The features that make an ordering site pay for itself

Good-looking is not the same as profitable

You look at the site of the place three streets away and think it looks better than yours. It might. That tells you almost nothing about what it earns.

A restaurant website has four jobs. That is the whole list.

• Get found: on your name, on your dish, on your town.
• Get understood: one glance and the visitor knows enough.
• Get ordered from: hungry to paid in few steps.
• Get remembered: a reason to come back.

Anything serving none of those four is decoration. Decoration is allowed, just not first.

What follows are the features that make the difference, in the order a guest meets them. They cost almost nothing. They get skipped because they are no fun to build, which is why they are still there to be won.

The first screen decides

What a visitor sees without scrolling decides whether they stay. Usability research from the Nielsen Norman Group, international rather than Dutch, has said the same for years: most attention goes to the top of the page, on a phone no bigger than a beer mat.

So no mood collage there, and no welcome paragraph about cooking with love. Put one photo of something you actually sell, from your own kitchen.

Test it yourself. Open your site on your phone and ask someone who does not know your place what you sell and how to order. If that takes more than five seconds, you know where Monday starts.

Your menu is your most important page

On almost every restaurant site the menu is the most-visited page, and usually the one with the least work in it: an old PDF, or a photo of a printed menu. Awkward for your guest, unreadable for Google.

So publish your menu as ordinary text, dish by dish, with the price beside it. Then your guest can read it on the tram, and so can a search engine.

Photos that sell

Not every dish needs a photo. Your ten best sellers do. Shoot them in daylight, close up, with the plate as the guest receives it. A mediocre photo of your own dish beats a perfect stock photo, which promises what you do not serve.

Descriptions and prices

Two lines per dish is enough: what is in it and what makes it different. Allergens belong with the dish itself. Prices are shown including btw, because that is what a consumer should see. Behind the scenes, mind the difference: 9 per cent on food, 21 per cent on most drinks.

Give your best sellers a page of their own

This is the cheapest search move there is and hardly anyone makes it: give each of your five to ten best sellers a page of its own.

Somebody typing ‘order pizza diavola’ or ‘poke bowl Utrecht’ is further along than somebody searching for somewhere nice to eat. Fewer people search those terms, but the ones who do are hungry. And so few restaurants build these pages that the competition is thin.

Do the same with your location, in moderation. Your town belongs in your page titles because it is true, not because you stuffed it in twenty times. Start with three dishes; build the next three once those pull visits.

From hungry to paid in few steps

Every step between ‘I am hungry’ and ‘paid’ is a place where somebody drops out. The odd thing is that most restaurant sites invent steps nobody needs.

• A compulsory account before anyone may order.
• An order button that only exists at the top.
• An address field that rejects a spaced postcode.
• Delivery charges appearing only at the final step.
• One payment method, and not the one the Netherlands uses.

That last one weighs heaviest. iDEAL is the standard here. Without it you ask guests to find their card, and they will not do that on an empty stomach. Put Apple Pay and Google Pay beside it.

Put the order button on every page and let people add your best sellers to the basket from the homepage. Then order from yourself once a month and actually pay. You will find more in ten minutes than in an hour of meetings.

Trust comes from story and from proof

People would rather order from a business than from a logo. That sounds soft and works practically: a site that says who cooks and why keeps visitors who would otherwise click away.

You need no long brand story. A few lines will do: where you come from, what you do differently, who is in the kitchen. If you make something people do not know, explain it. Explanation sells: somebody who understands why your dough proves for two days orders sooner.

Proof belongs beside it. Put your Google reviews on your site, with the text and not just a score. Do not invent them or write them yourself. Being caught once costs more than ten genuine reviews earn.

Add a frequently asked questions page. Write down what you explain most on the phone: do you deliver to that neighbourhood, how long it takes on a Friday night, whether you do gluten free. Every question answered there is one call fewer.

Getting them to come back a second time

A guest who orders once is a guest you have paid for. A guest who orders five times is a business. The difference lives in what happens after they have paid.

The simplest version is a reason to leave their details: money off the next order, or something small above a minimum spend. Pick something with a low food cost: chips, a sauce, a pudding from your own kitchen. It feels like a gift and costs almost nothing.

Ask for as little as possible: an email address, a first name at most, and a tick box the guest sets themselves. Under the GDPR you may only email people who said yes, and every message needs an unsubscribe link.

A loyalty programme does the same without the email, provided you explain what it is worth before anyone signs up. Three icons and two lines: what you collect, what you get, how fast.

The parts nobody sees

Some of what your site earns your guest never sees. It does decide whether they ever arrive.

Speed

A page that loads slowly on mobile loses guests before your photo appears. The culprit is nearly always the same: images uploaded straight off the camera. Save them under a few hundred kilobytes.

Alt text

Alt text is the short description on an image. Screen readers read it aloud and Google uses it to work out what the photo shows. ‘IMG_4471’ says nothing, ‘margherita pizza from the wood oven’ says everything.

Since June 2025 the European Accessibility Act has also set requirements for online shops. Small businesses are often exempt, but readable contrast and keyboard operation are simply good practice.

Structure

Give every page a title starting with the subject, not your business name. Put your address, opening hours and menu into the page code as well, so search engines can show them in the results. A decent site builder handles that; ask before you sign.

What all of this earns you

The reason these features pay is simple. An order through Thuisbezorgd, Uber Eats or Deliveroo costs you commission on the whole amount. The same order through your own site costs the payment fee and nothing else.

That does not mean walking away from the platforms. They bring you guests you would never have seen. But every guest you move across is worth more than a new guest on the platform.

None of those five costs money and together they cost you an afternoon. They move your site from leaflet to till, and that is the only difference your year-end accounts will show.