not a 6-inch screen. Half the time the PDF doesn't even load properly on mobile browsers.

There's a bigger issue too. Google can't properly index a PDF menu. When someone searches "Thai restaurant Ponsonby menu," Google is looking for text on a webpage, not buried inside a downloadable file. A properly built HTML menu page with your dishes, descriptions, and prices as actual text on the page will rank. A PDF link won't.

And then there's the update problem. Every time your menu changes, someone has to redesign the PDF, export it, upload it, and replace the old file. Most restaurant owners don't bother, which is how you end up with a summer menu still on the site in July. With a proper web menu, updating a dish or a price takes seconds.

What Actually Needs to Be There

Keep it simpler than you think. A good menu page needs four things:

Your dishes with descriptions. Not just names. "Eggs Benedict" tells someone nothing about what makes yours different. "Free range eggs, house-smoked salmon, hollandaise, sourdough from Daily Bread" tells them everything. Keep descriptions to one line. Two at most.

Prices. This is the one that some restaurant owners push back on. "We change our prices, we don't want to commit." Fair enough, but here's what happens when you leave prices off: people assume you're expensive. A cafe in Grey Lynn with no prices on their site is competing against the one down the road that clearly shows $22 for eggs benny. The one with prices wins because it removes uncertainty. If your prices change, update the page. That's what the Care Plan is for.

Dietary labels. GF, V, VG, DF. Mark them clearly and consistently. This matters more than most owners realise. A table of four where one person is gluten-free will choose the restaurant where that person can easily see what they can eat. If your menu doesn't make it obvious, they'll go somewhere that does.

Clear sections. Breakfast, lunch, dinner if you serve all three. Starters, mains, sides, desserts. Drinks separate or on the same page depending on the size of your list. Don't make people hunt for what they want.

What Order Should Sections Go In?

This depends on what kind of place you are. If you're a brunch cafe that's known for your eggs and cabinet food, put that front and centre. Don't make people scroll past a drinks list to get to the thing they came for. If you're a dinner restaurant, starters then mains then desserts is the natural flow because that's how people eat.

The general rule: put whatever people are most likely looking for at the top. For a Takapuna brunch spot, that's the food. For a Ponsonby wine bar, it might actually be the drinks list. For a Dominion Road dumpling place, it's the mains and sharing plates. Think about what your customers are deciding between when they're on their phone at 6pm, and put that first.

Photos on Menu Pages

This is where opinions differ. Some fine dining restaurants deliberately show no food photos and let the descriptions do the work. That's a valid choice if your brand is built on mystery and anticipation. For most cafes and casual restaurants, though, a few good photos of your best dishes will increase orders of those items.

The key word is "good." A dark, blurry photo taken under fluorescent lights will do more damage than no photo at all. You don't need a professional photographer. Natural daylight near a window, a clean background, and a phone made in the last three years will get you 80% of the way there. Three or four strong photos spread through the menu page is better than a mediocre photo next to every single dish.

What to Leave Off

Your entire wine list. If you've got 60 wines, that's not a menu page, that's a document. Link to a separate wine list page or keep it to your top picks by the glass. Nobody is browsing your full wine list on their phone to decide whether to eat at your restaurant. They'll look at it when they're sitting at the table.

Multiple menu PDFs. I've seen restaurant sites with separate downloads for lunch, dinner, drinks, dessert, kids, and a "specials" PDF that hasn't been updated in eight months. That's six files someone has to open on their phone to figure out what you serve. Consolidate it into one scrollable page.

"Prices may vary" disclaimers. Every restaurant's prices may vary. You don't need a legal disclaimer about it. If a price changes, update the page. If you're worried about the gap between your website price and a future increase, update it when you change it. People aren't going to screenshot your menu page and dispute a $2 price change.

Lengthy origin stories for each dish. "Our beef is sourced from a family farm in the Waikato where cattle graze on rolling green hills..." Save it for the table tent card. On the website, people want to know what it is, what's in it, and what it costs.

Handling Seasonal Menus

If your menu changes seasonally, don't create a new page each time. Keep the same menu page URL and update the content. This preserves your Google ranking for that page. If you want to call attention to what's new, add a small "New" or "Seasonal" tag next to those dishes. Simple, effective, and it doesn't create a mess of old pages that Google keeps trying to index.

For places that change their menu daily or weekly (some cafes in Parnell and Ponsonby do this with their cabinet food), just show a representative selection and add a note: "Our cabinet changes daily. Here's the kind of thing you'll find." People understand. They want a sense of what to expect, not a binding contract.