Restaurant website cost and what you actually need

A restaurant website costs £400-£2,000 for a one-off build, or £49-£199 a month managed, with booking software separate at £0-£200 a month. Most restaurant sites spend the budget in the wrong place. Diners want the menu, tonight’s hours and a way to book. Nearly everything else is decoration.

A bistro owner showed me a £3,200 website with a full-screen video of steam rising off a plate. Gorgeous. The menu was a PDF that took nine seconds to open on a phone, and the opening hours had been wrong since a Christmas change two years earlier.

What a diner actually does

Watch the behaviour and the priorities become obvious. Someone hears about you, searches your name, and inside about twenty seconds wants to know:

1. Are you open tonight, and until when?
2. What food do you do, and roughly what does it cost?
3. Can I get a table?
4. Where are you and can I park?

That is the entire job of a restaurant website. Everything on the page that does not serve one of those four is in the way.

The PDF menu problem

This is the single most common mistake, so it gets its own section.

A PDF menu fails three times over. Google struggles to read it, so you never appear for “vegan Sunday roast Bath” or whatever your best dishes are. On a phone it opens in a separate viewer that people pinch and zoom around and then give up on. And updating a price means going back to whoever made the PDF.

Put the menu on the page as text. Sections, dish names, descriptions, prices. It is not glamorous and it is worth more than any other change you can make.

Where the money goes

Food photography is the one place a restaurant should consider spending. Good photos of your actual dishes sell better than any copy, and they feed your Google profile and social too. A half-day shoot at £300-£600 gets reused for years.

The delivery platform trap

Worth being blunt about the maths. Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat charge roughly 15-30% commission depending on your deal. On a £40 order that is £6 to £12 gone.

They are still worth using for reach. New customers find you there who never would otherwise. The mistake is letting them become your only channel, because you are then renting your own customer base and paying a cut on people who already know you.

Your own site with direct ordering or booking costs a fixed monthly fee regardless of volume. So the sensible pattern is: platforms to get discovered, your own site to keep them. Mention it on the packaging, on the receipt, at the table.

Getting found locally

For restaurants the Google Business Profile does more than the website, and it is free.

Photos, updated regularly. Hours, correct. The menu link. Attributes like outdoor seating, dog friendly, wheelchair access, all of which people filter by. And reviews, replied to, all of them.

Then the site catches specific searches. Not “restaurant Leeds”, which you will not win, but “sunday lunch Chapel Allerton”, “gluten free pizza Headingley”, “private dining room Leeds”. Those are pages or menu sections with real text on them, which loops back to why the PDF menu costs you.

Booking, and whether you need a system

Depends on covers. A 30-cover neighbourhood place with a phone that gets answered does not need a booking platform, and a simple enquiry form plus a number works fine.

Once you are turning tables and taking bookings at all hours, a system pays for itself in no-shows alone. Most of them can hold a card or take a deposit for larger parties, and that alone cuts the empty-table problem. Online booking and no-shows covers the detail.

What to do if your current site is old

Do not start with a rebuild. Start with three things: get the menu onto the page as text, fix the hours everywhere, and make the booking or phone number impossible to miss on a phone. That is usually a couple of hours of work and it will do more than a £3,000 redesign.

Rebuild only if the site cannot be edited or falls apart on a phone. The wider sector picture is in online presence for restaurants and cafes.

If you would rather hand the menu updates, hours, offers and Google profile to someone, our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract. Most independents want the £99 tier. The pricing page has the scope, or tell us the type of place you run and we will say which fits.