Restaurant websites in Westchester: what diners look for, and what most local sites get wrong

Before someone books a table or orders takeout, they usually look you up. In a survey of 1,101 U.S. diners by the restaurant marketing agency MGH, 77% said they check a restaurant’s website first, and about two in three of them said a website had put them off going to a restaurant at all.

So I took a closer look at the restaurants in my Northern Westchester website study. Restaurants, cafes, and bars were the biggest group in the study, and their sites were slower than the local average.

What I found

I tested the websites of 28 independent restaurants, cafes, and bars in Peekskill, Cortlandt, Croton-on-Hudson, Yorktown, and Ossining with Google’s PageSpeed Insights mobile test. 26 could be scored.

What I measured	Restaurants, cafes, and bars	All 55 local sites
Main content showed within 2.5 seconds (Google’s target)	0 of 26	1 of 55
Showed within 4 seconds	2 of 26	—
Typical (median) time to show main content	12.8 seconds	10.3 seconds
Took longer than 10 seconds	14 of 26	28 of 55
Took longer than 20 seconds	6 of 26	—
Score in Google’s “poor” range (below 50)	9 of 26	16 of 55
Website link on the listing didn’t work	2 of 28	8 of 63

Google’s test simulates a mid-range phone on a slower mobile connection, so on good 5G many of these sites will load faster than the numbers above. But the test is the same for everyone, and it’s the same standard Google uses. Someone standing on a sidewalk on Division Street or in a parking lot on Route 6 is not on office Wi-Fi.

I’m sharing totals only, not individual restaurants.

What a hungry person is looking for

Almost everyone who opens a restaurant website on a phone wants one of five things:

1. Are you open right now? Today’s hours, including holiday changes.
2. What’s on the menu, and what does it cost?
3. Where are you, and where do I park?
4. How do I call you?
5. Can I order or reserve online?

The test is simple: open your site on your phone and see whether all five are one tap away from the first screen. A full-screen slideshow, a video background, or a pop-up about your newsletter all stand between a customer and those answers, and they are also the most common reasons a restaurant site is slow.

Put the menu on the page, not in a PDF or a photo

This is the most common problem I see on restaurant sites. The menu is a PDF from the printer, or a photo of the paper menu. On a phone, that means downloading a file, then pinching and zooming to read it.

In the MGH survey, 30% of diners said a hard-to-read menu discouraged them from visiting, and 36% said the same about ordering takeout.

A menu written as real text on the page fixes several things at once:

• It’s readable on any phone without zooming.
• Google can read it, so your dishes can show up when someone searches “birria tacos near me” or “gluten-free pizza Croton.”
• You can update a price or mark a dish as sold out in a minute, instead of sending a new file to a designer.
• You can label vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free dishes clearly, which is often what decides where a group goes.

If you love your printed menu’s design, keep a PDF as a download link for people who want it. Just don’t make it the only version.

Food photos: yes, but not at full size

Photos sell food. In the same survey, 45% of diners said they look for food photos on a restaurant’s website, and younger diners even more so.

The catch is that photos are also the main reason restaurant sites are slow. A single photo straight from a phone or a photographer can be 5 to 10 MB, more than an entire well-built page should weigh. Resizing images and saving them in a modern format like WebP or AVIF often cuts a page’s load time in half without any visible difference.

A good rule: a few great photos, sized properly, beat a slideshow of twenty.

Online ordering, and what the apps cost you

Delivery apps bring you new customers, but they’re expensive. DoorDash’s published marketplace commissions are 15%, 25%, or 30% per delivery order, depending on the plan.

Many restaurants now also offer ordering directly on their own website. Most restaurant point-of-sale systems include an online ordering page, and DoorDash and others offer commission-free ordering links for your own site, with a payment processing fee instead. Regulars who already know you are happy to order that way, and you keep more of each order.

Your website should make that option obvious, with an “Order online” button near the top of every page, not buried in a menu.

Match your Google Business Profile

For a restaurant, your Google Business Profile is often seen more than your website. Keep the two in sync:

• Hours, including special hours for holidays and private events. Wrong hours on Google are one of the fastest ways to get a bad review.
• Menu link pointing to the menu page on your site.
• Order and reservation links, if you take them online.
• Fresh photos of real dishes and the dining room.

On the website side, a developer can add structured data that tells Google your cuisine, hours, price range, and where your menu lives. It’s invisible to diners, but it helps Google show the right details in search and Maps. I cover the rest of the Google side in how to get your local business found on Google.

A five-minute checkup for your restaurant’s site

Grab your phone, switch off Wi-Fi, and:

1. Search your restaurant’s name on Google Maps and tap Website. Does it open your current site?
2. Count the seconds until you can see something useful. More than about 3 is too slow.
3. From the first screen, can you find today’s hours, the menu, the address, the phone number, and ordering in one tap each?
4. Open the menu. Can you read it without zooming?
5. Run your address through pagespeed.web.dev and look at the Mobile score.

If you get stuck on two or more of these, your website is probably costing you tables and orders. My 7 signs your website is costing you customers goes deeper on the fixes.

What it takes to fix

Most restaurant sites don’t need to be big. Home, menu, hours and location, ordering, and maybe private events or catering is plenty. That usually fits a starter site, and a speed fix on an existing site can be much less. I explain the price ranges, including mine, in how much a website costs in Westchester.

I’m a web developer in Cortlandt Manor, and I build fast, mobile-friendly sites for restaurants and other local businesses in Peekskill, Croton-on-Hudson, Ossining, Yorktown, and across Westchester. If you’d like to know how your restaurant’s site did, email me and I’ll send you a free speed check, with the three fixes that would help most.

Sources: MGH diner survey of 1,101 U.S. adults, reported by Restaurant Dive and Hospitality Technology; DoorDash merchant pricing. Local results from my own October 2026 tests with Google PageSpeed Insights.