Restaurant and café websites in the Netherlands: what to include and what it costs

A restaurant or café website has one job: turn someone who is hungry and deciding right now into a booking or a visit. That means a readable menu, one-tap reservations, and hours and location visible without scrolling, on a phone. In the Netherlands, a custom-built hospitality site from FluoSite starts at €2,000, fixed price, with the first design within 3-4 days of kickoff.

The five things every hospitality website needs

• A real, readable menu: HTML text, not a PDF or a photo, so it's fast, searchable and easy to update.
• One-tap reservations, whether that's a booking widget, a phone number or both, visible on every screen.
• Photos that sell the room and the food, not stock imagery.
• Hours, address and a map above the fold, so nobody has to hunt.
• Mobile-first design: most restaurant searches happen on a phone, often while someone is already deciding where to go.

The mistakes that cost tables

The menu is a PDF. A photographed or scanned PDF menu is slow to load, hard to read on a phone and invisible to Google, so you don't show up when people search for your dishes. It's also invisible to AI assistants: when someone asks ChatGPT for a café with good lunch nearby, the assistant can only recommend what it can actually read.

The reservation button is buried. If booking takes more than one tap from the homepage, most mobile visitors give up and call a competitor instead. And if opening hours and the address aren't visible straight away, visitors bounce to Google Maps or Instagram instead of staying on your site.

Booking systems and ordering

You don't need to switch booking systems to get a better website. We integrate with most reservation platforms, such as OpenTable, Formitable or a custom widget. If you do takeaway or delivery, online ordering usually pays for itself fast. If you're mainly dine-in, a clear reservation flow matters more than ordering.

What it costs and how long it takes

Most restaurant and café sites fall in our Redesign / Essentials tier: a fixed price agreed before work starts (projects run €2,000-€4,000), first design within 3-4 days of kickoff, most projects live within 2-4 weeks depending on scope. You get full ownership of the site, the domain and the accounts, with no monthly platform fee to keep it online beyond hosting.

Choosing who builds it

• Ask to see the menu page on a phone in their past work. If it's a PDF, keep looking.
• Ask who owns the domain and hosting after launch. It should be you.
• Ask whether they connect to the booking system you already use, or make you switch.
• Ask for a fixed price before work starts, not an hourly estimate.