The web is the first place we go when we’re looking for a new place to eat. Making a good first impression with a professionally designed website is a great way to get people through your door. Restaurants need attractive-looking websites that represent the quality and flavor of their food.
The best restaurant websites are easy to navigate for customers. Many restaurants use a website builder that allows you to quickly and easily put together a website. There are hundreds of restaurant website builders to choose from, so we curated the top 6 restaurant website builders in 2021.
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What are the Benefits of a Restaurant Website Builder?
Restaurants need a solid online presence to tell their customers about their services, especially their menus, location, and ordering information. Since hiring a web developer is quite expensive, there are several website builders that restaurant owners can use to build websites for their restaurants.
Other significant benefits of using a restaurant website builder are having a place to include customer testimonials, increasing awareness of your restaurant and building a solid brand image for a relatively low cost.
What to Look for in a Restaurant Website Builder?
Website builders for restaurants should be cost-effective and straightforward but give you the tools to provide a smooth user experience for your customers. You’ll want easy integrations for menus, online reservations, interactive maps and other contact information.
Because restaurant information often changes, such as daily specials or menu item availability, website builders should allow for easy modifications. Here are the most important aspects to look for in a quality restaurant builder.
Usability: Having control over your website and using it effectively should be easy for you. When you’re considering what website builder to go with, find one that has intuitive editing tools so you can easily shape your restaurant website to look and feel how you want.
Reservations: Find a website builder that offers a dedicated space for reservations that’s easy to find from the homepage. If you’re still taking reservations by phone only, building a new website is an excellent time to add online options to your reservation policy.
Menu service: A good website builder should allow an easy way to view menus and place orders online seamlessly. Look for a restaurant builder that offers a well-designed menu page, prices, photos of best-selling items, and makes it simple to keep up to date.
Affordability: Restaurant website builders usually bill on a subscription model, so you have to consider the long-term costs and what you can afford at this moment. Choose a website builder that falls within your ongoing budget for your website. There can be many hidden costs, so don’t just go with the cheapest option. It could cost you more in the long run.
SEO: The last thing you want to do is build a website that doesn’t have an internet presence. To rank high on search engines, you will need good SEO tools and easy social media integration.
Customer support: Look for a website builder that offers 24/7 support and has a reputation for being helpful when customers need it. This is especially important when you are first building your website.
The Best Restaurant Website Builders
Below we describe the best website builders for restaurants based on price, functionality, templates, SEO and features.
1. Wix
Wix is the best restaurant website builder for beginners and one of the most popular on the market. It allows you to build a professional menu and customize the design, take online orders without paying commissions, lets customers book tables 24/7, and promotes your restaurant with powerful marketing tools.
If you are new to website building, Wix is easy to use but still gives you a lot of control over your design. We love the free option, which helps you try out Wix before committing to one of its annual plans.
Pricing: The Business Basic plan is $23 per month. This is a popular plan that allows you to receive online payments.
2. Weebly
Weebly is the best restaurant website builder in 2021 because of its performance.
We love the number of apps that are available on the Weebly platform. This restaurant website builder has 350 options to choose from, which quickly improve your website’s functionality. These apps allow you to accept reservations, display menus and accept food orders.
Pricing: The business plans start at $12 per month but they offer a free plan that is quite generous compared to what competitors offer. There is even a basic e-commerce feature on the free plan.
3. Squarespace
Squarespace is the best restaurant builder for building beautifully designed websites and functionality.
We love how it has a wide variety of easy-to-customize templates crafted by world-class designers. Squarespace helps create some of the web’s most expressive restaurants. Squarespace’s templates are conducive to showcasing your venue and your menu items beautifully. It also has a built-in menu formatting function that makes updating menus very simple.
Pricing: Squarespace business plans start at $18 per month, paid monthly or yearly. They make it simple to start and stop your service at any time.
4. Square Online
Square Online is the best e-commerce restaurant website builder in 2021. It offers features tailored to the restaurant industry, including order scheduling, order staggering, Apple Pay, Google Pay, order tipping and much more.
Square Online makes it easy to sell online and ship orders to customers. It also offers excellent options if you offer curbside pickup or local delivery. With the help of a user-friendly site builder, you can quickly create and publish your restaurant without knowing any code.
Pricing: The performance plan is $26 per month, which is the cheapest plan offering advanced e-commerce features. However, it also provides a “free” plan where you can use the online store builder to create, design and launch your site. Your only cost comes when you make a sale, which will cost you 2.9% plus 30¢ per transaction.
5. Zyro
Zyro is the best restaurant builder if you need the technicalities of a modern and high-performing website at affordable prices. Zyro helps you build mobile-ready, fast-loading, cross-browser compatible and SEO-friendly websites.
We love how Zyro offers 7 TOTALLY FREE well-designed, mobile-friendly templates for restaurants.
Pricing: Zyro is perfect if you are looking for an affordable option to build your website. E-commerce plans start at just $8.99 per month but increase to $24.99 per month after the 1st year.
6. Let’s Eat
Let’s Eat is a restaurant-exclusive website builder which will help you bring your food business to the online space. Over 15,000 restaurants worldwide use Let’s Eat, so we picked it as one of the best restaurant website builders in 2021.
What is terrific about Let’s Eat is that it takes care of hosting and your restaurant’s web design. All you need to do is sign up and fill in the details, making things easy when you’re busy running a restaurant.
You can choose from over 40 professional restaurant website templates and use its design editor to match your business’s unique logo and branding.
Pricing: Let’s Eat offers straightforward pricing that is refreshing in this space. It charges $10 per month or $99 per year.
Which Restaurant Website Builders Should You Avoid?
Of course, not all restaurant website builders are the same. Here are few restaurant website builders to avoid in 2021 and why:
- Flavor Plate: It offers limited customization options, basic SEO features, and its pricing is not flexible.
- Site123: Templates are very basic on a free plan allowing only limited changes to fonts, colors and design elements.
- GoDaddy: It does not let you add interactive menus with descriptions on your site.
Where to go From Here
It’s getting easier and easier to build the restaurant website of your dreams. With a little bit of time and research, a well-built website will help your customers will have no trouble finding the information they need.
A website is vital to compete with other restaurants. Purchasing a restaurant website builder is just one step of the process. Before you create a website that reflects your restaurant and brand, choose and register a domain name, choose a hosting service, then connect your domain name to your web host.
