Online Menus: The Seven Deadly Sins

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Article By Avi Goren, CEO, Marqii

There is no turning back the clock. Technology is reshaping the how, where and when of what it takes to operate a restaurant. Now more than ever, the digital world is driving the way restaurants connect and communicate with customers.

In this new digital frontier, online menus are where the taco meets the grill (so to speak), and are often cited by customers and restaurant management alike as the reason why customers come to a particular restaurant. 

Translation? Online menus have an overwhelming influence on the ability of restaurants to attract new customers and ultimately grow their business in the face of competition.

That’s why, at Marqii, we’ve developed what we call the “Seven Deadly Sins of Online Menus” for restaurants – a list of the most common mistakes we’ve seen as we’ve helped thousands of restaurants get the most from their online menus. We’re not just sharing this because we offer a platform that makes it easy for restaurant operators to publish and update their online menus across 75 consumer-facing sites directly from their POS. It’s also because helping restaurants find the best digital solutions to help grow their business is just… what we do. We can’t help ourselves.

If a restaurant continues to struggle with managing their online menus and using them to get new guests in the door, some of these call-outs might feel personal. We promise they’re not.

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  • Red Gold Sacramento
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  • BelGioioso Burrata
  • Atosa USA
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  • McKee Foodservice
  • RATIONAL USA
  • T&S Brass Eversteel Pre-Rinse Units
  • Imperial Dade
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Sin #1: PDF menus

Nothing screams ‘behind the times’ like a good old-fashioned PDF menu. Visually speaking it’s far less appealing than a modern digital menu platform. In an industry where great customer experiences and food aesthetics are king, having a clunky, outdated menu sends an unconscious message that a restaurant is struggling to keep up. From the diners’ perspective, if the menu doesn’t impress, will the food and service be underwhelming too?

Another challenge of PDF menus? Optimizing for search engines. It used to be that search engines could not ‘see’ PDFs and thus could not crawl them for their content in order to rank them for user searches. That changed some 11 years ago, at least for Google. Still, despite now being ‘crawlable’ and therefore usable as part of an overall search engine optimization strategy, the process of optimizing a PDF is arduous at best.

Bottom line, it takes more work to manage a PDF menu, the user experience is less impressive, and the work it takes to prepare the menu for search engines is manual and subject to erroneous entries. 


Sin #2: Neglecting menu updates

Every restaurant at some point, if it existed before the recent arrival of online menu management platforms like Marqii, has undoubtedly dealt with menu neglect. It’s not enough that there are print menus to maintain, but throw in delivery menus, and online menus across multiple digital platforms, and you have the recipe for menu version control chaos. 

Recent developments related to pandemic-induced supply issues have put many restaurants in a situation where some ingredients that were available one week are suddenly unavailable the next week. Trying to maintain an up-to-date menu is nearly impossible when not done with a more seamless, automated workflow. Marqii’s online menu management platform solves for this by integrating directly into any cloud-based  restaurant POS system. Each time the POS is updated for quick-changes, be they daily specials or ingredient supply snafus, the same information is fed to all the online menus automatically. If the POS is up-to-date, the menu is as well.


Sin #3: Not adding the menu to online listings 

As mentioned in the introduction, Marqii automatically updates its customers’ online information across over 75 different customer-facing sites, including online menus wherever they’re accepted. Why does that matter? As many as 49% of diners refer to online menus before choosing a restaurant. Consider the sheer size of what that statistics represents. If you take one report that said 163 million people dine out at least once a week – granted, that was a pre-pandemic measurement but today’s numbers are quickly returning to those levels – then 49% is a whopping 80 million views of online menus. 

Another fact: not all diners are using Google and Facebook. There are many other sites restaurant-goers use when looking for a place to dine, not the least of which includes the likes of Yelp, Tripadvisor, Zagat and Maps. Leaving sites like these out in the digital cold is a huge missed opportunity to win more customers. In the world of restaurants, every new guest can yield a multitude of benefits – referrals, positive reviews, return visits, better online visibility, and more.  


Sin #4: Failing to optimize online menus for search engines

Long gone are the days when diners would pick up a phone book to find a restaurant. Heck, long gone are the days when a newspaper might write about a restaurant’s grand opening and that was all you needed to fire up the customer attraction engine. We live in an increasingly digital world and search engines still wield incredible influence. Among search engines, Google is the undisputed heavyweight, coming in at around 94% of the mobile search engine market worldwide compared to 0.42% for Bing.

Most restaurants have a search engine optimization strategy and do their best to rank as highly as possible for search terms that diners use when looking for local food options. Yet many restaurants neglect optimizing their online menu for search. Online menus are valuable digital real estate, and they often net direct search traffic on mobile devices that may not otherwise go to the main website. So for restaurants to stay competitive among diners feeling the itch to get out for a good meal, it makes sense to deploy the SEO tactics to online menus at least as much as their main website. Failing to do so is an unforced error that can suppress future business growth for some time to come. 


Sin #5: No pictures on the menu

The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words could not be more applicable than to online menus. Here’s why: People tend to remember only about 10% of what they read. Seems crazy, right? Yet it’s a fact and based on solid science. 

But change one simple thing by adding pictures and guess what happens? A reader’s retention rate jumps to 65%. Adding at least some pics of tasty-looking dishes will help online menu visitors retain much more about that menu. It just might lure them back again over competitors without any pictures on their menus. 

Another reason to add pics? Search engines and people love them. Google has been steering its traffic toward more mobile friendly and visually appealing content for years. It should come as no surprise that web pages with pictures have been reported to receive as much as 94% more views compared to those without them.

An extra note here: it’s best if the pictures are good ones. High-quality phone cameras make this easier than ever, but we recommend investing in a good hand-held light for any restaurants planning to run their own photoshoot.


Sin #6: Slow web page load times

A slow loading web page is not good for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that Google weighs page load speed in the algorithm that it uses to rank websites. If the online menu on a restaurant’s site is slow to load, it could drag down the search rankings of the rest of the website. In this case, speed doesn’t kill, it triumphs.

Another reason why slow loading menus are bad for business? Consumers are impatient. Some research has pegged the online consumer patience threshold at 2 seconds. In other words, if your online menu doesn’t load in 2 seconds, an average consumer will bail and look for an alternative. It’s an unforced error with a bottom-line consequence.


Sin #7: Lacking a mobile friendly website

This echoes some of the previous six deadly sins of online menus in that search engines (namely Google) reward web pages that are mobile-first by design. We’re not talking mobile friendly here. Many older websites may be considered ‘mobile friendly’ but they rely on technology that was designed prior to Google’s mobile-first mandate. Legacy website architecture doesn’t age well in a world run by Google’s constantly-evolving search algorithm. 

Additionally, if a restaurant is hoping to drive traffic to its website from local “near me” searches, chances are high those searches are happening on a phone, not a computer.  

If online menus fall behind the times, they will impact load times and lead to a poor user experience, both of which will cost a restaurant in missed customer acquisition opportunities over time.

Marqii to the rescue

For those restaurants seeking to avoid one or more of the seven deadly sins of online menus listed above, now is a good time to look for a better alternative. Marqii has the ability to create and update online menus directly from a restaurant POS, eliminating errors and saving hours in mindless data entry. Best of all, Marqii also updates a restaurant’s info, including menus, hours, location, daily specials, contact info, and preferred online ordering links, across 75 consumer-facing sites. We make sure when guests search for our restaurant partners, they find only the most accurate and up-to-date information.. 

For more information about how Marqii can save you time and help you get the most from your online menus, visit our website and schedule a free demo and consultation today.


With nearly 10 years of experience helping restaurants optimize their online presence at companies like Yelp, Yext, and Marqii, Marqii Co-Founder and CEO Avi Goren lives and breathes the daily challenges restaurant operators face. He’s committed to teaching them how to reduce the time they spend on tedious online tasks and get back to doing what they love – cooking great food.

  • Red Gold Sacramento
  • AyrKing Mixstir
  • Texas Pete
  • Inline Plastics Safe-T-Chef
  • Day & Nite
  • Simplot Frozen Avocado
  • RATIONAL USA
  • T&S Brass Eversteel Pre-Rinse Units
  • DAVO Sales Tax
  • Atosa USA
  • McKee Foodservice
  • BelGioioso Burrata
  • Imperial Dade
  • RAK Porcelain