Web design for restaurants & food service in Kenya

Get a nearby, hungry person from “where shall we eat” to a booking or an order in under a minute, on a phone. That means a menu that loads instantly and is easy to read (not a photo of a printed page), clear location and hours, a reservation path, and (where it makes commercial sense) direct online ordering for pickup or delivery with M-Pesa. For a group with several outlets, each location needs its own page, menu and hours.

The aggregator apps are worth staying on for discovery, but every order you can move to your own channel is margin recovered. We build direct ordering as a fast e-commerce flow (menu to cart to M-Pesa STK Push to kitchen) and connect it to whatever you use for order tickets and, if you run your own riders, delivery-zone pricing. A simple loyalty or repeat-order mechanic gives regulars a reason to order from you rather than the app.

Delivery platforms bring volume and take a commission on every order, and they own the customer relationship that comes with it. That trade is worth making for discovery, but it is a bad deal for the regulars who would happily order from you directly. The answer is not to leave the platforms; it is to give repeat customers somewhere better to go, and to make the difference obvious on the receipt, on the packaging and on social media.

Direct ordering on your own site means M-Pesa into your own till rather than a platform payout cycle, your own customer records, and no commission on the orders you were already going to get. It works best for a focused menu with a delivery radius you can actually serve. We scope it honestly: if your volume does not yet justify running your own delivery, a table-booking flow and a click-to-call order line will earn more than a half-used ordering system.

Most restaurant discovery in Kenya happens on a map, not on a website. A complete, claimed Google Business Profile with correct opening hours, the right pin, current photographs, the menu link and active review replies does more for covers than a redesign will. Holiday hours are the detail that catches everyone out, and a listing that says you are open when you are closed produces a review you will be reading for years.

The site’s job is to support that: location pages for each branch with parking, directions and landmarks, opening hours in text rather than an image, and a booking or order route that is one tap from every page. That work sits under local SEO, and for most restaurants it is a better first investment than advertising.

A restaurant with more than one branch needs a page per branch, not a dropdown on a contact page. Each one carries its own address and map pin, opening hours, parking, whether it takes bookings, whether it delivers and to where, and photographs of that actual room. Customers search by place, and a branch page is what lets the Karen site rank for Karen instead of competing with your own Westlands listing.

The higher-value enquiries are often not tables at all. Office catering, private functions, birthdays, corporate lunches and outside catering are bookings with a per-head value many times a walk-in, and most restaurant sites bury them. A function page with capacities, set menus and per-head pricing bands, minimum numbers, deposit terms and a form that asks for the date, headcount and dietary requirements turns those enquiries from phone-tag into something your manager can quote against.

Loyalty is the other thing the site can carry that a delivery platform will not. A simple mailing list, offers for regulars, a page for the weekly special that actually changes, and a booking route that remembers returning customers all build the direct relationship the platforms rent back to you. None of it is complicated; it just has to be maintained, which is why we build it so your team can update it without calling us.

We start with how you want orders and bookings to flow and what you are paying the aggregators, design a fast mobile-first site around the menu, and build direct ordering where the numbers support it. The build is web design and development with e-commerce development for ordering and digital marketing to drive first orders. Tell us how many outlets and whether you deliver, and we will scope it.