What a riverside restaurant's website needs before Saturday service

Saturday, a little before six, and the car park by the lock is filling up. Plenty of the people in it haven't booked anywhere. They are looking at their phones, and in the next couple of minutes some of them will decide where they eat. I spent five years running front of house for riverside restaurants, and I watched that decision go to whoever made it easy.

This is the checklist I would run through before the weekend. It is written for restaurants and pubs along the river, where trade arrives in bursts, the signal is patchy and the Google listing matters as much as the website.

The menu is a web page

A PDF menu is the most common mistake I see. It is slow to open on a phone, it needs pinching and sideways scrolling, and if it is a scan or a photo of the printed menu then neither Google nor a screen reader can read it.

Put the menu on the page as text. Use headings for the sections, then dish names, short descriptions and prices. Mark vegetarian and vegan dishes plainly. Keep the sections in the order your guests order in, with the set menu or the Sunday roast near the top if that is what most people come for.

A web menu has three practical advantages. It loads quickly on a poor connection. It changes in minutes when the fish changes or the lamb runs out. And Google can read it, so someone searching for Sunday lunch in Cookham can land on your page rather than on a review site that copied your menu a year ago. Keep a PDF only if you need something to print, and put the web page first.

Put the booking button where a thumb can find it

On a phone the booking button should be visible without scrolling, on every page, including the menu. Fix it in the header or a slim bar along the bottom, and use the same words each time. Book a table beats Reservations, and both beat a button called Enquire.

Then check what happens after the tap. If it opens a third-party booking page, test it on your own phone on mobile data. Does it load? Can you choose a date and party size without zooming? Is there a clear route for a table of ten, or for tonight, when the online diary says full and the bar has room?

Say what you do for walk-ins. A line such as the garden is first come, first served saves a phone call and fills the garden. Put the deposit and cancellation rules on the booking page before the card details, never after. Add a tap-to-call number for people who would rather ring, and make sure someone answers it between services.

Hours that change with the season

Riverside trade follows the weather. The terrace opens in April, the kitchen closes earlier in January, and regatta week or Easter does something different to both. Every one of those changes has to reach your website, your Google listing and your booking page.

Google is the one that goes wrong. Someone drives out from Maidenhead on a bright Sunday because the listing says you serve until nine, and finds the kitchen shut at three. That review is about opening hours, and it will sit on your profile for years.

Set your regular hours first. Then add special hours for every bank holiday, the Christmas period and any event day, ideally a few weeks ahead. If the kitchen closes earlier than the bar, use the extra hours options on your profile to show kitchen hours separately. For a longer closure, such as a refit or a winter break, mark the business temporarily closed rather than leaving the usual hours in place. The detail is in our post on Google Business Profile for pubs, restaurants and venues.

Say how you handle allergens, and keep it current

If you serve food, you have to be able to tell guests which of the fourteen major allergens are in each dish. You can do that in writing, on the menu for example, or in person, as long as there is a clear sign telling guests how to find out and asking them to speak to a member of staff.

The Food Standards Agency's best-practice guidance for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, updated in 2025, recommends having written allergen information available alongside a conversation with the guest. On the website, that means a short allergen page or a note on the menu that says three things. How you handle allergen information. That guests with an allergy should tell the team when they book and again when they order. And that recipes can change, so the staff have the final word.

The risk on a website is staleness. An allergen table that was right in March and wrong by June is worse than having no table, because guests trust it. If you publish one, put a date on it, name who owns it and update it whenever a dish or a supplier changes. If you cannot promise that, publish the allergen note and point guests to your staff. Check the wording with your local council's food safety team and the FSA before you settle it. This is general advice and not legal advice.

The questions you answer on the phone every day

Every front-of-house team has the same short list. Are dogs allowed, and where? Is there a high chair? Is the entrance step-free? Where do we park? Can we tie up the boat? Do you do gluten-free? Can we bring a cake?

If you answer the same question ten times a week, answer it once on the website, in a plain list near the booking button. It saves a phone call that interrupts service, and it stops a guest with a pushchair or a wheelchair arriving at a step they weren't warned about. Put the same answers into your Google profile attributes so the two agree.

Groups and private dining deserve their own route. A table of twelve is worth more than a table of two, but it needs a date, numbers and a rough budget before anyone can say yes. A short separate enquiry form that asks for those three things, and promises a reply within a working day, beats an email address buried in the footer.

Photographs of the food you actually serve

Stock photographs of a generic burger do you no favours. Guests want to see the dish as it arrives, the terrace in daylight and the room in the evening, and they want those pictures to match what turns up.

Photograph the five or six dishes people order most, the outside space, the front door and the bar. Shoot in daylight where you can and show the real view, even if it includes a boat shed. People who come for the river will be pleased to see a river. Include the entrance, because anyone arriving from the towpath or the car park for the first time is looking for a door.

Ask your web person for properly sized images in a modern format with a short plain description for each one, so they load fast and make sense to guests using screen readers. A full-width photograph straight from a camera can weigh more than the rest of the page put together.

Speed on a poor signal by the river

Phone signal drops in odd places along the Thames. Down in a dip by a lock, behind a thick hedge or inside a thick-walled pub, a page with a full-screen video that loads happily in the office can stall at one bar. Test your website where your guests actually are.

Try it yourself. Switch Wi-Fi off, stand somewhere with a weak signal and open your menu page. Count how long it takes before you can read the first dish. If it is more than a few seconds, the page is too heavy. The usual culprits are an autoplaying video in the header, full-size photographs, a booking widget that loads before anything else, and too many fonts. A menu page should be mostly text, which is the cheapest thing a phone can download. Our technical lead, Dev Malhotra, explains the wider fixes in page speed for small business websites.

A Friday check before the weekend

Ten minutes on your own phone, on mobile data, is enough.

• Open the menu. Can you read it without pinching?
• Tap the booking button from the home page, the menu and the contact page. Does it work every time?
• Compare your hours on the website, on Google and on your booking page. Do all three match?
• Have special hours been set for the next bank holiday or event?
• Does the allergen note have a date on it, and is the person named on it still on the team?
• Do the photographs show the dishes and the room as they are now?
• Is there a tap-to-call number that gets answered?
• Can a guest find out where to park, where to moor and whether the entrance is step-free?

None of this is difficult. It just isn't anyone's job until a Saturday goes badly. If you want a hand setting it up, our websites for restaurants and pubs page sets out how we work, and the anonymised riverside restaurant example shows what changed for a 60-cover place near Bray.