Having a business that people have been visiting for generations doesn't mean you can't also have a modern online presence. That was the job for Lancers Diner on Route 611 in Horsham, Pennsylvania, a landmark in the area since the 1940s.
Their website needed a serious upgrade in general, and they were also ready to release a completely updated menu. They needed a complete overhaul, and they needed it fast.
No problem at all. Here's how Mountwell delivered a new site other diners would salivate over, and got it done in only two weeks.
A local landmark
Lancers is a family diner at 858 Easton Road, across from the old Willow Grove airfield. The corner has been a diner since the 1940s: Dutch's, then the Horsham Towne Diner, then Lancers since 1991. There's a bakery case on site and online ordering through Toast.
Like a lot of long-running local businesses, Lancers had a WordPress site that was built years ago and had become hard to update. The diner kept evolving, with new dishes, new prices and a new printed menu in July 2026. The goal was a website that matches the diner as it is today, and makes it easy to keep it that way.
Built around what customers need first
Every decision came from one question: what does someone looking up a diner on their phone need first? Almost always, it's one of four things: call, see the menu, get directions or order.
So that's what the new lancersdiner.com leads with. The first screen shows today's status, hours, address and phone in a card beside the headline, with big Call and Get directions buttons. The "Open now" badge runs on Horsham time, even if you're checking from a hotel in Phoenix. On phones, a bar stays pinned to the bottom of every page: Call, Menu, Directions, Order.
The hours, address and phone number each live in one file that feeds every page, the footer and the data Google reads. Change them once, and they're right everywhere.
The new menu, online and searchable
Like all great diners, Lancers has an expansive menu, and they were gearing up to launch a major update. We took the new menu and updated every item on the website to match.
In years past, this would've been a massive, manual process. By using the latest tools, we knocked all this out in a day.
But we didn't stop there. Their menu is huge, and sometimes people just want to find the one or two things they're craving. So, we also added a search function so people could quickly say, "Yep, they have exactly what I'm looking for," and head on in.
A look straight from the diner
The design came from the diner itself. The owner liked the old-school look of the new printed menu, so the site borrowed it: checkerboard trim, double rules beside section headings, a brush script for lines like "Classic Diner, Local Legend," dotted boxes around house favorites, and 17 pen-and-ink drawings cut straight out of the menu.
Everything on it is real. The photos are the diner's own, and the history and bakery list came from the old site. No stock photos, no made-up specials, no fake reviews. We even kept the L-A-N-C-E-R-S acrostic from the diner's wall ("Logically the place to eat…"). Some things you don't touch.
The owner's feedback shaped the final round: a gift card button up top, the history moved to its own Our Story page, bigger Call and Directions buttons, and plain contact details instead of forms. Hiring got simpler too. Job applicants now email six short details, or just stop in.
Ready for Google and AI search
Lancers first got in touch about SEO, so the new site was built to give search engines everything they look for:
- Restaurant and menu data on every page, the code that hands Google the diner's hours, phone number, address and dishes in a format it can read.
- A written summary (meta description) for every page, which Google can show under the link.
- Alt text on every image, for screen readers and search engines alike.
- A share image, so links that get texted or posted show up with a picture.
- A clean sitemap, plus redirects from the old site's addresses.
- Google Analytics 4. The old site's tracking had stopped recording when Google retired Universal Analytics in 2023, so this is the first real data in years.
All of this helps with AI search, too. A lot of small business owners are hearing they need a separate plan for ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and the rest. Mostly, they don't. When someone asks an AI assistant for a good diner near Horsham, it works from the same things Google does, so the foundation is the same: information that's accurate, up to date and structured cleanly.
With accurate information, solid foundations and working analytics in place, every future SEO effort can be measured against a real baseline.
Two weeks, start to finish
This is the part most small businesses don't understand. They think a complete site overhaul like this is going to be a long, painful, expensive process, so they postpone it or don't even consider it. And that's how it used to be a few years ago.
However, with all the technology available today, combined with 20 years of website building experience, that's a thing of the past. In this case, the whole process and launch took two weeks and a couple of phone calls.
Moving every page, dish and price across took a couple of hours. Refining the design took a few more, plus a short round of the owner's changes. The brief came in Sept. 17, the menu was rebuilt from the new printed version the next day, and the site went live Oct. 4.
Most of that time went into getting the details right. The open/closed badge has 11 automated tests, which caught a bug where a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day closure would have said "opens tomorrow." Every page was checked at phone and desktop widths, and the finished site passed our full site audit with zero errors and zero warnings.
It's leaner, too. The new site has 7 clear pages instead of about 190 auto-generated ones, which means a lot less to keep up to date.
Technical details: before and after
| Measure | Old site | New site |
|---|---|---|
| Where the hours appear | A popup only | Every page, and in Google's data |
| Finding a dish on the menu | About 22 screens of scrolling | Type it in the search box |
| CSS and JavaScript files on the homepage | 36 | 3 |
| Homepage HTML size | 44 KB | 24 KB |
| Pages with a meta description | 0 of 9 | 7 of 7 |
| Homepage images missing alt text | 9 of 11 | 0 |
| Business data Google can read | None on the homepage | Restaurant and menu data on every page |
| Jobs application | About 60 fields | An email with 6 details |
Both sites were checked Oct. 4, 2026.
Is your website keeping up with your business?
A business that's earned decades of loyal customers deserves a website that works as hard as it does. If yours hasn't kept pace with your menu, your hours or your customers' phones, catching up doesn't have to be a long or expensive project.
Book a free intro call, and we'll talk through what your site needs and how quickly we can get it done.
Lee Procida is the founder and president of Mountwell Marketing, and serves as the marketing lead for more than 30 small and medium-sized businesses. More about Lee
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