Retired a costly Wix site. Kept the staff in control.

Kasto is a plant-based Italian kitchen in Canggu. Warm room, open pass, specials that change on the strength of what arrived that morning. The website was none of those things. It was a Wix template that loaded slowly, looked like every other restaurant template, and charged £33 a month for the privilege.

The design complaint was real but it was second. The first problem was that the menu lived somewhere Giuseppe could not easily reach. A price change meant stopping service. So specials went up late, or did not go up at all, and the site drifted a week behind the kitchen.

Three days, and the brief resolved to one test: could the chef change the menu, from his phone, without asking anyone?

Menus change constantly. Specials rotate, a supplier misses a delivery, a dish sells out at eight. The editor is one password-protected page: three fields per dish, a drag handle to reorder, and a save button. It is deliberately not a general-purpose CMS, because the team does exactly one job in it.

• Runs on Decap CMS, so edits commit to the site and trigger a rebuild automatically
• Images are compressed in the browser before they are uploaded, so a photo taken on a phone does not become a two megabyte page weight
• Daily specials can be scheduled to expire at midnight, so nobody has to remember to take them down

A change is live in about thirty seconds. Giuseppe now updates between services, which was the entire point.

Most restaurant sites hand the guest to OpenTable or Resy at the moment they have decided to book. That is a redirect, a second brand, an account prompt, and a per-cover fee, all placed exactly where the intent is highest.

Kasto books in three taps: party size, date, time. The confirmation goes to the guest by email and the request lands in the kitchen inbox. There is no third-party widget anywhere on the site, no guest data handed to a platform, and no commission on a table the restaurant filled itself.

The palette comes off the restaurant's own walls: terracotta, burnt sugar, soft cream. No saturated greens and no leaf iconography, which is the default costume for plant-based food and reads as a category rather than a place.

The photography leads on atmosphere rather than hero-lit dishes. Kasto sells an evening more than it sells a plate, and a room shot does that work better than a styled close-up. The type stays small and gets out of the way. A slow reveal on the hero, and almost nothing else moves.

Every page is pre-rendered to plain HTML before anyone visits, then served from Netlify's global CDN. There is no server, no database and no framework running at request time, which is most of why it is fast from Bali or from Bristol. Reservation requests use Netlify's built-in form handling, so the booking flow adds no backend of its own. Fonts and the hero video are served from the site rather than a third party, so nothing outside our control sits on the critical path. Hosting is £0 a month and the code belongs to the restaurant.