Why your restaurant website is slow and how to fix it

You tap the link to your restaurant's website on your phone, and the screen stays blank for four seconds. A customer trying to look at your menu while walking down the street will simply close the tab before the page finishes loading.

Restaurant website speed is almost always dictated by one specific thing. It is rarely the server, the underlying code, or the hosting provider. It is the photographs.

Why photos slow everything down

When you take a picture of a new dish with a modern phone, the camera captures a massive amount of detail. That single image file might be five or ten megabytes in size. This level of detail is necessary if you are printing a large poster for your window. It is entirely unnecessary for a phone screen, and it is terrible for mobile website performance.

If you upload that original photo straight to your website builder, every person who visits your site has to download those ten megabytes. If your homepage has six photos of your dining room, your storefront, and your food, the page might be fifty megabytes in total.

A customer sitting at a desk on a fast internet connection might not notice. A customer standing on a street corner with a weak cellular signal will wait a very long time for that much data to arrive. Slow website images are the primary cause of a poor website loading time. The phone has to pull down every single pixel before it can show the user what they want to see.

How to check your image weight

You can check the size of your photos yourself before you upload them. This is called the file weight.

On an iPhone, open the photo in your camera roll, swipe up, and look at the information panel. You will see a number next to MB or KB. On an Android phone, tap the three dots in the corner of the photo and look at the details section. On a desktop computer, right-click the image file and select properties or get info.

You are looking for the overall file size. A megabyte is too big for a single website image. A good target for a photograph on a website is under half a megabyte, which is five hundred kilobytes. If your file size is measured in megabytes, it needs to be smaller before it goes on your website.

Making images smaller

There are two ways to make an image file smaller. The first is resizing the actual dimensions of the picture. A modern phone camera takes photos that are three or four thousand pixels wide. A phone screen is only a few hundred pixels wide. You can use the basic photo editing tools already on your phone or computer to resize the image width. Changing the width to about one thousand pixels will drastically drop the file weight.

The second way is compression. This reduces the file size by removing data the human eye cannot see. You can find simple image compression tools by searching online. You upload your large photo, and the tool gives you back a smaller file that looks identical on a screen but weighs a fraction of the original.

Taking a few minutes to resize and compress your photos will make your website load much faster. A fast site gets out of the way and lets the customer read the menu or find your address.

Websites built into your operation

lokal includes a website builder as part of the system. You can publish a real site at a lokal.business subdomain, or you can connect a domain you already own. The website includes online ordering, and those orders flow straight to the register. Owners can also put their own delivery links on their site if they use outside services.

lokal is one app for running a local business, handling the website, register, reservations, and team scheduling. We charge a single price of $99.99 per month plus tax, with the first month for $1. There is no commission on your own orders, and payments process directly through your own Square account at your normal rates.