Does your restaurant need its own website?

When someone searches your shop's name, that results page decides what happens next — and you may not be on it. A delivery platform's listing, a review site, or a rival's ad can stand where your own page should, and each one collects the click on its own terms.

1. In a private browser window, search your shop's name on Google — the exact words customers use — and note the first five results plus what the map panel shows.
2. For each result, write down who controls that page: you, a delivery platform, a review site, or nobody.
3. Check where an order or booking tap on each result would send the customer, and which results show stale hours, prices, or menu items.

Platforms do real work — discovery, delivery logistics, payment — and they charge for it on every order, including orders from regulars who were coming back anyway. The commission is a price you can compute, and the rules attached to it change without your vote. Compute it before deciding anything.

1. Take last month's platform statement and work out the effective cost per order: commission plus every fee, divided by the number of orders.
2. List the fee or rule changes the platform made this past year that affected you, and what your options were each time.
3. Estimate how many of last month's orders came from regulars who would order direct if a direct channel were just as easy.

A restaurant site earns its place by taking over specific jobs, not by existing. The usual candidates: the authoritative menu and prices, hours and holidays, how to find you, reservations, direct ordering, and the questions people currently phone in to ask.

1. Write down what customers actually call or message to ask — hours, seating, parking, whether a dish is on today — and mark which of those a single page could answer.
2. Decide whether reservations or direct ordering belong in the first version, or whether menu, hours, and directions are enough to start. In Naratake, ordering and bookings go live on a published site on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them. Taking card payments needs your own Stripe account — the money goes straight to you, and we never touch it. What each plan publishes live is on the pricing page.
3. Pick the one action you most want a visitor to take — book a table, order pickup, call — and plan the page around that single obvious button.

For a local shop, the Business Profile panel is what a name search mostly shows: map, hours, photos, reviews. It is rented space too — Google chooses the layout and can place third-party ordering links on it. The website field is the one link on that panel that goes exactly where you choose.

1. Claim and verify the profile if you have not, then check that hours, address, phone, and photos are current.
2. Put your site's address in the profile's website field, and make sure the menu link points at your own menu page — not a platform listing or an outdated PDF.
3. Keep hours and menu identical between the profile and the site, and update both whenever either changes; when they disagree, customers trust neither.

The first version needs the jobs on your list, not everything you can imagine. One page that carries the menu, hours, directions, and your primary action beats a grand plan that stays a plan. Naratake's 40 industry starting points give a restaurant that first version ready-made, and building and previewing it costs nothing and needs no card. If owning the code matters, Storefront Pro downloads the complete source of the site you just built — a real project you can hand to any developer.

1. Build one page that carries your jobs list: the current menu with prices, hours, address and directions, and the one primary action from step 3.
2. Publish it to a hosted address, where HTTPS is issued automatically. Every cloud plan connects one custom domain.
3. Put the address everywhere you already are: the Business Profile website field, social bios, and printed where customers wait — the counter, the receipt, the door.
4. On a phone, search the shop's name, tap through to the site, and complete the primary action yourself — book, order, or call.