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The Best Restaurant Website Builder in 2022
Online food ordering is one of the rare industries that has flourished since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But having a good website is essential even for restaurants that have people eating on the premises: statistics show that 90% of guests check out a restaurant online before heading to eat there. Having an online presentation of your offer is essential for boosting your visibility and attracting new customers.
That’s why we’ve looked at the best restaurant website builder software around, so you can focus on what you do best - preparing amazing dishes.
1. Wix
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
- Unique designer-made templates
- ADI site generator
- Native menu app
2. Squarespace
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
GOOD
EXCELLENT
- Email campaigns
- Award-winning web designs
- OpenTable integration
3. GoDaddy
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
FAIR
GOOD
- Web hosting services
- SSL Certificates
- SMS alerts for new appointments
4. Square Online
EXCELLENT
FAIR
GOOD
EXCELLENT
- Free Plan
- Easy designing process
- Point-of-Sale Integrations
Choosing the Best Website Builder for a Restaurant - Our Methodology
When researching and compiling the best software for creating restaurant websites, we had to develop a fair and balanced set of criteria for evaluating the competitors. Here’s how we did it:
Ease of Use
Any good restaurant website design software should streamline the website creation process while being easy to use themselves. Complicated sites with clunky interfaces and design can turn off potential customers, and the same goes for overly complex website builders. After all, not everyone is an experienced website designer, and chances are people using this software have turned to it precisely because they are complete beginners in the field.
Aside from keeping things simple, the best restaurant website builder should make your flashy new site scalable to screens of all sizes. Top-notch apps for handling the design process and tweaking things while on the go are a big plus, too.
Integrations
For a successful online ordering business, you’ll have to integrate your restaurants’ website with good e-commerce and marketing platforms. You’ll need a POS system to automatically accept and process orders and payments. You should ideally also be able to integrate your site with platforms that accept online reservations, create online menus, let you read restaurant reviews, and earn points towards free meals.
Top-notch websites for restaurants should also allow marketing integrations with apps that would automatically pull in Instagram and Facebook posts or mailing lists to push guests’ data and manage your clients. Integrating with tools like Google Ads, Facebook Pixel, and Google Analytics will allow your website to get insight and reports about your target audience and their behavior. This will make managing online campaigns easier.
SEO
Having a flashy website with all the possible integrations won’t make any difference to your online restaurant presence if the customers cannot find you through their search engines. A good website builder for restaurants should help with your SEO efforts. Remember that around 75% of searchers never click past the first page, so making your site visible is essential to its success. With this in mind, we looked for software with a comprehensive SEO strategy and guidelines for users unfamiliar with search optimization algorithms.
SEO-friendly sites have built-in tools that constantly monitor and modify your site to help your site stay relevant to Google. They should be able to edit meta titles and descriptions, change URL slugs, add H-tags, and install apps that will help you rank better and drive organic traffic. Some platforms offer keyword density and conversion tools or the ability to hire SEO experts to optimize your site.
Design
Good restaurant websites are always easy on the eye and invest in building unique aesthetics. If you opt to hire a web designer to create your website from scratch, you’ll get a personalized solution, but it’ll cost you an arm and a leg. If you wish to avoid that, you’ll appreciate it if the website builder could provide restaurant-tailored templates with preinstalled menus. Having a high-quality template isn’t enough, as you’ll probably want to customize it. The software we look for should offer a diverse collection of artistic designs and templates along with top-notch but straightforward editing tools.
No matter how good the template is, you may wish to tweak and customize it. When you create a restaurant website, you’ll need a flexible drag-and-drop editor that will allow you to add pictures, logos, and maps, change the color palette, theme, style, and fonts. A good restaurant and e-commerce website builder will allow users to manage the content easily from their dashboard. Also, there should be built-in menu page layouts, blocks you can customize, or at least a native menu app.
Additional Features
We’ve already gone through some of the most important features: SEO tools, templates, editing and designing tools, and integrations. To streamline the process of creating the best restaurant sites, website builders should offer a comprehensive setup wizard to guide you along the way. Marketing tools such as email marketing, built-in analytics that track visitors’ demographics, and integrated social media buttons are a big plus, too.
E-commerce solutions that offer payment processing, inventory tracking, product descriptions, and more make the payment and delivery process smoother. For orders, it would be highly appreciated if the website builder offered a phone order setup, SMS alerts for new appointments, and a reservations app. Finally, mobile-responsive sites with editing tools that allow tweaking while you’re on the go get extra marks from us.
Support
What is even the best website builder for a restaurant worth if its customer support is not well-organized and customer-friendly? We expect products to offer at the very least email support and have a dedicated FAQ section on the site. Community forums, live chat, or even better - a dedicated phone support line are not mandatory but certainly increase the appeal of the software significantly.
Pricing
Our thorough review process includes some of the greatest free restaurant website builder platforms around. Most of the companies we’ve reviewed have a free plan or at least a free trial to try before buying the full product. However, if you know in advance that you’ll need more robust SEO and marketing or e-commerce tools, you may want to look at the premium options available. Here the pricing scheme becomes a factor. As such, we also include pricing in our review methodology as a criterion to help you pick the best restaurant website builder for any budget.
4 Best Website Builders for Restaurants
- Wix
- Squarespace
- GoDaddy
- Square Online
Wix Review
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
- ⦿ Free plan
- ⦿ Excellent app market
- ⦿ Wix Artificial Design Intelligence
If you’re into web design or you’ve been researching free website builders to help you get your business off the ground, you’ve most certainly heard about Wix. The most popular platform for creating websites has been around since 2006. It serves more than 200 million users worldwide, has the most diverse template gallery, and offers top-notch editing and customizing tools.
Restaurant website creation can be a daunting job. Wix provides you with its unique Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) tool to help you get started in no time. Simply go through a setup wizard by answering questions related to your restaurant business, pick the design template you like best and edit the content blocks until you’re satisfied with the results. Wix will generate the perfect website for you, with a menu page, online ordering and booking, and a site map. If you’d like a more unique and customized website, Wix has you covered, too. Using its drag-and-drop editor will let you create a professional website from scratch, and tech-savvy users can even make web apps with Wix’s developer platform Velo.
Wix templates for restaurants are unique and diverse, made by designers. There are over 800 of them, with more than 60 restaurant-specific templates. You can even choose a blank template and let your imagination go wild. All culinary-related templates are divided into categories: restaurant, catering & chef, cafe & bakery, bar & club, and food & drinks. Once you pick the one that fits your concept, you can further customize it using Wix drag-and-drop Editor X. It lets you create new pages, change themes and colors, add images and logos, delete entire sections, and more.
Wix has built-in SEO tools that’ll help with your page’s ranking. To pump up your restaurant’s e-commerce, you should simply answer some questions and name keywords in the Wix SEO Wiz section. Aside from having a top-notch SEO service, Wix offers additional features and integrations to its customers. You can easily integrate your website with more than 200 apps such as Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, eBay, ShipStation, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Pixel, and much more.
If you’d like a state-of-the-art service for your customers, you can take advantage of Wix Analytics tools that’ll provide you with valuable insights regarding consumers’ behavior. You can also get free web hosting, a professional mailbox and custom domain name, as well as Wix Chat for contacting your customers, the Site Booster app, and much more. This website builder for restaurants is entirely scalable for screens of all sizes and boasts a fantastic app for iOS and Android users. Finally, customer support includes a knowledge base, 24/7 live chat in eight languages, and even a dedicated support phone line.
As for the pricing, Wix offers a free plan that lets you build a basic website. However, if you wish to get more out of it, you’ll have to subscribe to one of four regular website plans, with prices between $4.5 and $24.50 per month. Wix does allow you to create a nice-looking website for restaurants and bars without paying a dime, but you’ll have to live with on-site ads and Wix branding. If you want to take online orders, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the three business plans priced between $17 and $35/mo. All pricing tiers come with free SSL certificates and a free domain for a year.
Squarespace Review
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
- ⦿ Exceptional templates
- ⦿ Easy to use
- ⦿ Integrations with OpenTable and ChowNow
Squarespace is a tried-and-true website builder that’s been around for almost two decades. Known for its artistic templates and an excellent mobile app, Squarespace offers a professional website-building experience along with a user-friendly approach, which is an ideal combination for both amateurs and experts. Let’s dive deeper into all it has to offer.
Whether you need a simple website for a restaurant or something more flashy and complex, Squarespace has you covered. The software greets new users with a short introduction that contains explanations and how-tos. Creating a website is simple and requires you to pick a template and customize its looks, pages, menus, and navigation. You can even create a free logo for your brand and include it on the webpage. Then, simply add a custom domain to it, and you’re ready to go. You can add online reservations, business hours, a photo gallery, and much more. The dashboard is easy to navigate, with a menu on the left and the editor on the right side. If you still need some assistance, you can hire a Squarespace expert to help.
There aren’t as many templates as Wix, but all of the ones on offer are beautifully designed, food-centered, and have stylish and classy imagery and menu layouts. Squarespace restaurant templates might well be the best ones on the market, but we’re sure you’ll still want to personalize them. Customizing the template and text is possible, but the editor tool is quite limited and isn’t one of the best we’ve encountered while reviewing website builders. All you can do is add and edit pages and sections and change the colors and fonts, which isn’t very flexible compared to some of the competition.
Helping you rank your website is one of the essential tasks for every website builder, and Squarespace is no exception. Its top-rated built-in SEO tools automatically generate sitemaps, provide SSL certificates, a clean HTML markup, mobile optimization, etc. Aside from offering arguably the best restaurant website design templates, the platform boasts e-commerce features and an email campaigns tool, which lets you send branded marketing content directly from your website.
To extend your website’s reach across the web, Squarespace lets you integrate it with OpenTable and ChowNow, ApplePay, FedEx, social networks, Zapier, Google Analytics, and much more. Finally, you can manage your site and edit content via mobile devices using the excellent iOS and Android apps.
Squarespace is one of the more affordable website builders around, and its entry-level Personal plan starts at only $16 per month. Business Plan costs $26, Basic Commerce $35, and Advanced Commerce $54. If you decide to pay annually, you can count on significant discounts: the Personal Plan will cost just $12 per month, and the most expensive Advanced Commerce package only $40 per month.
With affordable prices and a 14-day free trial, it’s the best website builder for a small restaurant business. All plans include fully-managed cloud hosting, SSL security, and unlimited bandwidth and storage. Marketing and e-commerce tools are not available with the starting plan, while only the Advance Commerce tier has recovery solutions for cart abandonment.
For every issue you might encounter, you can reach out to Squarespace’s award-winning customer care team that’s available round the clock via email, live chat, or Twitter. Alternatively, you can consult the extensive knowledge base on the site.
GoDaddy Review
EXCELLENT
EXCELLENT
FAIR
GOOD
- ⦿ GoDaddy Insight
- ⦿ Strong SEO tools
- ⦿ Speedy creation process
GoDaddy is a tech giant with more than 20 million customers worldwide and a strong reputation in the entrepreneurial world. The company doesn’t only help you create an online venue with an ordering builder platform but offers a whole suite of services necessary to get your business off the ground. It will provide web hosting and WordPress hosting services and grant you a professional email address and domain name and all the necessary e-commerce tools you’ll need. GoDaddy is an all-inclusive service for those who wish to increase their online presence.
Designing a website is a breeze, and you’ll only have to create an account and choose your business category. After naming your site, GoDaddy will generate a layout that you can later edit. On the flip side, its editing tools are not the most flexible we’ve ever seen. Even though it’s hassle-free and simple, this restaurant website building platform only lets you customize colors and fonts. We have to praise the speed of service, though, as its AI-based GoCentral system makes the whole website creation process take a matter of minutes.
When it comes to templates, GoDaddy’s 19 restaurant-related designs are pretty standard and do not particularly stand out. However, you can tweak the one you choose and make it more personal. We loved the straightforward editing process that can be performed from the intuitive dashboard, with an on-site editing tool, or from your mobile device, as GoDaddy has excellent iOS and Android apps. You can also hire a GoDaddy web designer if you don't have time to fiddle around with the options yourself.
Knowing how to make a website for a restaurant in a couple of clicks isn’t enough. You also need to tackle those Google rankings, so your site will be noticed by the customers. GoDaddy has one of the best SEO strategies on the market. Its native SEO tool, Search Engine Visibility, generates keywords related to your industry and constantly monitors your site performance with regular health check reports to keep it performing well. For better results, you can integrate your newly generated website with the ChowNow platform for online ordering. There are also integration options for social network platforms, OpenTable, and many other apps.
Notable features include e-commerce tools (in the top tier plan), GoDaddy Insights marketing tools, online menu and booking creation, and SSL security for your site. The software has one of the best online ordering systems for restaurants, and we love its SMS alerts for new appointments that keep you in charge of the ordering process. GoDaddy offers robust email campaigns and branded content creation to streamline the process of posting on social networks.
GoDaddy offers a free plan with limited features. For more serious website work, you’ll want to move to one of the paid plans, though. Currently, you can choose between Basic, Standard, Premium, and Commerce packages that cost between $6.99 and $14.99 per month if you sign up for an annual subscription or 30% if you pay month-to-month. Even though GoDaddy offers the ability to create a free website for restaurants, bars, or pubs, and the lower pricing tiers are good too, customers who want e-commerce features and the ability to sell products online will have to subscribe to the most expensive package.
Should you need assistance, the GoDaddy support team is available 24/7 via toll-free phone and live chat. You can find solutions to your problems by checking out GoDaddy community posts.
Square Online Review
EXCELLENT
FAIR
GOOD
EXCELLENT
- ⦿ In-built marketing features
- ⦿ Intuitive dashboard
- ⦿ Various integrations
Square Online (not to be confused with Squarespace) is a section of the large Square family that includes banking services such as savings and checking accounts, payroll services for managing and paying the staff, and e-commerce solutions. On top of that, it lets you build your own restaurant site or a website for retail, professional services, or a large business. This financial services and digital payments company was established in 2009 in California and then launched its website builder.
With Square Online, you’ll be able to build a website in no time by opening an account and answering a few questions regarding your business. The platform will walk you through the setup process with prompts and video tutorials. Upon finishing, you’ll be asked to connect an existing domain, use a free Square subdomain, or upgrade to a paid plan and buy a domain from Square.
Unlike the Squarespace restaurant ordering platform, which gives you plenty of creative and flashy templates, Square Online doesn’t have a lot to offer when it comes to design. Namely, once you start creating your website, you’ll be given a simple general layout to customize. Even though it won’t push any design boundaries, Square Online offers the ability to create a website that’s well-organized and easy to navigate. Adding a personal touch to it won’t be that easy, though, as the customization options are somewhat limited and only let you add your company’s logo and play with the color palette and fonts.
Square Online offers SEO services to its users, but they are fairly limited. To help Google’s algorithm rate your restaurants’ websites well, you’ll need to have a solid knowledge of the SEO process. There’s little to no guidance at all from the software, so you’ll mostly be on your own. Square Online makes up for this tradeoff with numerous integrations with social networks, point of sale systems, Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Open Table, DoorDash, Postmates, and many more.
When it comes to other features, we loved its built-in menu creator, various shipping options, the Automatic Tax Calculator feature, and contactless ordering via QR codes. You can also set pickup and delivery options, limit the number of orders, or automatically add an item for tipping. Aside from being arguably the best website builder with appointment booking features, Square Online has a Square Loyalty program that lets customers collect points and redeem them for online orders. Another great feature is access to email, text, and social media marketing campaigns that help you boost your sales. There aren’t any analytical tools, though.
Pricing is a bit different from what you might expect. There is a free plan along with three paid packages that cost from $12 up to $72 per month. Additionally, each transaction is charged 2.9% + 30¢ (2.6% + 30¢ if you opt for the most expensive Premium Plan). The starting plan offers most of the features you’ll ever need to create a good website, but it comes with a tradeoff - a Square logo on your website. Even the best free website builder for the restaurant industry will never offer as much as paid software, and the same is true here. Upgrading to paid plans will give you access to a free domain, add PayPal to the payment methods on the site, provide cart abandonment solutions, and much more.
As for the customer support options, you can get in touch with the support agents via phone, email, live chat, and even through some social media channels. With a regularly updated blog, a robust library of resources and guides, and a community to step in whenever you need help, Square Online offers some of the best customer support in the industry.
Wix might be the most famous option and the best restaurant online ordering website builder according to many reviews, but there are certainly other options around. If you need to build a website quickly and effortlessly, you’ll love the hassle-free creation process that Square Online provides. And if you’re into creative and unique designs, we recommend you go for Squarespace.
The creation process is very simple, and upon creating an account with the website builder of your choice, you’ll be asked to answer a couple of questions regarding your restaurant. The AI-based platform will perform the rest, and all you have to do is customize the final product to your liking.
Yes, it is. In fact, we found GoDaddy to be the best restaurant website builder for professional users that require top-notch service, a strong SEO strategy, and excellent marketing and analysis tools in one reasonably priced package.
