Operations Guide
How to Make a Restaurant Website (and What It Costs)
A restaurant website has four jobs and none of them is looking impressive. Someone standing on a street corner at 6:40pm wants to know if you are open, where you are, what you have, and how to order it. Almost every expensive restaurant website failure comes from optimising for the wrong audience — the owner, looking at it on a desktop, rather than a hungry person on a phone with one thumb.
Website builder prices here are marked reported: Squarespace renders its prices client-side and Wix's were not read directly, so the figures come from third-party pricing trackers in 2026 and should be checked against each vendor before you buy. Squarespace's transaction-fee structure did render on its own pricing page and is stated as such. Ordering provider figures are from each vendor's own pages, verified September 2026.
Ginger · Ginger builds your ordering site with the menu as real text on the page, at your own domain — $0 a month, no commission.
What a restaurant website needs: four jobs, in the order people need them
Watch what people actually do on a restaurant site and the priority list is brutally short. Hours and address first, because the most common visit is someone deciding whether to come now. Then the menu, then a way to order, then a way to book a table if you take bookings.
Everything else — the story of the founding family, the slideshow of the dining room, the chef's philosophy — can exist, but it must not sit between a hungry person and those four things. The test is whether a stranger can find your hours in under five seconds on a phone.
| What they came for | Where it should be | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Are you open right now? | Visible without scrolling | Hours in a footer, or only on Google |
| Where are you? | Address as tappable text | Address only inside an embedded map |
| What do you have? | Real text on the page | A PDF menu |
| How do I order? | One button, same place on every page | Buried under a navigation menu |
| Can I book? | Only if you actually take bookings | A booking form nobody monitors |
Should your restaurant menu be a PDF? No — here is why
If you do one thing from this page, make it this: your menu must be real text on a web page, not a PDF or a photograph of the printed menu.
A PDF is unreadable on a phone without pinching and dragging, which is where most of your visitors are. It cannot be searched. Screen readers cannot read it. And critically, Google cannot reliably pull dish names out of it — so when someone searches for the specific thing you are known for, your own site does not come up for it.
AI assistants have made this worse, or better, depending on which side of it you are on. When someone asks an assistant where to get a particular dish nearby, it answers from text it can read. A restaurant whose menu is a photograph is invisible to that question in a way it was not three years ago.
The fix is not glamorous: type the menu out, or use an ordering provider whose menu page is generated from the items you already entered. If your ordering system already has every dish, price and modifier in it, that data should be producing your menu page rather than sitting in a separate silo from a PDF.
How to build a restaurant website: three options compared
The route matters less than most owners think, because all three can produce a perfectly good restaurant site. What differs is who does the work, what it costs annually, and how tangled things get when you want to change providers.
A general website builder gives you the most control and the lowest monthly cost, but the ordering has to come from somewhere else and you are responsible for keeping the two in step. A restaurant-specific platform bundles both and charges accordingly. An ordering provider's included site is the cheapest path to something that works, and usually the least flexible to look at.
| Route | Typical cost | Ordering included? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| General builder (Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy) | ~$11–$39/mo reported, plus a domain | No — add it separately | Owners who want control of the look |
| Restaurant platform (Popmenu, Owner.com, BentoBox) | $179–$499/mo reported | Yes, bundled | Groups with a marketing budget and no time |
| Ordering provider's site | $0–$249/mo depending on provider | Yes — it is the point | Most independents |
Builder prices are third-party reported figures for 2026; check them against each vendor before buying. BentoBox now redirects to Clover and publishes no pricing. Note that Squarespace's own pricing page does state its commerce transaction fees: 2% on the entry Personal tier, 0% on Business and above — which matters if you ever sell anything through the site itself.
How much does a restaurant website cost per year?
Add the pieces up before you commit, because the website is almost never the expensive part — the ordering is. A restaurant that spends $200 a year on a site and $3,000 on an ordering subscription has, in effect, bought a $3,200 website.
| Item | Cheapest realistic | Middle | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain | ~$10–$20/yr | Same | Register it yourself, in your own name |
| Hosting / builder | $0 if bundled | ~$130–$470/yr reported | Bundled with most ordering providers |
| Ordering | $0/mo providers exist | $1,800–$5,400/yr | The real cost centre |
| Photography | $0, shoot it yourself | $300–$1,000 once | Top twenty dishes is enough |
| Reservations | $0 if you do not take them | ~$1,500–$6,000/yr reported | Per-cover fees compound fast |
Ordering and reservation ranges are drawn from our provider comparisons; reservation figures are third-party reported because the vendors do not publish them consistently.
Mobile-first restaurant website design: build it for a phone
Design on a phone first and check it on a phone, not on the desktop where you built it. The most common failure is a beautiful desktop layout whose ordering button sits below three screens of photography on mobile.
Speed matters more than design. Every second a page takes to load on a phone on a weak connection costs you visitors who will simply go back to the app they came from. Large unoptimised photographs are almost always the cause, and resizing them is the cheapest performance work available.
And make the phone number a tappable link. A surprising number of restaurant sites print the number as plain text, which on a phone means the visitor has to memorise it, leave, and dial. Every extra step is people you lose.
Your restaurant website and Google Business Profile must agree
For most independent restaurants, the Google Business Profile gets more views than the website does. It is free, it appears above your site in search, and it is where the hours, the photos and the ordering link that people actually click all live.
So the website's job includes agreeing with it. The hours have to match, the address has to match, the phone number has to match. Conflicting information between the two is both a customer problem and a ranking problem, and it happens most often after a seasonal hours change that somebody updated in one place only.
Check the food ordering link on your profile specifically. If nobody has ever set it, it may point at a delivery marketplace rather than at your own site — which means Google is sending your highest-intent traffic to a channel that charges you commission on it.
Who should own your restaurant's domain name? You
Register the domain yourself, with your own card, in your own name, before anyone builds anything on it. It costs about the price of two lunches a year and it is the only permanent thing in this entire list.
Providers get acquired, raise prices and shut products down — GloriaFood's users learned this the hard way. If your domain sits in a vendor's account, leaving means losing the address your customers have learned or negotiating to buy back your own name.
The same applies to the photographs and the menu text. Ask who owns them, and get the answer before you need it. Anything you cannot take with you is something you are renting, whatever the invoice calls it.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a restaurant website cost?
The website itself is the cheap part: a domain is roughly $10-$20 a year, and a general builder is a reported $11-$39 a month, or nothing at all if your ordering provider includes a site. The expensive part is ordering, which ranges from $0 a month with several providers up to $249-$499 a month with subscription platforms. Budget by the whole stack rather than the site alone — a $200 website attached to a $3,000 ordering subscription is really a $3,200 website.
Should my restaurant menu be a PDF?
No. A PDF cannot be read comfortably on a phone, cannot be searched, is inaccessible to screen readers, and cannot be reliably indexed — so when someone searches for the dish you are known for, your own site does not come up for it. AI assistants answering “where can I get X nearby” read text, not pictures. Put the menu on the page as real text, ideally generated from the items already in your ordering system.
Do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?
The profile does a lot of the work — for many independents it gets more views than the site — but it is not a substitute. You do not control it, you cannot take the orders through it, and the food ordering link on it may point at a delivery marketplace rather than at you unless you set it. Treat the profile as your front door and the site as the place the door opens onto, and make sure the hours, address and phone number on both agree.
What is the best website builder for a restaurant?
For most independents the question is the wrong way round: pick the ordering provider first, because that is where the money and the operational risk are, and take whatever site it includes. A general builder like Squarespace or Wix is worth it when you want real control of the look and are willing to run ordering separately and keep the two menus in step — which is a recurring job, not a one-time setup.
Who should own my restaurant's domain name?
You should, in your own name, registered with your own card, before anyone builds anything on it. It costs roughly $10-$20 a year. If a provider registers it on your behalf, changing providers later means either losing the web address your customers have learned or negotiating to buy back your own name — and that negotiation happens at the worst possible moment, when the relationship has already gone wrong.
How fast should a restaurant website load?
Fast enough on a phone on a weak connection that nobody gives up, which in practice means keeping it to a couple of seconds. Oversized, unoptimised photographs are almost always the cause of a slow restaurant site, and resizing them is the cheapest performance work available. Test on a phone on mobile data, not on the office wifi where you built it.
We build the site with the menu already in it
Send a photo or a PDF of your menu and we build the ordering site from it — real text on the page, sizes and modifiers included, at your own domain. $0 a month, no commission, no contract, and the $1 order fee is paid by the customer.