A restaurant website in Morocco: menu, booking, delivery
Four pieces of information decide the visit: where, when, what, how much. A restaurant website that gives them in ten seconds has done most of its job.
· 7 min read · Noor Studio Agency
What the diner is looking for, in this order
The behaviour is remarkably consistent, and almost always on a phone: someone decides to eat out, searches your name or your type of cuisine, and wants to check four things before travelling.
Are you open now? Where exactly are you? What is the food? What does it cost? A site answering those four in the first screen has done the essential part. A site that makes people hunt loses them to the restaurant next door whose listing showed the opening hours.
The PDF menu is the most common problem
It is the first thing to fix on most restaurant websites, and it can be fixed without a rebuild.
A PDF menu downloads instead of displaying, opens in an external reader, arrives at six-point type on a phone, and forces zooming and dragging. It is not read by search engines the way a page is, so your dishes cannot surface in a search. And it is almost always out of date, because updating it means finding the source file.
A menu as web pages reads immediately, updates in a minute, and makes your specialities findable. It is the highest effort-to-result intervention in the whole sector.
Prices: whether to show them
The temptation not to show them is understandable, especially at the higher end. It almost always backfires.
A diner who cannot find prices assumes the worst, or checks elsewhere — on a platform, in a review, on a photo of the menu someone else took. You lose control of the information and the visit at once. Showing prices filters out diners you are not right for, which serves both sides.
Booking, delivery, platforms: choosing
- Booking. For most Moroccan restaurants, a tappable number and a WhatsApp link are enough, and convert better than a form. A reservation system with a table plan is justified when volume makes the paper book risky, not before.
- Delivery. Platforms bring volume and take a commission on every order. Ordering directly from your site avoids the commission but leaves you the logistics. Most restaurants do both, which is reasonable — provided the site gives a reason to order direct.
- The QR menu. Useful at the table, provided it points to a web page and not a PDF. The same content then serves the diner at the table and the one searching from home.
The business listing matters as much as the site
For a restaurant, local search is the dominant channel, and what appears first is not your site: it is your listing, with hours, photographs, directions and reviews.
Hours are the most consulted information there and the most often wrong — particularly during Ramadan, when restaurants that do not update their listing send customers to a closed door, or put them off when they are in fact open.
The site and the listing do not replace one another: the listing captures the search, the site gives the reason to come. Both must show the same hours.
Photographs, and what they need to show
A restaurant is chosen on images, and a restaurant’s images date quickly: a menu changes, a room is repainted, a dish is dropped. Two mistakes recur everywhere.
The first is showing only dishes. A diner also wants to know where they will sit: the room, the terrace, the noise level you can guess at, whether it works for a family or for dinner for two. Those photographs decide as much as the plates do.
The second is showing dishes that are no longer served. It is the most common source of disappointment on arrival, and entirely avoidable: photographs are updated with the menu, not once a year.
One technical point that matters more than it looks: these images must be served at the size actually displayed. A full-resolution dish photograph on a phone over 4G is the leading cause of slowness on a restaurant website.
Frequently asked
Does a restaurant really need a website?
It needs a complete business listing: that is the minimum, and it is what captures local search. A website becomes necessary as soon as there is something to tell that a listing cannot carry — a changing menu, a place worth seeing, events, international guests planning ahead.
Does it need to be multilingual?
It depends on your actual clientele, not on principle. A neighbourhood restaurant does not need it. A restaurant in a tourist area, in Marrakech or in a medina, serves people searching in English, French and sometimes Spanish — and each language needs its own address to be found.
How should Ramadan hours be handled?
By changing them everywhere they are published, at the same time: business listing, website, social profiles. It is a ten-minute job that avoids the period’s main source of negative reviews, and a good reason for the site’s hours to be editable without calling a supplier.
And at Noor Studio Agency?
For Atelier Noir we treated the menu as real web content rather than a document to download — readable on a phone, editable in-house, and findable by dish.
See what that looks like
The simplest thing is to look at a site we have delivered in a trade close to yours, and judge it on the work.