What’s the most searched for item on our current restaurant clients’ websites?

May 7, 2025

Reading time: 2 minutes

Shockingly, "menu" is the top search on restaurant websites! So why the PDF obsession? A mobile-friendly, updatable online menu delights visitors and avoids the pitfalls of outdated, inconvenient documents. Choose better.

Disclaimer: I’m not going to share actual search data (become a client and start benefiting from the type of data our website setups gather for our clients). But I can say with absolute certainty that the most searched thing on our current restaurant clients’ websites is the word, “menu”.

Can you guess what website visitors are looking for who search for a menu?

Pretty obvious they want to see a menu, right?

So here’s a question (and this is a personal gripe I have with restaurant websites): why are restaurant owners happy with uploading PDF menus to their websites?

How on earth is this a sensible business practice?

If you own a restaurant, wouldn’t it be much better to have a WordPress website with a mobile-friendly menu that’s updatable from within the WordPress dashboard?

Also, isn’t it a much better user experience for website visitors, to be welcomed by a mobile-friendly menu that fits on their screens without them having to pinch and zoom?

Let’s go back to the data.

For our current clients, guess which page on their websites is one of the top two popular?

Yes, the menu page.

Why?

Because it’s a mobile-friendly design that allows people to easily see what our restaurant clients have on offer.

And if one of our restaurant clients want to update pricing, they can do so.

Or they get us to do it. Either way, it makes MUCH more sense than using a PDF.

Here’s another problem with PDFs.

When you upload PDFs somewhere, Google indexes them.

What happens if you don’t remove old PDFs with pricing that’s outdated, and someone comes across that menu and tries to hold you to the pricing on it?

That’s an inconvenient situation, wouldn’t you say?

Why spend mental effort on things like battling potential clients about old menus you’d forgotten to remove from wherever you uploaded them to.

There’s a better way.

Get a mobile-friendly, optimized WordPress website for your restaurant, get a mobile-friendly menu page and enjoy the delightful taste of delighting your website visitors.