Resources · Website planning
Should Your Restaurant Website Have Booking or Reservations?
This one comes up early in almost every restaurant website conversation, and the honest answer is: it depends on how you already run reservations.
If you already use a reservation platform
Connect it, don't compete with it.
Most restaurants already have something: OpenTable, Resy, Toast, SevenRooms or similar. In that case, the website's job isn't to rebuild reservations from scratch. It's to make the existing system easy to find and use: a clear, visible button that connects straight to the platform you're already running, rather than a competing system nobody maintains.
If you're taking reservations by phone only
That's a real, valid way to run a restaurant.
Especially for smaller or more casual spots. In that case, the website doesn't need a booking feature at all. It needs a phone number that's easy to find, on every page, not buried on a Contact page three clicks deep.
The mistake to avoid
Building or bolting on a booking system that isn't connected to how you actually manage the floor. A reservation form that emails you a request, but doesn't talk to your host stand or your existing platform, creates more work than it saves: double-booking risk, missed requests, and a system nobody trusts enough to use consistently.
Bottom line
The website's job is to connect cleanly to whatever you're already using to manage reservations, not to replace it. If you don't have a platform yet and you're getting enough call volume that it's becoming a problem, that's a separate conversation worth having before the website gets built, not after.
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