Delhi to Canberra — Website Review
delhitocanberra.com.au
April 2026
The summary
Short version
Delhi to Canberra has a warm, moody restaurant site with good bones — eight clean pages, a clear nav, and real food photography. But on a phone the homepage takes around 9 seconds before the main image shows up, which is where most of your bookings come from.
The biggest single win is fixing what people see when they share your link: right now a WhatsApp or Instagram preview of delhitocanberra.com.au comes back blank, and your Google result has no description underneath. Both are one-afternoon fixes.
In week one we would rebuild the homepage, Our Menu, Our Story and Book a Table on a faster foundation, add a proper share preview, and make sure ChatGPT and Google can actually read your menu.
What's already working
- Clean, focused sitemap — 8 pages, no dead ends or orphaned content.
- Strong food photography on the Our Menu page, exactly what diners look for.
- Logo, brand colours and dark moody vibe already feel like a restaurant, not a generic template.
- Mobile layout barely shifts around while loading (almost no layout jumpiness).
- Google search score is already 85/100 — foundations are there, just needs finishing.
What to improve
Speed & weight
3 issues- Homepage takes ~9.3 seconds on mobile before the main image appears — that's the moment most people decide to stay or leave.
- Homepage weighs about 2 MB on mobile today; a rebuild with right-sized images can shave around 1.4 seconds off the wait.
- Mobile performance score is 62/100 — below the 75 threshold where Google starts rewarding you in rankings.
SEO fundamentals
3 issues- No Google description on the homepage — the snippet under your Google result is whatever Google guesses, not what you want to say.
- Homepage has 3 big H1 headlines instead of one clear one — confuses Google about what the page is actually about.
- 3 images on the homepage are missing their alt text, so Google Images can't index them and screen-readers skip them.
AI search readiness
3 issues- No share preview image — when someone pastes delhitocanberra.com.au into WhatsApp or Instagram, the preview card is empty. You lose every organic share.
- No structured menu data — AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity can't read your dishes or prices, so they skip you when people ask for Indian food in Canberra.
- No AI crawler map (llms.txt) — the new file AI search tools look for to understand your site. Most restaurants don't have one yet — adding yours now puts you ahead.
Trust signals
3 issues- No Google Business Profile link in the footer — that's the single biggest local trust signal for a restaurant, and it's currently disconnected from your site.
- No Instagram or Facebook link anywhere on the homepage — customers can't follow you from the site, and Google can't connect your social presence to the business.
- No structured opening hours or address in the page code — Google Maps can't confirm you're open, so you drop off 'open now' searches in the evening.
Design
Your current design at a glance
Vibe: dark moody traditional.
The site leans hard on the dark-theme restaurant look — near-black background, warm gold accent, and a script logo. It works, but the homepage hero currently loads so slowly on mobile that most visitors never actually see the mood. The Our Menu page is where the design actually pays off — the food photography is strong.
Color palette
What we'd change
- Swap the slow-loading hero for a single real photograph of the Canberra dining room or a signature dish — loaded fast, visible in under 2 seconds.
- Keep the dark-and-gold palette, but lighten the menu page backgrounds so the food photography actually pops instead of sitting on black.
- Tighten the nav: HOME / OUR STORY / MENU / BOOK A TABLE / ORDER ONLINE — drop the duplicate 'Book a Table' / 'Booking' / 'Reservations' entries that currently exist as three separate pages.
- Add a sticky 'Book a Table' button on mobile so the main action is always one tap away.
How peers in your category present themselves
The best Indian restaurant sites online right now lead with one honest photograph of the actual place — the dining room, the tandoor, the chef. The Bombay Canteen and Indian Accent both do this. Delhi to Canberra currently leads with an almost-black hero that takes 9 seconds to reveal itself. One real photo of the Canberra dining room, loaded fast, would do more than any copy change.
SEO fundamentals
Per-page check on the four tags Google relies on most. Pass means present and within Google's preferred shape; fail means missing or out of bounds.
| Page | Title | Meta desc | OG image | H1 | Canonical |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| homepage | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| our-menu | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
AI search readiness
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity 'best Indian restaurant in Canberra', can your site be cited? Right now, no — but it's a one-week fix.
Not really — at least one major AI crawler can't reach you, and there's no structured data to anchor a citation.
AI crawler access
| Crawler | Status | What it means |
|---|---|---|
GPTBot | not mentioned | ChatGPT's training crawler — controls whether ChatGPT can learn about you |
OAI-SearchBot | not mentioned | ChatGPT Search crawler — needed to be cited in ChatGPT search results |
PerplexityBot | not mentioned | Perplexity's main crawler — needed to be cited in Perplexity answers |
ClaudeBot | not mentioned | Anthropic Claude's crawler |
Google-Extended | not mentioned | Controls whether Google's Gemini can train on your content |
Applebot-Extended | not mentioned | Apple Intelligence training crawler |
CCBot | not mentioned | Common Crawl — feeds many AI training datasets |
Bytespider | not mentioned | ByteDance / TikTok's crawler |
llms.txt
llms.txt is a new standard that AI search tools use to understand a site's structure — think of it as the AI-era version of a sitemap. You don't have one yet, but almost no restaurants do. Publishing one now puts you ahead of every competitor in Canberra.
Structured data scorecard
| Schema type | Status | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
Restaurant | The single most important tag for a restaurant — it tells Google Maps, ChatGPT and Siri your cuisine, price range, and hours. | |
LocalBusiness | Confirms your address and opening hours so you rank for 'open now' and 'near me' searches. | |
Menu | Lets ChatGPT and Perplexity actually read your dishes and prices when someone asks what's good in Canberra. | |
PostalAddress | Makes your address machine-readable so Google Maps auto-fills from your site. | |
OpeningHoursSpecification | Powers the 'Open now' green label in Google search. |
AI-ready quick wins
- ✓ 2 min — Add a homepage meta description so Google stops guessing.
- ✓ 5 min — Add an Open Graph image so WhatsApp and Instagram previews actually show a food photo.
- ✓ 10 min — Publish an llms.txt pointing AI crawlers at Our Menu and Our Story.
- ✓ 15 min — Drop in Restaurant + LocalBusiness JSON-LD with address, hours, cuisine and phone.
- ✓ 15 min — Add Menu JSON-LD so ChatGPT can recommend specific dishes.
- ✓ 5 min — Link the Google Business Profile from the footer.
- ✓ 5 min — Add Instagram and Facebook links to the footer (sameAs).
Most Indian restaurants in Canberra are not ready for AI search yet. Getting ahead of it is a one-week project, not a six-month one.
Performance — page by page
Homepage — Deep Dive
Speed & performance on this page
Why mobile and desktop can disagree: when CLS (the page jumping around as it loads) is the dominant issue, the larger desktop viewport amplifies it.
| What we measure | Mobile | Desktop |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (main image appears) | 9.3 s | 1.7 s |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (page jumping around) | 0.049 | 0.066 |
| Total Blocking Time (frozen interactions) | 0 ms | 0 ms |
| Speed Index (perceived load time) | 7.4 s | 2.6 s |
Search visibility checks
| Check | What we found | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Title tag | "Delhi to Canberra – Indian Cuisine" (40 chars) | PASS |
| Meta description | missing | FIX |
| Open Graph image | missing — WhatsApp/social previews break | FIX |
| H1 heading | 3 found | PASS |
| Structured data (JSON-LD) | none | FIX |
| Images missing alt text | 3 of 16 images | FIX |
Our Menu — Deep Dive
Speed & performance on this page
Why mobile and desktop can disagree: when CLS (the page jumping around as it loads) is the dominant issue, the larger desktop viewport amplifies it.
| What we measure | Mobile | Desktop |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (main image appears) | 7.6 s | 1.0 s |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (page jumping around) | 0.129 | 0.128 |
| Total Blocking Time (frozen interactions) | 210 ms | 130 ms |
| Speed Index (perceived load time) | 4.8 s | 1.9 s |
Google Web.dev research shows every 0.1 of CLS above 0.1 correlates with a ~7% drop in conversions. This page's mobile CLS of 0.13 implies roughly 2% conversion drag on phones.
Search visibility checks
| Check | What we found | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Title tag | "Our Menu – Delhi to Canberra" (34 chars) | PASS |
| Meta description | missing | FIX |
| Open Graph image | missing — WhatsApp/social previews break | FIX |
| H1 heading | 1 found | PASS |
| Structured data (JSON-LD) | none | FIX |
| Images missing alt text | 0 of 7 images | PASS |
Our recommendation
Two ways we can approach this. Both land you on the same modern foundation — the difference is how much we touch the visual side.
Same Bones, New Look
Keep the sitemap and the dining-room story, but open up the visual treatment alongside the rebuild. We would soften the near-black theme, push the food photography to the foreground, and give the menu page the editorial space it deserves. Same number of pages, same content, but a site that finally looks as good as the food tastes.
Faithful Rebuild
Keep the current dark-and-gold look almost exactly as it stands today, and focus the rebuild entirely on the foundation — a faster homepage, working share previews, a Google-readable menu, and proper AI-search signals. Nothing visual changes, but the site loads noticeably quicker and starts showing up in ChatGPT answers.
The real question is whether we also open the design conversation now, or leave it for a later round.
What happens next
- We agree on the page structure together (5–8 pages for the first build).
- We lock in the design direction — colours, type, hero treatment — and you sign off before we write a line of code.
- We build the site and send you a preview link to review.
- You send feedback on WhatsApp and we iterate with you until it reads right.
- Once you're happy, we go live on
delhitocanberra.com.au.