Keep a Copy of Your Menu, Photos, and Hours Outside Your Website Vendor

A restaurant's website is a small pile of expensive things: menu copy that took the chef and a writer a week, photos from a shoot that cost real money, and the details guests rely on. It usually lives in one place, the vendor's servers, under a login that belongs to whoever set it up. This is how to keep a copy with the business.

Once

1. Find the originals. The photographer's delivery folder, the designer's files, the menu document. Put them in a cloud drive the owner controls, in a folder named after the restaurant and the year.
2. Confirm the domain. Look up who registered it and where. If it is not in the business's name, fix that now; it is the one thing that is hardest to get back later.
3. Start a monthly backup of the site. Dead Simple Backups copies every public page, with menu pages, photos, and PDF menus, on the 1st of every month and emails a private link. Point it at an owner or manager address, not the agency's.

Every month

1. Open the backup email. Glance at the page count and one screenshot. Two minutes.
2. Save the current menu. If the menu changed, save a copy of the new one to the cloud folder: a PDF, a document, or the backup's menu page.
3. Check the hours on the site against reality. Holiday hours that never got reverted are the most common error on restaurant sites, and last month's backup shows what they were.

Every quarter

• Check who has the vendor login and the domain login. Remove people who left.
• Open one backup and open a page from it, so you know the copies work.

Why not rely on the vendor

The vendor keeps the live site while you pay. At the time of writing none of the common restaurant website vendors offer a download, and the site comes down when the contract ends. The habit above means a vendor switch is a handover of a folder, not a scramble to rewrite the menu from photos of the old site.

Q: How do I save my restaurant menu from my website?

Open the menu page and use Save As in your browser, or let a monthly backup keep the menu pages and any PDF menus automatically.

Q: Who should receive the website backup emails?

The owner or general manager, at an address that belongs to the business. Not the agency, and not a staff member who might leave.