Restaurant website design and marketing

Diners in El Paso pick a restaurant from a phone. They open Google or Maps, look at the stars, tap the menu, check whether you’re open right now, and either order or move on. Restaurant website design, done right, is about making that sequence work in your favor: a menu Google can read, an order button that goes to you instead of to a 30% commission, and hours that match the sign on the door. Rodco Systems builds restaurant websites in El Paso, Las Cruces and Juárez, in English and Spanish, and shows you a free sample of your home page in one business day.

Where do diners look first?

Google, and the menu before they commit. In Toast’s September 2024 survey of 850 U.S. adults, 25% said they always check a restaurant’s menu before choosing where to eat and 34% said they often do. In its December 2023 survey of 1,157 adults, 46% said Google Reviews was the first place they checked ratings, twice Yelp’s share, and 32% said they always look at the restaurant’s website before visiting.

Your Google Business Profile is the front door. Your website is where the profile sends people when they want the full menu, the catering form or the second location’s hours. If one is stale, the other looks stale too.

The size of the market is on record. El Paso County had 1,452 restaurant establishments in 2025, employing about 33,300 people, and Doña Ana County had 254 more. Across the river, INEGI’s directory lists 6,065 restaurant establishments in Juárez, and 135 of them (2.2%) list a website. Most of those are chains. A taquería with a menu page that opens fast on a phone has very little company.

What does your site have to do?

One job: get a hungry person from “what do they have?” to an order or a table in the fewest taps. Everything else on the page supports that.

The menu comes first. It goes on a web page with sections, prices and photos, at an address that never changes. That same address goes in your Business Profile’s menu link and in the menu field of your Restaurant structured data, so Google reads one menu instead of three versions. A photo of the menu can’t do any of that, and a PDF makes a phone user pinch and scroll. In the Toast survey, 66% of diners preferred menus with dish photos, and 60% wanted service charges written on the menu itself.

Then the order button. DoorDash takes 15% to 30% of a delivered order in the U.S. and 6% on pickup. Uber Eats takes 20% to 30% plus 7% on pickup, after raising its fees in March 2026. Both also sell a direct-ordering page for your own site: Online Ordering by DoorDash has no commission, and Uber Eats Webshop costs 2.5% plus 29 cents an order. Whatever ordering tool you already run, including your POS vendor’s page, we link it from every page and set it as “Preferred” for pickup and delivery on your Business Profile. Google lists any delivery app that claims a relationship with you automatically, so if you don’t mark your own link as preferred, the profile shows theirs.

One catch on the border: Google won’t accept a WhatsApp or Facebook link as an order or reservation button. The link has to land on a page where the order can actually be completed. If you take orders by WhatsApp, the WhatsApp button lives on your site’s menu page, and that menu page is what goes on Google.

What does the page look like? An illustrative wireframe

Picture a phone screen. At the top: your name, “Open until 9 p.m. today” and three buttons, Call, Order and Directions. Below that, the menu by section, each dish with a price and a photo, with today’s special pinned to the top of the first section. Then your hours, with takeout, delivery, drive-through and pickup hours where they differ, the address with a map link, and a reviews line that links to your Google profile. On the Spanish page, the same layout written in Spanish, with WhatsApp beside Call. For a Juárez location, prices in pesos with IVA included and a dollar reference beside them.

That is an illustrative wireframe, not a client’s site. Your menu, your photos and your cross street go in; the structure stays the same because it’s the one diners already know how to use.

Who crosses the bridge to eat?

In the El Paso and Ciudad Juárez cross-border survey published in Estudios Fronterizos in 2022, U.S. residents spent about $30.9 million at sit-down restaurants in Juárez in the last quarter of 2019, their largest named spending category, ahead of groceries. Mexican residents spent about $6.6 million at sit-down restaurants in El Paso in the same quarter. Food moves both ways. An El Paso restaurant gets Spanish-reading families from Juárez, and a Juárez restaurant gets English-reading diners from El Paso.

In El Paso, 63% of city residents age 5 and up speak Spanish at home. A bilingual menu here isn’t a courtesy. It’s how most of the city reads you. We write the Spanish page in Spanish, not through a translation plugin, and we write “burrito de asado” the way the sign out front does.

Which seasons move the menu?

About 78% of the people in the Diocese of El Paso are Catholic, by the Church yearbook figures compiled at catholic-hierarchy.org, and Fridays in Lent are meatless from age 14. Ash Wednesday falls on February 10 in 2027. A specials block that takes minutes to update, plus the same change in the Google menu editor, puts your Friday seafood or meatless plate in front of people before the season starts. Google’s menu changes take 24 to 48 hours to show, so update the week before, not that morning.

The same block carries the daily plate, the game-day special and the holiday hours. It is the part of the site that changes most, so we build it to be changed without touching anything else.