6 Best Restaurant Website Builders

Squarespace outscored its competitors for features in our research, and when you look at what it has to offer restaurants, it’s easy to see why.

You’ll find menus built into its restaurant website templates, plus a choice of online reservation options. Squarespace integrates with OpenTable, but also comes with an in-house scheduling widget. Among other things, this widget lets you view how many guests you have booked at what time – a feature that’s especially important in this current era of social distancing.

Customers even receive an automatic confirmation email once they’ve booked through your Squarespace website. Alternatively, you can give customers the option to call your restaurant directly with a phone reservation call to action button.

The only drawback to Squarespace’s features is that its menu builder isn’t totally customizable like Wix’s is.

Not only does Squarespace have the best designs on the market, but it also has templates specifically designed for restaurants. This makes creating a stylish website even easier, because it’s already tailored to your industry – for example, you’ll find a menu already built into your design.

There are 10 restaurant-specific templates for you to choose from, and each one is modern, stylish, and follows design best practises. If aesthetics are as important to you as features, then Squarespace offers the full package!

We awarded Squarespace the highest value for money score of 4.5 out of 5 stars, because of the sheer number of features you get for your money. Sure, it’s not the cheapest builder on our list, but neither is it the most expensive – at $12 per month, it’s cheaper than both Wix and Duda, while offering a better range of features than both.

Squarespace comes with a 14-day free trial, so even though it doesn’t have a free plan, you can still try it risk-free before choosing a plan.

Ease of use was the area where Squarespace scored most poorly, with 3.5 stars out of 5. This is because it has a bigger learning curve than builders like Wix, where you can just drag anything anywhere. While you don’t need tech experience to use Squarespace, you will need some time and patience.

Instead of jumping straight in, we recommend spending some time using Squarespace to get the hang of its editor before starting real work on your site – its 14-day free trial is perfect for learning the ropes.

Squarespace has a solid range of support channels, including:

• Knowledge base
• Live chat Monday to Friday
• 24/7 social media support via Twitter
• 24/7 email support
• Community forum

You’ll also find webinars and video tutorials in Squarespace’s knowledge base.

Like Squarespace, you’ll find a menu widget pre-built into Wix’s restaurant templates. Unlike Squarespace, however, Wix’s menu widget is fully customizable – you can choose whether you want to display pricing, dish options, dish labels, or images, and you can also customize the menu design to match your on-site branding.

Wix also comes with a built-in reservation widget, so that customers can place bookings directly through your restaurant website. You can amend the number of people allowed to make a booking at any one time, limit how many people are allowed per party, and set a notice period for reservations.

You can also set up an automatic confirmation email in your reservation settings dashboard.

What we would have liked to see from Wix is a phone reservation call to action. While other builders like Squarespace let customers ring you directly through an on-site call to action, with Wix, you can’t link to a phone number.

One of our favorite things about Wix is the level of creative freedom it gives its users, while remaining super easy to use. Its menus and reservation forms are all customizable so that you can keep your branding consistent across your website, and you can easily add images and text across the board.

Wix has 69 food and restaurant templates to choose from, so you’ll have plenty of options no matter the style or vibe of your business. The only complaint we have with Wix’s templates is that you can’t switch once you’ve published your site – so make sure you’re happy with your design before committing!

Wix has a free plan, which is useful for trying out the builder to see if it’s right for your restaurant business. Wix then has four price plans, ranging from $13 to $39 per month when billed annually.

Although its starting price is somewhat pricey at $13 per month (billed annually), Wix offers good value for money – we awarded it 4.4 stars out of 5, putting it just behind Squarespace in terms of value.

We recommend upgrading to a paid plan for all business websites in order to remove Wix adverts from your site, improve storage, and connect a professional domain name.

Wix is the easiest restaurant website builder to use – not only does this make it perfect for beginners, but it can also be an ideal choice for busy business owners who don’t have time to learn their way around a tricky editor.

One of the reasons Wix is so easy to use is thanks to its drag-and-drop editing tools, which let you drag elements, such as images and text boxes, anywhere you want them on your page. This gives you total freedom over your site, but can be daunting if you don’t have much experience with web design best practices.

Overall, though, you’ll find Wix a breeze to use – there’s very little learning curve, and its editor is very intuitive. You can jump straight in and start building!

Wix scored top marks for its help and support offerings. You get access to Wix’s help center, 24/7 callback service, support tickets, and more.

Our favorite part of Wix’s support options is its in-editor support – question mark bubbles provide helpful hints, tips, and guidance, so that you don’t need to leave the editor for answers while you build.

Duda has some attractive features – especially when it comes to design customization – but when it comes to restaurant features, it could do better. For example, it relies on the OpenTable widget to allow online reservations. Duda’s built-in booking feature is geared toward paid bookings such as haircuts, and so isn’t suitable for restaurant reservations.

That said, we liked the way Duda’s built-in menu widget let you use a CSV file to upload your menu, which then formats to match your site’s branding. You also get to decide whether you display pricing, dish labels, dish options, and images within your menu.

Duda is ideal if you want to personalize your restaurant website because of its easy-to-use widgets and apps, which let you add tailored interactions with your site based on factors such as location.

Design is Duda’s strongest area, which is reflected in its star rating. It has a small range of seven restaurant-specific templates, all of which are modern, clean, and simple.

Duda’s templates are pretty structured, so you can only customize within your template’s limits – if you start trying to change your design too much, you’ll find Duda clunky and awkward to navigate.

There’s no point beating around the bush – Duda’s price plans are expensive. With no free plan, and prices starting at $14 per month when billed annually (and $19 on a month-by-month plan), it’s the most expensive informational restaurant builder we looked at.

This would be okay if it had outstanding features, but as our research showed, its restaurant-specific offerings just aren’t as good as Squarespace’s, which provides much better value for money.

The good news is Duda has a 14-day free trial, so you can take it for a test drive before shelling out for one of its plans.

Duda is a wonderfully simple builder, and as long as you stick to the structure laid out by your template, you should find it pretty easy to use. In comparison to its top competitors, it’s easier to use than Squarespace, but not quite as intuitive as Wix.

The support you get access to depends on the price plan you choose. 

Those on the cheapest $14 per month Basic plan only receive support via email, as well as through Duda’s help center. The $22 per month plan further unlocks chat and phone support, while the most expensive Agency plan gives you priority email support as well, at a cost of $44 per month (billed annually).

Weebly comes packed with features like blogging and SEO tools, but we were underwhelmed by both its menu widget and reservation options. While its menu widget comes built into restaurant templates, it’s pretty basic – especially compared to Squarespace and Wix.

The menu comes in a predetermined layout – you can pick from a few options, but on the whole, the design is fairly fixed. You can edit text, but that’s about it, and it doesn’t come with any image options.

The reservations feature was most noticeable in its absence – if you use Weebly, you’ll need to use a third party app like Restaurant System to accept bookings and reservations through your restaurant website.

It’s for these reasons that Weebly has a lower feature score than its usual top competitors, Wix and Squarespace.

Weebly has a small range of templates – there isn’t a dedicated restaurant category, but you’ll find a handful of stylish restaurant and food designs that come with a menu section built-in. You can switch templates at any time, and even use coding to customize your site.

Weebly’s designs won’t knock your socks off, though, and customization is pretty limited unless you know some code – if you’re after a beautiful restaurant website, you’re better off with Squarespace or Wix.

Weebly has a generous free plan and three paid plans, starting at an affordable $5 per month (billed annually), and all Weebly’s plans include ecommerce. This makes Weebly a very budget-friendly builder, although it still didn’t wow us in terms of value for money.

Its cheapest plan doesn’t offer great value at all. In fact, we recommend skipping it altogether and heading straight for the $12 per month Pro plan instead – it’s the cheapest plan to remove Weebly adverts from your website, and helps your money go much further.

In terms of ease of use, Weebly received the same score as Squarespace – what we learnt from our user testing was that Weebly isn’t nearly as easy to use as it first appears. 

On the surface, it’s pretty straightforward – it uses drag-and-drop editing tools, just like Wix, but with less creative freedom. You can drag elements onto the page, but they’ll format into predesigned sections – in short, you can’t drag anything anywhere.

As soon as you start to try and push your template beyond its limits, you’ll struggle – this is where our users became frustrated with Weebly, and its ease of use score fell as a result. The basics are super simple, but unless you can code, you’ll find advanced customization clunky and difficult.

Weebly provides a help center, a community forum, live chat, and email support to all its users, but phone support is reserved for the more expensive Pro and Business plans.

Square Online impressed us with its range of restaurant features. Its built-in menu creator is fully customizable – you can edit images, pricing, and descriptions, enter nutritional information for customers, and even add delivery and pick-up options.

Okay, a lot of other restaurant website builders have similar features. But Square Online goes a step further – shoppers can customize their orders, winning you points with any fussy eaters or those with dietary requirements. Lastly, it supports the ability to update your inventory based on orders via the menu.

Square Online’s features are designed to make your life as easy as possible – expect inventory syncing, delivery integrations with Deliveroo and Uber Eats, as well as a dedicated POS system you can link to your store.

The only drawback is that Square Online doesn’t have a built-in reservation system – instead, you’ll need to use its integration with the OpenTable app.

Square Online is an ecommerce builder first and foremost, so it’s no surprise that it scored well for its sales features. Adding products is super easy, you get powerful inventory management, and (our favorite) you can allow customers to easily personalize their items. Perfect for food orders!

Square Online is ideal if you’re already using Square as a payment processor, or for your business’ EPOS – you’ll discover seamless integrations between your restaurant’s physical and digital presence.

Square Online puts most of its energy into its features – where it falls down slightly is its design and customization. First off, Square Online doesn’t have any restaurant-specific templates, and you may find customizing your design frustrating.

Customization options are pretty limited, especially if you’ve tried a builder like Wix and want a similar level of creative control. However, if you want your template to guide your design, then you may enjoy the structured feel of Square Online’s editor.

One thing that really stands out about Square Online is how affordable its price plans are. You can even sell for free with Square Online, which is pretty rare!

The free plan is generous – among other things, it lets you:

• Sell an unlimited number of products
• Automatically sync inventory, items, and orders with your Square POS
• Offer pickup, delivery, or shipping

The cheapest paid plan costs $12 per month (billed annually), and this lets you remove adverts and connect a custom domain for a more professional site.

Another thing worth mentioning is how you can simply add Square Online payment links to an existing website for free, so you only pay Square’s transaction fee. You can add links to Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress websites. This is an affordable option worth knowing about if you want to let customers check out and pay directly on your site.

For the number of features you get, Square Online’s prices offer great value for money – it’s only rivalled for value by Wix Ecommerce, which also scored 4.5 out of 5 stars in our testing.

Square Online is very easy to use, and setting your site up takes nearly no time at all. You provide answers to a few questions about your business, such as your business name and industry, and you’ll be given a general website layout based on your answers.

In our user testing, participants awarded Square Online the highest ease of use score of any of these ecommerce restaurant website builders! That means even if you’re a beginner, you’ll have no problem building your restaurant website using Square Online.

Square Online’s help and support options aren’t the best out there, but they’re not the worst, either. It’s pretty middle-of-the-pack compared to its competitors, and offers support via:

• Phone
• Live chat
• Email
• Knowledge center

Squarespace boasts some ace restaurant features, such as its built-in menu widget and online reservations system. Its online ordering feature is pretty neat, too, and you shouldn’t have any trouble managing orders.

Squarespace allows inventory updates based on your online orders, although you can only update whole menu items, rather than individual ingredients. This could mean a little more effort to work out how many ingredients you have left after a busy day.

Customers can personalize their online orders thanks to Squarespace’s integration with ChowNow.

With the ChowNow integration, customers can view the menu, submit their order, and pay using a collapsible ChowNow order page. Luckily, this all takes place directly on your Squarespace site, without redirecting away from it.

Unlike Square Online, Squarespace doesn’t have a dedicated POS to sync your inventory in your real-life restaurant. You can offer delivery or store pickups, but there are no integrations with delivery apps such as Deliveroo.

Squarespace doesn’t do badly when it comes to sales features, offering a range of payment gateways and 0% transaction fees as long as you choose from its two ecommerce plans.

Squarespace does now offer a Square integration, making it easier to sync your inventory when running pop-up stands or market stalls.

Design is where Squarespace really shines. It comes with beautiful, restaurant-specific templates – complete with built-in features, such as a menu widget – to make building your site easier.

The only drawback to Squarespace’s stunning designs is that it can be challenging to customize. You have much more creative freedom than Square Online, but it’ll take longer to set up.

Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, but you can try it out free for 14 days before choosing from one of its paid plans.

The cheapest plan with ecommerce functionality is the $18 per month Business plan, but to remove transaction fees, you’ll need at least the $26 per month Basic Commerce plan. 

Compared to its rivals, Squarespace offers better value than Shopify, but slightly less than Square Online and Wix Ecommerce.

There’s no denying that Squarespace can be tricky to use at first. But in our opinion, it’s worth the challenge – once you’re a Squarespace pro, you’ll be able to build a powerful and attractive restaurant ordering website.

When we say that Squarespace can be hard to use, we don’t mean it requires coding or any tech experience. We simply mean the learning curve is a little steeper compared to a builder like Square Online – instead, you need to take your time getting to know Squarespace to get the best out of it.

Squarespace provides all the usual support channels – knowledge base, email, live chat, and social media – but it doesn’t offer phone support. So if you’re a bit old fashioned and want to pick up the phone to get support, Squarespace isn’t the right choice.

Wix doesn’t have the tools to support a large restaurant with a big customer base. The Wix Restaurant app, which comes built into its restaurant and food templates, doesn’t support inventory updates for its online ordering system. This will make it very hard to track your stock levels.

On top of that, there’s no built-in functionality for customers to make edits to their order. There’s only the option to add a notes section for customers to write in, but this is easily missed, and not ideal for a smooth user experience.

On the upside, you can offer both delivery and customer pick-up with Wix, although there aren’t any in-house integrations with delivery apps like Deliveroo or Uber Eats.

Wix gives you plenty of choice when it comes to picking a payment gateway, with over 15 to choose from – and it doesn’t charge transaction fees, either.

Abandoned cart recovery is a great asset for recapturing the interest of customers who have abandoned items in their basket, and you should be able to find any missing features you want in Wix’s huge app market!

Wix has a huge range of templates, including restaurant-specific designs, and has an easy to use editor that uses drag-and-drop to give you ultimate design control over your website.

The main drawback to Wix’s design functionality is that you can’t switch templates once you’ve published your site – this is usually not too much of a problem, unless you want to rebrand later on.

Wix’s ecommerce plans start at $23 per month (billed annually), and for the features you get, that price offers pretty good value – we awarded it 4.5 stars out of 5, which is right up there with Square Online.

When looking at the two builders side-by-side, however, we’d recommend Square Online if you’re on a budget. You get better features for less money, and we know every cent counts when you’re running a business!

Wix is known for being very beginner-friendly, so you might be wondering why it hasn’t received a higher ease of use score this time around. Well, we found that the limits on its features were impacting how easy our users found it to create their website.

For example, to allow customers to customize their online order, you need to manually edit the variant options to add a notes section for them to add any comments about their order. This is a lot more hassle than a builder that automatically includes a feature for customers to edit their order!

Wix scored highly for help and support, reminding us that at its heart, this is a beginner-friendly platform. Whether you prefer finding answers by knowledge center, video, social media, phone, email, or on-page hints while you build, Wix has got you covered!

Safe to say, we were extremely underwhelmed by Shopify’s restaurant features. First off, there’s no built-in reservation system, and we hesitate to recommend any of its third-party reservation apps based on the poor user reviews.

You can add a call to action that lets visitors ring your restaurant directly, but you’ll need coding skills to set this up – it’s not as easy as the other builders we tested.

That said, Shopify does have online ordering functionality, and your inventory can be synced and updated from your Shopify dashboard. Shopify also has its own POS software, which you can use to link and sync your website to your restaurant.

You can offer both delivery and customer collection, but there’s no integration with delivery services like Deliveroo or Uber Eats.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Shopify doesn’t support an in-house menu creator. Instead of having your menu section built into your template, you’ll need to pay for and install a third-party app to add a menu to your site. This failed to impress us in testing, especially compared with all the other restaurant builders that automatically include a menu creator.

One area where Shopify has always performed well is its sales features. This is an ecommerce builder through and through, and its features reflect that focus – you get all the tools you could need to build and grow a serious online store.

Shopify’s sales tools are designed for online stores – among other things, you get access to:

• Abandoned cart recovery
• Multi-channel integration
• Dropshipping
• 100+ payment gateways
• Multiple currencies
• Built-in automatic tax calculation

This is perfect for a lot of ambitious businesses – but it’s not right for everyone. It’s up to you to decide if these business features are enough to outweigh Shopify’s lack of helpful restaurant specific features.

Shopify has a range of both free and paid templates, all of which feature stylish designs. There are 20 themes in the “Food and Drink” industry category, 18 of which are premium themes. The prices for Shopify’s food and drink themes start at $100 and go up to $180. 

Shopify’s new Express theme is worth checking out if you need a website for your restaurant quickly and easily.

This is a free theme that’s designed to help non-traditional business get online fast, and with minimal hassle – Shopify released it in response to restaurants’ struggles during the pandemic. It’s optimized for one-page stores, and has a strong mobile focus.

It’s worth noting that none of Shopify’s food and drink themes come with a built-in menu feature.

Shopify came last for value for money – it scored poorly for features in our testing, but is one of the most expensive restaurant builders we reviewed. Prices start at $29 per month, which is a lot if you’re also having to shell out for third-party apps for basic features like a menu.

Although it’s a pretty powerful ecommerce builder, Shopify is still nice and easy to use. On the whole, you don’t need coding skills, and its themes are simple to edit and make your own. Adding products, changing colors, tweaking text – it’s all pretty straightforward, so you won’t struggle to get started with Shopify!

Shopify has a solid range of support options, including:

• 24/7 phone
• 24/7 live chat
• Email
• Help center
• Community forum
• Video tutorials

So however you want to reach out for answers, there should be something to satisfy your curiosity!