How to put your pizzeria menu online
Put the menu on a web page, not in a PDF, with one item per dish and its own price. A PDF cannot be read properly on a phone, gives search engines almost nothing to work with, and makes changing one price a re-export of the whole document. The menu is the page customers actually came for — it should be the easiest thing on the site to change.
Why not a PDF
| Web page | ||
|---|---|---|
| On a phone | Pinch and zoom | Reads at any width |
| Changing a price | Re-export and re-upload | Seconds |
| Marking a dish sold out | Not really possible | One tap |
| Search engines | Very little extracted | Dishes and prices readable |
| Screen readers | Often unusable | Works |
| Ordering from it | No | Yes |
The PDF exists because somebody had the menu in a design file already. That is a reason to have a PDF as well, for printing. It is not a reason to make it the thing a hungry customer taps at 7pm.
Structure it once, properly
Most of the work is deciding on the shape, and the shape is the same in every pizzeria:
- Categories — classics, white pizzas, vegetarian, sides, desserts. Five or six. A customer scanning on a phone cannot hold more.
- Items — one per dish, with a base price and the list of ingredients. The ingredients are not decoration; they are what drives the allergens.
- Options — size, base, extras. Defined once and attached to many dishes, so changing the price of a 40cm upgrade is one edit rather than twenty.
Write the descriptions for someone deciding
A description earns its place when it answers a question the name does not. Nobody needs a paragraph under Margherita. They might need one under your house special, and they definitely need to know if the nduja is hot.
Skip the adjectives. "Hand-stretched, lovingly prepared with the finest ingredients" tells a customer nothing that the next line — "San Marzano tomato, fior di latte, basil" — does not tell them better.
Allergens belong on the item
Not on a separate page, not in a downloadable chart. On the dish, where the person deciding is looking. If you take orders online this is also a legal requirement: written allergen information has to be available before the order is placed.
Recording them per ingredient rather than per pizza is what makes this survivable. Change gorgonzola supplier and you update one line, not every white pizza on the menu.
What the allergen rules actually require
Photos: all or none
A menu where three dishes have photos and eleven do not makes the eleven look unavailable. Either photograph everything, on the same day, in the same light — or photograph nothing and let the page be clean and fast. Stock photography of somebody else's pizza is the worst of the three options and customers notice.
Let a search engine read it
Marking up the menu as structured data means a search engine can associate your dishes and prices with your restaurant rather than inferring them from a paragraph. It costs nothing at serve time and it is what puts a dish name in front of someone searching for it nearby.
Keep it true
A menu online is a promise about price and availability. The two habits that matter: change the price on the site the same day you change it on the board, and mark things sold out during service rather than after it. Both are only realistic if editing takes seconds from your phone — which is really the whole argument for everything above.