A restaurant's link in bio has to answer five questions before the person gets bored: can I book, can I order, what do you cook, where are you, and are you open. Most restaurant Linktrees answer them in the wrong order, put the hours behind a link, and send people to a menu PDF that opens at four percent zoom.
The fix is not a better link in bio tool. It is a page written for this specific job, which an assistant will do in one pass if you tell it what the job is.
The five decisions, in order
Someone lands on your bio link from a story about tonight's special. In order, they want to:
- Book or order. The intent is at its peak right now. This is the first card and it is the only one that gets emphasis.
- See what you cook. Not the whole menu. Three or four dishes as text, then the full menu behind a link for the people who want it.
- Know where you are. One tap to directions, not an address they have to copy.
- Know if you are open. As text, on the page. Never behind a link.
- Everything else. Private events, gift vouchers, the newsletter, the jobs page.
The two most common mistakes are putting the menu first, because it feels like the most important thing to you, and hiding the hours behind a link, because the tool made hours look like a link. Both cost you the booking that was thirty seconds away.
Your Google reviews belong on the page
Reviews are among the strongest signals in local search, and most restaurants leave them on Google where the bio link never mentions them. Put the rating, the review count and two or three short quotes on the page, with the number linking to your listing.
It does two things at once: it reassures the person deciding, and it puts a live link to your Google Business Profile in front of everyone who arrives from Instagram, which is where you want the next review to come from.
If you point the assistant at your listing, it will pull the rating, the count, the address and a couple of quotes into the page for you.
The prompt
This is the general link in bio prompt with the restaurant specifics added: ordering priority, hours as text, and the note about menu PDFs.
Build a single HTML page to use as the link in my restaurant's Instagram bio, replacing my Linktree.
MY LINKS (paste what you have, in this priority order):
- Current Linktree or bio page: [url]
- Website: [url]
- Instagram: [url]
- Google Business Profile (listing or search): [url, or business name + city]
- Menu: [url or attach the PDF]
- Delivery or ordering: [url]
- Reservations: [url or WhatsApp number]
- Anything else I want on the page: [url] - [url]
Leave anything blank and skip it.
WHAT TO DO FIRST
1. Read all of it. From the website, take the visual identity: fonts and colors in hex, and the logo. From the Linktree, take the existing links and their titles. From Google, take the rating, the number of reviews, the address and two or three short quotes. From Instagram, take the handle and the tone of voice.
2. Before building, show me in one short message: the palette (five or six colors, each with the job it does), the font you picked (use the site's font if it is on Google Fonts, otherwise the closest match), and the list of links in the order you propose, each with a title and a one line subtitle. The first link is the main call to action and gets the emphasis. Ask me if that is right and only build after I confirm.
3. Then build the page.
PAGE RULES
- Mobile first: one column, about 440px max, centred, large tap targets, iPhone safe area
- One file, no dependencies beyond Google Fonts, icons as inline SVG, logo embedded as base64
- Pick the structure, do not assume it. Tell me in step 2 which shape you chose and why. A roastery and a tattoo studio should not come out with the same skeleton in different colours
- The identity block has to establish who this is within one screen. A circular logo above the name is one way. A full bleed image with the name over it, a typographic lockup with no logo at all, or a wordmark on its own line are others. Choose from what the brand already looks like
- Then one block that makes the business concrete. Choose the form from what the business actually is:
a number that genuinely matters, counting up from zero, with bars for the supporting figures
what is available right now, as a list: today's dishes, the coffees on the shelf, the next three open slots
the work itself, as a grid: pieces, rooms, past jobs
a process in three steps, or a short before and after
Pick one and commit to it. Do not stack all four
- If there is a Google Business Profile: a location block with the rating, stars, "X reviews on Google" linking to the listing, two or three reviews fading slowly from one to the next, and two buttons, book or contact, and directions
- Links: a stack of icon cards is one option, and it is the most common one, which is a reason to consider the others first. A numbered index, a compact text list with rules between the items, or a two column grid of tiles can all read better depending on the business. Whatever form you choose, the first link is the main action and gets the emphasis, and every target is comfortable to tap
- Order the links the way a hungry person decides: book or order first, then the menu, then how to get here, then everything else
- Put the opening hours as text on the page, not behind a link, and say which days you are closed
- If there is a menu PDF, link it but also put the three or four dishes people come for as text, because nobody opens a PDF on a phone at a bus stop
- Motion stays subtle: one cascade on load of about 1.5 seconds, a periodic glow on the main call to action, one or two blurred shapes in the brand color drifting in the background, and everything static under prefers-reduced-motion
- OG meta tags and a favicon from the logo. WhatsApp links open with the message already filled in
- Calm, direct copy. No exclamation marks and no emoji
- Before you hand it over, render it at 390px wide and check the line breaks, the contrast and every link
Give me the finished .html file, ready to host.It will come back with a proposed palette, font and link order before it writes anything. Read that message properly. Correcting the order there takes ten seconds and saves a rebuild.
What it produced
Northbank Kitchen is a fictional twenty seat restaurant, built from exactly the prompt above and hosted on the free plan. Booking is the first card and the only one with emphasis. The menu is second. Hours are text at the bottom, not a link. The whole page is one HTML file of about 13 KB with a single script.
The same prompt for a different vertical produces something that shares no palette, font or layout with it: a coffee roastery and a tattoo studio. Fictional businesses, illustrative numbers.
What we measured
| Measured on 2026 09 08 | The four pages from this prompt | The Linktree page for the same business |
|---|---|---|
| Network requests | 2 to 5 | 72 |
| Hosts contacted | 1 to 2 | 6 |
| Script tags in the DOM | 0 or 1 | 56 |
| DOM nodes | 100 to 129 | 1,087 |
Method. Chrome, PerformanceResourceTiming plus a DOM count, on a real
restaurant profile and on each of the four demo pages linked from this article, which is why
our side is a range. We are not publishing a byte comparison: per resource
sizes come back as zero for cross origin responses because of Timing Allow Origin, so any weight number
you see quoted in this category is either guessed or unmeasured. Requests, hosts, script tags and DOM
nodes are all directly observable, so those are what we report.
One of the six hosts on the Linktree page is edge.browser-fp.production.linktr.ee.
Why this matters more for a restaurant
Two reasons that are specific to local businesses.
The page is often the only website. Plenty of restaurants have an Instagram, a Google listing and a link in bio, and nothing else. If that is you, the bio link is your website, and it should carry your own domain rather than living on someone else's. Linktree cannot do that on any plan, including Premium at thirty five dollars a month, which their own help centre confirms.
Phones on bad connections. People open this in a car park, on the street, at a bus stop. The measurement above is not a vanity metric in that context: seventy two requests across six hosts is a different experience from two requests on a slow connection.
Good to know before you switch
Hostus is not a link in bio builder with a dashboard of draggable rows. The loop is: you describe the page to Claude or ChatGPT, you get one HTML file, you drop it into Hostus and you get a link. Changing a link later means editing the page in the inline editor or asking the assistant again, not dragging a row up two places on your phone. If reordering links in ten seconds from a bus is the job, Linktree does that better and we would rather you knew that now.
The free plan is 20 documents and 2 MB of HTML. A page like the ones above sits at about 14 KB, so the ceiling is real but far away. There is no click count per individual link either: Hostus reports which sections of a page were actually read, which answers a different question.