Project overview
The group runs three restaurants in central Manchester. Their old website was slow, hard to update and pushed diners to a third-party booking page that charged per cover.
They wanted a site that looked as good as the food and made booking direct the easiest option.
A beautiful restaurant, a frustrating website
Three things were holding bookings back:
Slow on mobile
Large images and a heavy theme meant pages took over five seconds to load on a phone.
Menus as PDFs
Diners had to download menus that were hard to read and often out of date.
Booking was hidden
The booking button sent people off-site, where many gave up.
What success looked like
- Make direct booking the defaulton every page.
- Load in under two secondson mobile.
- Let staff update menuswithout a developer.
Our approach, step by step
- 1
Discovery and design Weeks 1–3
Mapped how diners choose a restaurant and designed mobile-first pages around menus, photos and booking.
- 2
Build Weeks 3–6
Built a fast WordPress site with editable menus, venue pages and an embedded booking flow.
- 3
Local SEO setup Weeks 5–7
Created venue pages, restaurant schema and aligned each Google Business Profile with the new site.
- 4
Launch and training Week 8
Launched with redirects in place and trained the team to update menus and events.
Before and after: key metrics
Website performance for the month before launch vs month three.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Online bookings per month | 180 | 540 | ▲ 3x |
| Mobile load time | 5.4s | 1.6s | ▼ 3.8s |
| Booking page drop-off | 61% | 29% | ▼ 32 pts |
| Menu page views | 2,100 | 3,110 | ▲ 48% |
The results
Direct online bookings grew month on month after launch.
“Booking a table on our site is now quicker than on any app, and the team can change menus in minutes.”