Romdera.lt

At a glance

Overview

The 2021 Romdera engagement built the brand. The 2024 Romdera.lt project asks a harder, more modern question: what if the redesign’s real client is Google?

The brief, explicitly: redesign the home-style restaurant’s website and improve its SEO performance – site structure, page speed, mobile responsiveness, and on-page SEO – to increase organic traffic and user engagement. This is not a visual refresh; it is a performance project wearing a redesign’s clothes, and it treats the design discipline as inseparable from technical SEO.

The work moved through a four-stage process – SEO Audit & Research → UX/UI Redesign → SEO Implementation → Performance Optimization – with the redesign delivered as an interactive Figma prototype and the updated site developed for launch and results evaluation.

Role

Graphic & Multimedia Designer (Web Design)

Client

Romdera – home-style food restaurant. The same Romdera whose 2021 branding engagement is covered separately; this project is the second chapter of the client relationship.

Scope

Full website redesign with an SEO performance mandate – structure, page speed, mobile responsiveness, on-page SEO. Four page types: Mainpage, Product Page, Menu, Contacts. Deliverable: interactive Figma prototype (v3), with the site update developed for launch and performance testing.

The starting point: what the audit found

The original site’s problems were enumerated with unusual honesty in the brief – a useful list, because it reads like a checklist of everything a small-restaurant website accumulates over years:

• Low search rankings for local food-related keywords – the restaurant invisible exactly when locals search “pietūs” nearby.
• Poor site structure and unclear navigation – the menu, the one page every visitor wants, not one tap from anywhere.
• Unoptimized images and slow page load – food photography at full resolution, punishing mobile visitors on 4G.
• Weak content hierarchy and missing SEO metadata – the machine-readable layer (titles, descriptions, structured data) that tells search engines what each page is.
• Inconsistent branding and outdated UI – eroding trust before the first dish photo loads.

Each of these maps to both a ranking factor and a UX failure – which is the thesis of the project: what’s bad for Google is bad for the guest.

Objectives

The redesign’s success criteria, as set at kickoff – each objective paired with what it really measures:

• Improve visual appeal and brand trust – the restaurant looking as good as its food, everywhere it appears online.
• Increase organic traffic through SEO – being findable at the moment of hunger: local search visibility.
• Enhance mobile responsiveness and UX – the phone experience treated as primary, not a desktop afterthought.
• Improve site speed and technical performance – load times that respect both the visitor and the search ranking.
• Increase online orders and customer engagement – the business metric all the above serves.

Architecture & pages

The new structure was deliberately minimal – four page types for a restaurant’s real decision journey:

Mainpage

Orientation: who, what, where, and the path to food.

Product page

The dishes themselves, structured so that each item carries clean metadata – the SEO layer that can surface a restaurant’s dishes in search directly.

Menu

The single most visited page on any restaurant site, given clear hierarchy, scannability, and fast-loading imagery.

Contacts

The local-SEO anchor: address, hours, phone, map – everything a “near me” search needs to convert.

Fewer pages, each doing more: a structure chosen for crawl clarity as much as for navigation – every page type maps to a distinct search intent.

Design & process notes

The four-stage method

The process sequence is the professional pattern: audit before design, design before implementation, implementation before measurement.

• SEO Audit & Research – establishing the baseline: what’s broken, what competitors rank for, which keywords the restaurant can realistically win.
• UX/UI Redesign – the visual and interaction layer rebuilt around the audit’s findings: clear navigation, content hierarchy, mobile-first layouts.
• SEO Implementation – the metadata, structure, and semantics layered into the design: clean URLs, page titles, descriptions, structured content.
• Performance Optimization – the speed work: image optimization, lean builds, fast loads on mobile connections.

Prototype-driven delivery

The redesign shipped as an interactive Figma prototype (Romdera Web v3) – the design system, page flows, and interactions testable before a line of production code. For a small business, prototyping first means the expensive development phase starts from an approved, clickable truth rather than from static mockups and guesswork.

Website showcase

Explore the webpage showcase below – click any thumbnail to open the gallery view.

Results

The site update was developed for a spring launch, with performance testing and results evaluation to follow – the measured numbers (organic traffic change, page speed scores before and after, local keyword rankings, online order growth) will be added here when available. Qualitatively, the project delivered:

• A diagnosis-first redesign – every visual decision traceable to an audit finding, not taste alone.
• A four-page architecture aligned to search intent as much as to user navigation.
• A working method transferable to any small business: audit → redesign → implementation → measurement.
• The second chapter of a multi-year client relationship (2021 branding → 2024 redesign), where the designer’s role matured from making the brand visible to making it findable.

Lessons & reflections

• SEO is a design discipline. Structure, hierarchy, image weight, and metadata are design decisions with ranking consequences – treating them as someone else’s job produces the “beautiful but invisible” website this project was hired to fix.
• The audit makes the argument. A redesign justified by measured findings (slow loads, poor rankings, unclear navigation) is unarguable; a redesign justified by taste invites debate. Audit-first is how design gets the mandate.
• Small clients need the full professional loop too. The four-stage process – usually associated with agencies serving large accounts – adapted cleanly to a single restaurant website. Method scales down; craft doesn’t care about client size.
• Long clients are deep clients. Knowing the brand from 2021 made the 2024 redesign faster and truer: the second project inherits the first one’s context – the mark, the “der-” voice, the weekly-menu reality – and spends that capital on performance instead of re-establishing identity.

Credits & links

• Web design & SEO redesign: Lukas Sabaliauskas – Graphic & Multimedia Designer, Vilnius, Lithuania
• Client: Romdera – home-style food restaurant
• Figma prototype: Romdera Web v3 – interactive