Do I need a website for my restaurant if I am on Deliveroo and Just Eat?

Give the apps their due first. Deliveroo and Just Eat put your food in front of people who were never going to walk past the door, and they take the payment and send the driver while you cook. Instagram sells a plate better than any sentence we could write here, and the regulars who follow you see every special. All three are doing what they were built to do. None of them was built to fill your room on a Friday with people who have never eaten your food.

Those people search on Thursday night, hours before anybody is hungry enough to open an app. A couple deciding where to go for an anniversary, a family booking a birthday, somebody typing the name a friend gave them: they search Google, and Google hands back websites. The only page with your food on it is a Deliveroo menu at deliveroo.co.uk, in the same layout as every other kitchen in town, ranked against the place two streets over on delivery time, rating and whatever promotion each of you is running that night. Google can show that page. It's showing the marketplace, not you.

Why your own site finds new customers

Search and AI read the open web. Google, ChatGPT and Claude fetch pages at addresses like yourrestaurant.co.uk. A listing inside a delivery app is mostly not something they can fetch. If the only description of your restaurant out there was written to a platform's template, that's the version anything recommending somewhere to eat has to work from.

Own the site and you own the words people actually search. Sunday lunch. The tasting menu. A private room for twelve. Set lunch before the theatre. Where to park and how late the kitchen runs. Each of those can have a page of its own, written the way the person searching would say it, and it can carry photographs of the dishes plated the way you plate them rather than shot for an app tile.

That's a different customer from a delivery order. Someone searching for dinner in your town on a Friday has decided to go out and is choosing where. A delivery app is built to send a driver, not to fill a dining room, and the person filling the dining room made the decision hours earlier on a search that never touched the app. They're also worth more when they arrive: a table of four ordering wine is a different night's takings from a single order in a paper bag, and it's the sort of booking a page of your own is built to win.

How we make it simple

The site is built from your Google Business Profile, so the hours, the phone number, the address, the photos and the reviews Google shows are the ones on the site. Nothing typed twice, nothing left saying you close at ten when you changed it to eleven in March.

From the listing and your menu we make a page for what you serve, and an FAQ out of what your reviews keep asking about: booking a big table, high chairs, gluten free, corkage, how far in advance Sunday lunch goes. If you want a page for the private dining room or for the set menu that only runs midweek, that's the kind of page a site of your own can carry.

The technical work you would otherwise be quoted for by an SEO agency is part of the build. The site is written to be indexed by Google and read by ChatGPT: pages of real text, structured data describing the restaurant, a sitemap, and all of it submitted to Google and Bing at go-live. Google can show a page at your address, under your restaurant's name, working for one kitchen.

It's live a couple of minutes after you type the name in, with nothing to write first and no design meeting to sit through in the middle of a service. After that it keeps up with your Google listing, so a change of hours over Christmas is one edit rather than three, and the version on your own website is never the one that's a season out of date.

How they work together

The apps keep doing delivery. Somebody who wants dinner on the sofa orders the way they always did and the ticket lands in your kitchen exactly as before, commission and all, which is the fair cost of an order you would not otherwise have had. Your own site works the other end: the table booking. Put your booking link, or just the phone number, behind the Book a table button and the reservation comes straight to you, with no commission on a table you filled yourself.

Your Instagram bio points at the site instead of at a delivery listing, so the people who came for one reel of the pasta land somewhere you control and can book in two taps. The website field on your Google profile points at the same address, and that field is the one most people tap after Google has shown them your name.

What you pay

£30 a month, no setup fee. A real multi-page site on your own .co.uk or .com, built from your Google listing, with the menu, the hours and the reviews coming across on their own and hosting and updates in the price. Live in a couple of minutes and free to look at first. Cancel any month and the domain stays yours.

Put your restaurant's name into our restaurant page and we'll build one from your Google listing. Reading it costs nothing.