I rebuilt the website for Walrus Subs, a local sub shop whose old site was actively losing them orders. The new site — interactive menu, Google Maps integration, and a streamlined contact flow — drove a 35% increase in online orders.
Context
Walrus Subs is a sub shop competing the way every local restaurant competes now: someone gets hungry, pulls out their phone, and searches. Whoever answers "what's on the menu, where are you, are you open" fastest gets the order.
Their old website failed that test. It was outdated, and the business knew it was costing them — customers who couldn't quickly find the menu or figure out how to order were bouncing to whichever competitor made it easy. That's the actual problem with a bad restaurant site. It isn't embarrassment. It's lost orders, every single day.
Constraints
This was a small local business, not an enterprise project. That shaped everything:
- Budget had to match a sub shop's reality. No room for a five-figure agency engagement.
- The site had to work hardest on phones. Restaurant traffic is overwhelmingly mobile — people searching on the way somewhere.
- It had to be simple for the owners. A restaurant doesn't have a web team. Whatever I shipped needed to keep working without babysitting.
The build
Three decisions mattered most.
1. The menu is real HTML, not a PDF
Most restaurant sites bury the single most important thing — the menu — inside a PDF that's slow to load and miserable to pinch-zoom on a phone. I built the Walrus Subs menu as an interactive, on-page menu in React. It loads instantly, it's readable on any screen, and search engines can actually index every item. If someone searches for a specific sandwich, the menu page can rank for it. A PDF can't do that. (I wrote more about this in 7 restaurant website mistakes that cost you orders.)
2. Google Maps integration, front and center
"Where is it?" is the second question after "what do they have?" Instead of a buried address line, the site embeds Google Maps directly, so directions are one tap away. Less friction between hungry and ordering.
3. A streamlined contact flow
The old site made it hard to act. The new one treats every page as a path to an order: clear calls to action, a contact flow with as few steps as possible, and nothing competing for attention. A restaurant website has one job — turn a visitor into an order — and every design decision pointed at it.
I kept the stack deliberately boring: React, JavaScript, CSS. No heavy framework overhead, no CMS the owners would never log into. Fast to load, cheap to run, nothing to break.
Results
The headline number: online orders up 35% after the new site replaced the old one.
Beyond the number, the structural wins are checkable on the live site at walrus-subs.com: the menu is indexable HTML instead of a dead PDF, directions are one tap, and the whole experience works on the device customers actually use — their phone.
Want something like this?
If your restaurant's website is losing orders to a clunky menu or a slow mobile experience, that's exactly the kind of problem I fix. See what a site like this costs, read about my web design service, or get in touch — I'll take a look at your current site and tell you honestly what's costing you orders.