How to Prepare Your Restaurant's Website and App for Peak Traffic
Contents
What’s worse for a restaurant owner than a “no one’s coming” situation?
Only one thing: “Everyone showed up at once, and we didn’t have the resources or inventory to handle it.” Just one thing: "Everyone showed up at once – and we didn't have the resources or the inventory to handle it.
Only one thing: “Everyone showed up at once, and we didn’t have the resources or inventory to handle it.” Just one thing: "Everyone showed up at once – and we didn't have the resources or the inventory to handle it.
Once you’ve built a loyal audience and have a steady flow of customers, the next challenge is making sure your restaurant website can handle peak traffic during holidays and weekends.
Failing to prepare for high demand can be costly. Just notice the facts:
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Failure to serve customers at peak times negatively impacts sales and profits that businesses miss out on. The U.S. restaurant market will reach a record $1.1 trillion in 2024, up 5.4% from 2023. And 29% of diners visit restaurants at least once a week.
In this article, as a restaurant app development company we will tell you:
- What are peak times and when do they occur?
- What should a location's digital infrastructure look like to handle high traffic?
- What needs to be considered before a restaurant's website and app are developed?
- What integrations and services help optimize load during high customer traffic?
- Why is it necessary to perform load testing when launching a product or making changes to its operation?
What causes peak traffic?
Peak times in the restaurant industry are times when the demand for service increases dramatically. During these hours, the entire operation comes under pressure: the kitchen, staff, delivery service, and most importantly, the restaurant’s digital infrastructure. Your food and beverage website, mobile app, online menu, reservation module, payment gateway, CRM, POS integrations – all of these systems need to work seamlessly when user traffic surges.
If at least one of these components fails, the entire process will suffer: the conversion rate will drop, some orders will be lost, and the workload for operators will increase significantly.
Peak times can occur in several ways:
- Predictable – linked to weekends or national holidays;
- Seasonal – driven by tourism or high local activity;
- Planned – aligned with big sales events like Black Friday or 11.11, when restaurants and retailers run special deals;
- Spontaneous – triggered by viral content on social media or shoutouts from influencers.
And if at some point in the restaurant's service, administrators can limit the flow of guests by suspending table reservation requests and notifying guests in advance, the case is different for delivery and takeout.
On the one hand, this format is the most profitable. You can take orders from more customers at the same time, and you are not limited to serving only in the restaurant. Find more trends and advantages in our article:
On the other hand, not every website or mobile app development for restaurants can handle peak loads. As a result, if several thousand users try to make a delivery or pickup at the same time, the system may fail and crash. If such situations are not anticipated in advance, it can take a long time to fix. And the company will face a series of problems – order errors, rejections, and negative feedback.
✍ Even major retailers aren't immune to disruptions on peak days. On Black Friday 2020, Walmart's website was unable to handle the influx of traffic: pages loaded slowly, shopping carts froze, and it was nearly impossible to place an order. Against the backdrop of the rapid growth of online sales during the pandemic, this caused a wave of discontent - users complained en masse on social networks that they had missed out on profitable promotions due to technical problems. As a result, instead of record sales, Walmart suffered a serious blow to its reputation.
According to Bank of America, today's restaurant owners are looking to partially digitize their business for the following benefits:
Check out our overview of restaurant technology trends and how they're impacting loyalty.
However, a restaurant's digital infrastructure – a website, app, reservation service or delivery service – must be prepared for traffic that can grow several times over in just a couple of hours. And the problems that can result: server overload, insufficient system scalability, and even reduced security.
Want to prepare for peak load while restaurant app development? Tell us about your business specifics.
How the Restaurant Industry Handles Peak Traffic
No one understands the reality of high-traffic operations better than the restaurant teams themselves. Today, we’re highlighting insights from two industry voices:
- Olga Zhebina, Deputy Director of Ronin, a popular Japanese restaurant for which we developed a custom delivery website;
- Alexey Shpadaruk, founder and owner of PON-PUSHKA, a donut chain with 70+ sales points.
Service for online ordering dishes from a premium Japanese restaurant
Ronin is a premium Japanese restaurant in Minsk. Popular due to the high level of quality and service. After the offline business was built, the owners decided to conquer online.
We asked them how they predict peak periods and prepare for high-volume days. And how their websites and apps are currently performing under pressure.
In response to these challenges, our CEO Max Bontsevich also shared his recommendations on the technical solutions that should be built into any restaurant website or app from day one, so they’re ready to handle a flood of customers and orders when it matters most.
Where Is Your Website Currently Hosted?
Our current website was built on the Tilda platform and is hosted there as well. It handles basic technical needs: serving as a product catalog and allowing users to place orders for delivery or pickup. However, online payments aren’t available – due to the structure of our franchise model, which involves multiple legal entities, we don’t have a unified system for processing transactions. Given the technical limitations of the platform and our growing business needs, we’ve decided to develop a new website with a more advanced architecture.
— Alexey, PON-PUSHKA
For early-stage businesses, using a no-code builder or off-the-shelf platform is a valid choice. It’s a fast and affordable way to test your concept and understand your market.
But if you’re aiming to scale, these platforms can create bottlenecks — limited customization, challenges with integrating new locations (especially for franchises), and difficulties adapting to more complex processes.
As for our team, we typically work with Laravel (PHP) and Node.js. And sure, like any devs, we’ll always advocate for the stack we know best. But let’s be honest: most modern languages are pretty similar today.
You only start seeing performance issues under extreme loads. What really matters is that your product is easy to maintain, has active community support (libraries, updates), and that your team or tech partner knows the stack inside and out.
Also, make sure the technology you choose is popular and well-supported in case you ever need to switch vendors or expand your team quickly.
When it comes to handling peak load, it’s usually not about rewriting your code – it’s about upgrading your infrastructure. For high-traffic businesses, something like Kubernetes can make a huge difference. It scales automatically during high demand and shrinks back when things slow down.
One last thing: server location matters. The closer your hosting is to your users, the faster your website will load.
— Max Bantsevich, dev.family
Olga V.
Business Manager
Looking for restaurant mobile app development company? Book a free consultation
When Does Your Website Experience the Highest Load?
For us, it’s fairly predictable. The busiest hours are in the evening from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM. Friday is our peak day, followed by Saturday with slightly lower volume. Thursday and Sunday show moderate activity, but there’s a seasonal shift between them: in fall and winter, most orders happen on Sundays, while in spring and summer, Thursdays tend to be stronger. In general, bad weather or rain – no matter the season – leads to a noticeable increase in delivery demand. We also see a clear spike in orders during holidays and special occasions.
— Olga, Ronin
Our busiest days are Friday and Saturday. There is a noticeable drop-off in traffic from Monday through Thursday. Interestingly, Saturday outperforms Friday by about 30%, while Sunday averages about 10% less traffic than Saturday. Keep in mind, however, that these numbers don't take into account holiday surges or media-driven spikes.
In terms of time of day, there are no dramatic peaks in website traffic. But if we go by store sales, the most active hours are between 12:00-2:00 and 5:00-7:00. Website traffic, however, is more evenly distributed throughout the day, with small spikes in the morning (9:00-10:00 AM) and late afternoon (4:00-6:00 PM). These fluctuations are small – within 10% of the total daily traffic.
— Alexey, PON-PUSHKA
What Actions Do Users Typically Take on Your Website? (Orders, Menu Views, Delivery?)
Olga, Ronin: Our site does not offer table reservations and we do not currently track menu views. For us, "ordering" and "delivery" go hand-in-hand – the website is used solely to place delivery and pick-up requests from our restaurants.
— Olga, Ronin
The most common user actions on our site are viewing the menu, checking store locations, and looking up business hours. The conversion rate to actual orders (pickup and delivery) is relatively low – around 3.5% of total visitors. Click-to-call actions account for about 2% of sessions.
— Alexey, PON-PUSHKA
High traffic doesn’t always mean high load. What really matters is how well your system handles the complexity of the ordering process.
If you sell standard menu items with no customization – that's one scenario.
But when users can dynamically customize their order (change ingredients, add modifiers, etc.) right in the cart, your backend has to do a lot more – especially when loyalty points, delivery fee calculations, and tipping options are involved.
But when users can dynamically customize their order (change ingredients, add modifiers, etc.) right in the cart, your backend has to do a lot more – especially when loyalty points, delivery fee calculations, and tipping options are involved.
In this case, the shopping cart becomes a bottleneck. And it's critical to think about how your backend handles requests and what background processes are involved to keep orders flowing smoothly under pressure.
To monitor and troubleshoot these issues, tools like Prometheus and Grafana are incredibly useful. Their agents can track order processing times and automatically alert your team when something goes wrong.
— Max Bantsevich, dev.family
What Services Are Integrated With Your Website? Have You Experienced Issues During Traffic Spikes?
Our site is integrated with a popular restaurant automation system that manages orders, kitchen workflows, POS, and inventory. This integration allows us to automatically send orders from the website directly to the restaurant’s POS system, which speeds up processing and reduces errors.
We haven’t experienced any performance issues during traffic spikes. Previously, we were also connected to the other payment system, but we decided to turn off online payments. But payments didn’t always show up immediately in the system, and customers were frustrated by the lack of confirmed delivery times.
— Olga, Ronin
The POS system is the heart of a restaurant's operations. It handles everything – payments, order flow, kitchen coordination, inventory control and loyalty programs. It's essentially the technical core that connects your online and offline processes. If your POS is unstable or poorly integrated, it has a direct impact on customer experience, service speed, and team efficiency.
Beyond the POS, restaurants can also benefit from other integrations – like built-in support chat or real-time geolocation. And the good news is, you don't have to build these tools from scratch. There are plenty of solid plug-and-play services on the market that can be connected quickly and inexpensively.
— Max Bantsevich, dev.family
How Is Your Online Pre-Order System Connected to the Kitchen and Logistics?
POS-system connects our call center, front of house staff, kitchen and couriers. The head courier manually assigns orders to drivers. If a customer wants to make changes to an order that has already been placed, they must call the operator. The operator then updates the order in the POS-system and notifies the appropriate team member – whether it's the admin or the courier – depending on what exactly has changed: order content, preparation time, or delivery address.
— Olga, Ronin
In the current version of our website, orders are sent to Telegram bots that are individually configured for each location. Each store has a tablet or smartphone with Telegram installed, and employees use it to receive and manage orders. An operator then contacts the customer to confirm the order by tapping the phone number left in the form.
number left in the form.
number left in the form.
If a location has its own delivery team, the order is also duplicated to the couriers via Telegram bots. Only a few cities follow this setup.
The same process applies to the mobile app – although right now we're using a temporary solution built with a no-code platform.
— Alexey, PON-PUSHKA
For Ronin, we integrated directly with R-Keeper, which handles all incoming orders. Everything is simple, fast and centralized.
Other restaurants often prefer to use custom POS systems, especially when they need more flexibility. For example, dark kitchens – delivery only businesses – rely heavily on delivery costs as a key performance indicator. That's why prices are calculated dynamically.
When a point-of-sale system is integrated with the kitchen, it also enables real-time menu updates. So if tomatoes run out, any dish that includes them will automatically be marked "unavailable" and customers won't be able to order it.
— Max Bantsevich, dev.family
When a point-of-sale system is integrated with the kitchen, it also enables real-time menu updates. So if tomatoes run out, any dish that includes them will automatically be marked "unavailable" and customers won't be able to order it.
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How does the online ordering system work during high load times?
When the website and POS-system are stable, there are usually no delays in accepting orders. However, there have been several situations when an order confirmed by the operator was received in the system only after 15 minutes. At the same time, the next orders placed by the same operator were processed normally and arrived without delay.
— Olga, Ronin
Integrations and additional tools can help to avoid delays in receiving orders. For example, you can organize a backup channel for booking orders via WhatsApp or Telegram.
You can also develop and integrate a separate dashboard (for example, based on Grafana) into the architecture of a website or application, where all incoming orders are tracked. This will make it possible to notify in a timely manner those orders that for some reason did not make it into the POS system.
— Max Bantsevich, dev.family
Were there any cases when the site stopped working or slowed down due to high traffic?
The site has never shut down or slowed down due to a high volume of orders. However, any outages related to the network connection, as well as errors in the work of the site (for example, missing prices, inaccessible shopping carts, long loading pages) caused irritation among users. As a result, some people refused to place an order at all – later they reported this directly to the operators. In addition, such errors increased the workload of operators, as orders were not automatically entered into POS-system and had to be entered manually.
— Olga, Ronin
I don't see the point of evaluating the performance of the site by load. We first realized that we were working on the power of Tilda, and this is a ready-made, cloud-based constructor. I haven't noticed any outages due to traffic, but maybe I just haven't been tracking it. Our average load is about 45,000 visits per month, so I wouldn't call the current site heavily loaded at all. The losses are due to technical limitations of the designer and internal operational complexities rather than overload.
— Alexey, PON-PUSHKA
You should prepare for any loads in advance while preparing for restaurant delivery app or website development. If the system is already got "down", it will be very difficult to bring it back up in a minute. The fastest option is to increase the capacity of the current server. But this requires additional investments and does not always save the situation.
Therefore, it is better to prevent such risks in advance. For example, with the help of load testing. But my team will tell you more about that.
— Max Bantsevich, dev.family
Olga V.
Business Manager
Looking for restaurant mobile app or website development company? Let’ discuss how we can collaborate
Conducting load testing
To verify that a website or application is ready for peak usage, load testing is a mandatory development stage. In this case, our QA checks how the product performs under expected or extreme load. Load testing helps to understand the limits of system performance and identify potential weaknesses before the site "crashes" under the influx of users.
Typical parameters tested include:
- Maximum number of users simultaneously using a particular site or application feature;
- Server response time under varying load levels;
- System stability at peak levels, including multiple retries during sales or holiday periods.
With load testing, you can assess whether the site can handle a sudden influx of customers, prevent site crashes and outages, and optimize performance by identifying bottlenecks in the code, database, or architecture.
You can also test planned integrations. For example, to see how the site-POS-system-delivery service bundle will perform under maximum load.
Our team recommends load testing before launching a new website or application, as well as before major marketing campaigns and after significant changes to the product architecture.
To perform load testing, our QA team uses:
- Locust – a tool for load testing web applications and APIs (a higher priority option).
- JMeter – desktop application for setting up and running load tests.
Don't skimp on load testing and try to save on restaurant app development costs – invest in stability and confidence in your business. One day of downtime during a sale can cost you more than all your testing combined. Give your site a chance to withstand real-world load testing and perform at its best. It's not just testing - it's insurance for your revenue, reputation, and future growth.
Ready to Stress Test Your Platform? Get in touch today!
Ensure your website or app can handle peak traffic without downtime. Our QA experts identify bottlenecks, test system stability, and optimize performance, so your platform is always ready for real-world challenges.
Our conclusion
Scaling doesn't start when you have 10 restaurants. It starts at the design stage. From the start, it is important to think through the architecture, determine possible integrations, and consider growth scenarios: connecting new locations, launching mobile applications, moving to third-party delivery. This is especially critical if you are developing under the franchise model - where scaling and standardization are no longer a convenience, but a necessity.
It's important to consider the day-to-day scenarios of restaurant operations: updating stop lists in real time, tracking errors, quickly resolving negatives, and responding to outages. What do you do when the Internet goes down? If the website goes down? If the POS system stops working? You should have a crisis plan-even a simple one that everyone on the team can understand.
Not all businesses need a complex system with Kubernetes, Grafana, and other integrations. Sometimes the simplest solution works best. For example, a Telegram bot or a website with an order form. The important thing is not to overload the product, but to make it user-friendly. And to do that, just talk to your customers. Ask them directly how they like to order. Through the website? By messenger? Through the cashier at the store? This will save you tons of time and money, and help you build the product they want right away.
Still have questions on how to create an app or website for a restaurant? Write us to get answers
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