Website upkeep for restaurants: what goes stale first
On restaurant websites, the menu and its prices go stale first, followed by holiday opening hours and announcements for events that already happened. Seasonal menus are also often left up past their season. Guests check the menu and hours right before visiting, so both deserve a look every time the menu changes.
Check whether last season is still on the menu page
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So geht es
- 1Enter your address. Type your restaurant's website address.
- 2Let us look. DustOff reads the menu, hours and homepage text.
- 3Read the result. Every outdated passage appears with an excerpt and a reason.
- 4Get reminded. Add your email so DustOff checks again on your rhythm.
The five places diners notice first
A diner rarely browses your whole site. They open it in the car park, check the menu and the hours, and decide whether to walk in. Everything else can wait; these two cannot.
- A menu with last season's prices
- Holiday hours carried over from last year
- Announcements for events that have already happened
- Seasonal menus still listed outside their season
- Booking instructions pointing to a service you no longer use
Why the cost lands immediately
A wrong price does not cost a click, it costs a table — and often an awkward conversation at checkout. A festive menu still on the homepage in June tells a visitor, correctly, that nobody has looked at the site in a while.
Unlike a shop, a restaurant loses these visitors without any data to show for it. Nobody fills in a form to say the hours were wrong; they simply choose somewhere else for dinner.
Building the check into a rhythm you already have
Check the menu page, the hours page and the homepage in that order, every time the seasonal menu changes. That rhythm already exists in the kitchen — the website just needs to follow it.
If the menu lives as an uploaded file rather than text on the page, put it at the top of that list: files are the easiest thing to forget when a price changes, because updating them is a separate step from updating the site.
Beyond the menu
Photos of a dining room that was since renovated, a wine list missing a bottle that sold out months ago, or a delivery partner logo for a service you dropped — these smaller details rarely drive a decision on their own, but together they build the same impression as an old price: nobody is minding the site.
Häufige Fragen
- What do guests notice first?
- Prices and opening hours. Both are read right before the visit and compared against reality within minutes.
- Does the online menu need to be complete?
- No, but it needs to be correct. A short, current menu reads better than a long one with prices that no longer apply.
- How do I stop holiday hours going stale?
- Update them together with the seasonal menu change, and set a calendar reminder for the day after each public holiday to check they were reverted.
- Should past events stay on the site?
- Move them to an archive or gallery page instead of leaving them on the events list, so the current page only shows what's coming up.