Hospitality is one of those trades where the website has a very specific, very unglamorous job, and most of them get it wrong in the same handful of ways. So, whether you run a pub in the Dales, a restaurant in York or a wine bar in Leeds, this one's for you.
Start by picturing the person you're actually trying to reach. It's half six on a Friday, they're in Yorkshire for the weekend, they're hungry, and they're standing on a pavement holding a phone. They are not going to browse. They want to know, in about ten seconds, whether you're open, whether you've got a table, roughly what you serve and what it costs, and how to get to you. Give them that fast and you've won. Make them dig for it and they've already tapped back to the search results and picked the place next door.
Nearly everything about a good hospitality website follows from that one moment.
It lives or dies on a phone
Most of your visitors will be on mobile, often while they're out and deciding then and there. If your site is fiddly on a phone, slow to load, or hides the important stuff behind menus and pop-ups, you're losing bookings you'll never even know you missed.
That means the essentials have to be right there without any hunting. Opening hours that are actually current. A location that links straight through to maps. A phone number you can tap to call. And a way to book that takes about three taps, not a form that wants your life story. None of that is exciting to build, but all of it is the difference between a full Friday and a quiet one.
The menu is not a PDF
The single most common mistake in hospitality websites is sticking the menu up as a PDF someone designed in Word.
On a phone it's a nightmare - it opens tiny, the person pinches and zooms and squints, and half of them give up. Google can't read it properly either, so when somebody searches for "Sunday roast in York" your menu might as well not exist. Put your menu on the page as actual text. It reads beautifully on a phone, it can be updated in two minutes when the specials change, and it gives Google something to get its teeth into. This one change alone does more than most owners expect.
Photos that are actually yours
Hospitality sells a feeling as much as a meal, and nothing kills that feeling faster than obvious stock photography. A generic plate of pasta and a smiling model who's never set foot in your place tells people nothing, and on some level they know they're being sold to.
Real photos of your actual room, your actual food, the beer garden on a good evening - that's what makes someone think "yes, there, tonight". It doesn't need a fashion shoot. A good photographer for a morning, or even a careful phone in decent light, beats a library of stock every time. People are choosing where to spend an evening, so show them the evening that you can offer them.
It has to cope with a busy year
Hospitality isn't flat - there's the Christmas bookings rush, the summer trade, the wedding enquiry that lands at eleven at night, the event you're hosting next month that needs its own page for a fortnight and then never again.
A good site lets you handle all of that yourself without ringing your web person every time. Putting up the Christmas menu, opening festive bookings, flagging that you're closed for a private function - if that's a faff, it simply won't get done, and an out-of-date site is worse than no site because it actively misinforms people. You want something you can keep current in the two spare minutes you have between services.
Getting found in the first place
None of the above matters if nobody lands on the site to begin with, and in hospitality that's overwhelmingly local search. Somebody types "best pub near me" or "restaurants in York" and Google serves up a little map with three places on it - you really want to be one of them.
Your website and your Google Business Profile work as a pair here - the profile gets you into that map, and the site backs it up with the detail that turns a browse into a booking. Get them singing from the same hymn sheet, with matching information and genuine reviews, and you're competing properly for the person deciding where to eat tonight. That's a bigger subject than we can do justice to here, but the website is half of it, and it's the half you own outright.
The through-line
Everything above comes back to that person on the pavement. A good hospitality website isn't the one with the cleverest design - it's the one that answers a hungry stranger's questions before they lose patience, and makes your place look like exactly where they want to be.
We build websites for hospitality businesses across York and Yorkshire, and we've seen what the difference is worth on a Friday night. If yours is fighting you rather than filling tables, let's have a chat about it.