[ yorkville · 5 min read ]

Why Yorkville restaurants lose customers to a slow website 

Restaurant websites fail in a specific, measurable way, and Yorkville has a lot of good restaurants doing it. The decision window is about thirty seconds long, on a phone, usually within a mile of your door.

The PDF menu is the biggest offender

A PDF forces a download, opens in a separate viewer, and requires pinch-zooming to read on a phone. Every one of those steps loses people.

Put the menu on the page as real text. It loads instantly, it is readable at any size, and search engines can index your dishes — which is how someone searching for tacos or a fish fry near Yorkville finds you at all.

Hours have to be right and easy to find

Wrong holiday hours generate one-star reviews from people who drove out for nothing. Keep them accurate on the site and the Google profile simultaneously.

Put today's hours at the top of the homepage on mobile. It is the most-looked-for piece of information on any restaurant site.

Photos of your food, not the vendor's

Stock food photography reads as a chain. Phone photos of your actual plates, taken in daylight, outperform it consistently in a town where people know each other.

One tap to call, one tap for directions

Reservations, takeout, directions. Three things people want, each one tap away. Nothing else needs to be above the fold.

Let the local groups do the rest

Yorkville's community pages move a real number of covers. Post specials there and make sure the link people click lands on a page that loads in under two seconds.

The takeaway

For a Yorkville restaurant, speed and a readable menu beat every design flourish. Fix those two and the site starts filling tables.

Working in Yorkville? See our Yorkville web design page →

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