28 JUL 2026 · 3 min read
Your menu is a photograph, and Google cannot read a word of it
A menu saved as a JPEG or PDF is invisible to search, unreadable on a phone, and impossible for a screen reader. Here is what it costs and how to fix it in an afternoon.
The designer sent over a beautiful menu. Someone saved it as a JPEG and put it on the website. It looks exactly like the printed one, which felt like the point.
Nothing in it can be searched, read aloud, copied, translated, or found by anyone looking for what you sell.
What a search engine sees
When Google crawls a page with a text menu, it reads every dish, every description, every price. When someone in your town searches "wood fired pizza near me" or "gluten free bakery", those words on your page are why you come up.
When Google crawls a page with an image of a menu, it sees a rectangle. It can guess a little from the filename and the alt text, and that is all. Every dish name you offer — every one of them a phrase a real person might type — is invisible.
You are competing for local searches with one hand tied, against competitors whose menus happen to be text.
A menu image is not a design decision. It is an opt-out from every search for the food you actually sell.
What a customer sees
It is worse on a phone. An image sized for A4 arrives on a 6-inch screen at about 15% of its intended size. The visitor pinches, zooms, drags around, loses their place, gives up. Every one of those actions is a chance to leave.
A PDF is not better. On most phones it opens in a separate viewer, taking the visitor out of your site entirely. Coming back means the back button and a reload. Many do not.
Who is excluded completely
Anyone using a screen reader gets nothing. Not a summarised version — nothing at all. The same is true for anyone who needs larger text, higher contrast, or a translation into their own language.
Depending on where you operate this may also be a legal exposure, but the practical point stands on its own: these are customers who wanted to buy from you and could not read what you sell.
The fix
It is genuinely an afternoon of work.
- Type the menu into the page as text. Headings for sections, a list for dishes, the description underneath, the price alongside. This is ordinary web content.
- Keep the design in CSS, not in the image. The typography, the rules between courses, the spacing — all of that can be styled. You do not have to choose between looking good and being readable.
- Add structured data.
MenuandMenuItemschema tell Google explicitly what each item is and what it costs. This is what powers rich results. - Keep the PDF as a download if you want. Link to it as an extra, for people who want to print. Just do not make it the only version.
The version that keeps happening
The reason menus end up as images is almost never ignorance. It is that updating text on the website is hard, and replacing an image is easy. Someone changes a price, exports a new JPEG, uploads it, done.
That is a real workflow problem and it deserves a real answer: the menu should be editable by you, in a few minutes, without calling anybody. If it is not, the image will come back within a year no matter how well the text version is built.
Fix the workflow and the menu stays text. Fix only the page and you are back here next spring.
Think this is happening on your site?
One hour on your business and your customers. No pitch. We work out where the business is losing customers online, and whether I am the right person to fix it.