Keep a restaurant menu current without retyping it
A restaurant website usually goes out of date within a season, and it is almost never because somebody stopped caring — it is because changing one costs an evening. This guide sets your menu up so that the next change costs a few minutes, and so that nothing you have printed ever has to be reprinted because a link moved.
Step by step
- 1
Publish your menu at a permanent link
Upload your menu PDF and give it its own permanent web address. This is the address you put on flyers, in your Google listing and on the window — from now on you replace what is behind it rather than changing it.
- 2
Make a code for the tables
Create a scannable code for that address and download it ready for a print shop. Name each one — table tent, window, flyer — so you can see later which is actually being used. Because the code points at the address, replacing the menu never breaks it.
- 3
Set your opening hours once
Enter your usual week, plus the bank holidays and any planned closures. Add an Opening hours section to your page and it reads those hours — so your website, your structured data and your booking form cannot drift apart.
- 4
Build the menu properly, if you want to
You do not have to. A PDF is a complete answer. Building the dishes out gets you a menu that reads well on a phone, prices you can change from the kitchen, and search engines that understand what you serve — so it is worth doing when you have twenty minutes, not before.
- 5
Update from the PDF you already make
When the menu changes, send it to the printer as usual and upload the same file. You are shown what is different — new dishes, prices, removals — and nothing changes on your website until you approve it. If a file cannot be read, you are told plainly and nothing is guessed.
- 6
Plan the seasonal change in advance
Build the Christmas menu, the photographs and the changed hours in November, group them together and give the group a date. It goes live on the day and takes itself down afterwards, and you can preview it — and send that preview to a partner for sign-off — before any of it is public.
Your checklist
0/5 doneBest practices
- ✓ Put the permanent link on print, not a link that includes a date or a file name.
- ✓ Name each printed code so you can tell the window sticker from the table tent later.
- ✓ Upload the same PDF you send the printer, so the website and the printed menu change on the same day.
- ✓ Read the price and allergen changes individually, even when you accept the wording changes together.
Common mistakes
- ✕ Printing a link straight to a PDF file — when the file is replaced, everything printed points at the old one.
- ✕ Typing opening hours onto a page by hand, so they have to be changed in several places and eventually disagree.
- ✕ Waiting until the first of December to build the Christmas menu, when it could have been ready and dated in November.
- ✕ Uploading a photograph or a scan of a menu and expecting it to be read — it cannot be, because the words are not really in the file.