Five design rules for high-converting digital menus
What separates a digital menu that gets browsed from one that gets ordered from. Five design rules — and the data behind each.
PleaseScanMenu Team
Most restaurants treat their digital menu like a printed one with extra steps. They paste in the same item names, same prices, same single-line descriptions, and assume the screen does the rest of the work. It doesn't. A menu on a phone is a different medium, and rewarding the medium's strengths produces measurably more orders than translating paper habits verbatim.
This guide is five rules. Each one is independently testable. None requires Pro. All five together make the difference between a menu that gets browsed and a menu that gets ordered from.
Rule 1: Lead with photos
The single highest-leverage change you can make to a digital menu is adding a photo to every item.
Items with photos are tapped at roughly twice the rate of items without. The effect is largest for high-margin items and items that are unfamiliar by name — a guest can't visualize "korma" or "lahmacun" without help. They can with a photo.
The good news: phone shots are fine. You do not need a food photographer for day one.
The rules for photos that work:
Natural light, no flash. Window light at any time of day beats overhead restaurant lighting.
Clean background. A plain white plate on a wooden table looks ten times more appetizing than the same dish on a busy patterned surface.
Top-down or 45-degree angle. Eye-level shots flatten the food; top-down or three-quarter angles add depth.
One dish per photo. Don't try to stuff three items into one frame; the menu shows them one at a time anyway.
Crop tight. Negative space is great for art galleries, bad for menus on phones. Fill the frame.
A useful exercise: spend 30 minutes on one Friday afternoon photographing every item on the menu. Crop and upload Saturday morning. The conversion uplift is visible by the following weekend.
If the kitchen genuinely has dishes that don't photograph well — some soups, some pastas — those are the items that need the strongest written descriptions instead.
Rule 2: Group thoughtfully
The default category list — Breakfast, Mains, Drinks, Desserts — works for most restaurants. But it's a default, not a rule. Categories shape how guests browse, and a thoughtful grouping nudges them toward bigger orders.
A few patterns that work:
Sequence by meal stage
Guests order in a roughly predictable order: starter, main, side, drink, dessert. Putting categories in that sequence reduces friction. Don't bury Drinks at the bottom — drinks are often the first thing decided.
Pull out signature categories
If your restaurant is known for one thing — a pasta concept, a coffee program, a particular cuisine — give that thing its own category, even if it would technically fit elsewhere. "Our Signatures" or "House Specialties" at the top of the menu draws disproportionate attention.
A category with one item looks like a category that ran out. Either expand the category or merge the item into a neighbor.
Don't over-categorize on day one
Five categories is plenty. Seven is fine. Twelve is too many — guests hit decision fatigue and bounce. You can split a busy category later when you have data on what's actually selling within it.
Order matters within a category
Within each category, the items at the top get the most attention. Put your highest-margin or most-distinctive items first. Save the staples (water, plain coffee) for the bottom.
Rule 3: Use psychology in your pricing
Three pricing patterns reliably increase average order value on digital menus:
Drop the currency symbol when it's obvious
"Margherita pizza — $14" reads as a transaction. "Margherita pizza — 14" reads as a feature. The currency symbol activates a "paying money" mental state; removing it (where local conventions allow) reduces it.
Whether to use the symbol depends on the cultural expectation. In Europe, prices commonly appear without the euro sign and feel natural. In the US, the dollar sign is so expected that dropping it can feel weird. Test what works for your guests.
Avoid "charm pricing" on premium items
$9.99 signals "we are being clever and aggressive on price." That's perfect for fast food. It's wrong for a $40 steak. On premium items, use round numbers: $40 reads as confident, $39.99 reads as fast food's cousin.
Anchor with one premium item
Putting one expensive item near the top of the menu — even if it rarely sells — anchors the price perception of everything else. A $24 burger looks reasonable next to a $48 ribeye; on its own, it looks pricey.
This is the most-discussed and most-overused trick in restaurant pricing. Use it once per menu, not five times.
Rule 4: Write descriptions that sell
A good description does three jobs simultaneously:
Tells the guest what they're getting (the practical job)
Conveys quality (the aspirational job)
Reduces ordering anxiety (the trust job)
Bad descriptions do only the first. Great descriptions do all three.
Lead with the hero ingredient
Don't bury what's best about the dish in a list of accompaniments. "Pan-seared salmon, miso glaze, ginger broth, baby bok choy" front-loads the headline. The same description in reverse — "Baby bok choy, ginger broth, miso glaze, salmon" — reads like a side dish.
Use specific words, not generic ones
"Fresh" → "this morning's catch" or "from our local supplier"
"Homemade" → "rolled fresh every morning"
"Crispy" → "double-fried at 180°C"
Specificity is trust. Generic language is forgettable.
Mention sourcing where it matters
If you source locally, name the supplier. If you use a specific technique, name it. "House-cured" beats "cured." "Stone-ground in the back" beats "stone-ground."
Keep it short
Three to five lines is the sweet spot on a phone. Anything longer scrolls off-screen and reads like a wall.
Use tags, not paragraphs, for dietary info
Dietary information shouldn't live in the description text — it should be in the tags (vegan, gluten-free, contains nuts, etc.) that power guest filters. Putting it in the description doubles the text and hides the tags' value.
Rule 5: Optimize for speed
A digital menu that loads slowly loses orders. The cost compounds:
A 1-second delay → roughly 7% drop in conversion
A 3-second delay → roughly 30% drop
A 5-second delay → most guests abandon and ask for a paper menu
The dashboard handles most of this automatically — image compression, cache headers, lazy loading. Your job is to not undo it:
Don't upload massive images
The dashboard compresses uploads, but the originals you upload still get processed. Starting from a 12 MB phone photo means a longer upload and a bigger initial pass. Resize to 2000px wide before uploading where you can.
Don't pile on items you never plan to sell
A 200-item menu loads more slowly than a 60-item one. It also looks intimidating. Cut anything that hasn't sold in 90 days.
Test on a real, mediocre phone
Your iPhone 15 Pro on home WiFi is not the test environment. The test environment is a three-year-old Android on a slow 4G connection in your dining room. If the menu still feels snappy there, you're good.
Test in airplane mode after first load
Once a guest loads the menu, parts of it should be cached. Turn on airplane mode and refresh — does the menu still work? If the menu collapses, something isn't being cached properly.
A bonus rule: actually look at the analytics
Most restaurants set up a digital menu and never look at the data again. Don't do that.
Once a month, spend ten minutes in the Insights tab. Specifically look at:
Top sellers — are these items priced correctly? Are they on the most prominent spot of the menu? Could you raise the price by 5% without losing volume?
Lonely items — items not sold in 90 days. Either remove them or rewrite the description and move them higher.
Average order value over time — is it trending up, down, or flat? Flat is the warning sign; flat means the menu is no longer doing work.
Hourly heatmap — when are guests browsing but not buying? That's where staffing or pricing changes are most likely to matter.
A menu is a living thing. Looking at the data turns it into a deliberate growth lever.
The simple version
Photos, structure, pricing, descriptions, speed. Five rules, each independently testable, none requiring more than a phone and a free afternoon.
Restaurants that follow all five see a measurable lift in average order value (often 5–15%) and a measurable drop in time to first order. Restaurants that follow zero of them have a digital version of their paper menu — and they're surprised when it doesn't move the needle.
A digital menu can be the highest-leverage marketing surface in the restaurant. Treat it that way.
