Do I Need a Website for My Restaurant if I Already Have Instagram?
It is a fair question. You post most days, people tag you, and the reservations that come in mostly come from Instagram. Paying someone a few thousand for a website that sits there sounds like a solved problem you are about to unsolve.
So here is the honest version: you do not need a website the way restaurants needed one in 2012. But there are four jobs Instagram genuinely cannot do, and every one of them costs you customers quietly.
Can people find my restaurant on Google through Instagram?
Someone who already follows you finds you on Instagram. Someone who does not is typing "vietnamese near me" or "best chai in dallas" into Google, and Instagram profiles are not what Google shows them.
Google wants a page it can read as a restaurant: a name, an address, a phone number, opening hours, a menu with prices. Give it those in the format it asks for and you become one of the results. Do not, and you are only findable by people who already know your name, which is the group least in need of finding you.
What happens when my opening hours change?
Your bio says "Tue to Sun, 11 to 9". Then you close for a wedding, open late on the Friday of a long weekend, or shut the kitchen early because the brisket ran out.
Nobody updates a bio for that. So someone drives across town, finds the lights off, and does not try again. A page that computes open or closed from your actual hours, in your actual timezone, is doing a job no Instagram bio has ever done.
Is a photo of my menu in the feed good enough?
Posting a photo of your menu board works once. Two weeks later it is forty posts down, the prices have changed, and the person who wanted it has given up.
What people want before they walk in is boring and specific: what do you serve, what does it cost, and is the thing I want still on. That is a menu page, not a feed.
Why does having one link matter?
Instagram gives you one. Google Business wants one. A QR code menu on the table needs one. Your printed takeaway menu has one on the back.
If that link goes to Instagram, everyone who taps it lands in a feed and has to work out the rest for themselves. If it goes to a page with your menu, your hours and your address, they have what they came for in about four seconds.
Why do most restaurants still not have a website?
Not ignorance. Cost and dread.
A designer quotes a few thousand and takes a month. A DIY builder is free to start and then it is 11pm on a Sunday and you are dragging a text box around and it will not line up. Either way, the site goes live, and then it goes stale, because nobody sits down to edit a website on a Tuesday.
That last part is the real killer. A stale site is worse than no site: wrong hours and last year's prices actively mislead people.
What does a restaurant website cost now?
The useful version of this is not a website project. It is a page that gets built from things you already know and then keeps itself current from things you are already doing.
That is what the Website plan is. You fill in a form once: your address, a cover photo, a style, your hours, your menu. Your page goes live at yourname.postmyplatter.com. After that, every food post you make appears on it automatically, newest first, with today's special at the top.
You get it without a developer, without an agency and without any coding skills: no domain to buy, no server, no code to write, and no builder to learn. You also get a QR code menu for the table, and a printable card to put it on. It is US$19.99 a month, and it carries full Restaurant structured data, so Google can read it as a restaurant rather than as just another page. We cannot promise you a ranking, and anyone who does is guessing. What we can say is that your page is indexed and gives Google everything it asks for.
So do I need a restaurant website, or just Instagram?
Both, and they are not really competing.
Instagram is how strangers discover your food. A website is where they go to decide, and where Google sends people who have never heard of you. The trick is not doing two jobs. It is making the work you already do cover both.
Working out the budget? Read how much a restaurant website costs and how long it takes. Ready to build one? Here is how to do it without any coding skills.
Want to see what one looks like? Have a look at three sample pages, or see what the Website plan includes.