How do I create a digital menu for my restaurant?
By Zyff
Short answer
Put the menu on your website as real text — sections, dish names, short descriptions and prices — rather than as a photo or only a PDF. Text reads properly on a phone, can be enlarged, translated and read aloud, and takes a minute to change when a price does. Your site builder's own text blocks or a menu widget will both do it, and a QR code on the table can open the same page.
Keep a PDF for the people who want to print or download the menu, and link to it from that page rather than making it the only menu.
Why text beats a photo or a PDF
Most restaurant menus online start as the file that went to the printer: a PDF, or a photo of the printed card. Both are easy to upload, and both fail the person most likely to open them — someone on a phone deciding where to eat. A PDF has to be downloaded and pinch-zoomed; a photo blurs when enlarged, cannot be read by a screen reader, and has to be redone for every price change.
Menu text on the page avoids all of that. It reflows to the width of the phone, the visitor's browser can enlarge or translate it, and changing one dish is a one-line edit rather than a new export.
Three ways to put the menu on your site
Which suits you depends on how long the menu is and how often it changes. A short menu that changes twice a year is fine typed straight into the page; a long one with seasonal specials is easier to keep in one editor and embed.
- Your site builder's own text or list blocks. The words become part of the page's HTML, which is the most dependable form for search engines and for anything else that reads your site.
- A menu widget: sections, prices and dietary markers laid out for you, edited in one place and updated everywhere it is embedded. It renders with a script, which Google reads when it renders your page but simpler crawlers may not.
- A PDF, kept as a download for people who want to print it, linked from the menu page rather than replacing it.
What a digital menu should include
The same things a printed menu does, arranged for scanning rather than reading top to bottom.
- Sections in the order people decide: starters, mains, desserts, drinks.
- A price on every dish, written the way you would say it, with the currency symbol.
- A short description naming the main ingredients — that is what diners scan for.
- Dietary and allergen markers, explained once in a key. They are the part of a menu some guests cannot do without.
- Nothing that has gone off the menu. A stale online menu is worse than none, because it is believed.
QR codes and your Google listing
A QR code on the table is only as good as the page it opens. Point it at the menu page on your own website rather than at a PDF file, so the same printed code keeps working when the menu changes and nobody has to download anything at the table.
Your Google Business Profile has its own menu section, which Google says you edit from the profile and which helps diners find you on Search and Maps. It is separate from your website, so a price change has to be made in both places — keep them in step, or the version on Google will contradict the one on your site.
Restaurant Menu Widget
A menu with sections, prices and dietary markers.
Also asked
- How can I create a menu website for my restaurant?
All of these have the same answer, so they share this page rather than each getting a near-identical one of their own.