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Covid 19 has significantly hardened our lives. The whole pandemic situation has affected every business, whether it is a small or a big one. Restaurants are a job for many people. To save your restaurant, you will need one unique website that is quite a big part of the job.
We’ve done our best and tried to choose some website builders that will help you save your small business. However, it won’t be easy to decide which one is the best among thousands of website builders. Besides choosing a developing platform, you will need to do in-depth research and see what else is required. To save your time, we made sure to provide other crucial information, except the list of the best website builders for restaurants. But first, let’s check the comparison chart below and see what each website builder has to offer.
Check our Top 7 Best Restaurants Website Builders:
- Squarespace – best for design-focused websites
- Wix Website Builder – best overall website builder
How Do We Test and Rank?
The testing and ranking necessary for compiling a list of the “Best website builders for restaurants†is done by our team of experts in the website-building industry. They test the builders by buying a plan from each of them and putting them all through a series of rigorous tests. That way, they are able to rank each builder accordingly and choose which builders are the top 7 best ones on the market.
Also, they have determined five factors on which they base their rankings, and each factor is assigned a specific percentage that shows how important the factor is for building a restaurant website. The five factors include:
- Ease-of-use (15%): how easy it is to set up with the builder, overall ease of navigating through the dashboard and using the Control Panel, how fast it is to learn to use the builder, can beginners use the builder, do users need to have prior coding or programming skills to use the builder
- eCommerce features (25%): does the builder offer eCommerce features, how many eCommerce features does it offer, are the features enough to build and maintain a restaurant website, are the features helpful
- Features (30%): what kind of features does the builder offer in general, does the builder offer any restaurant-specific features, how many features does the builder offer, are the features easy to use
- Pricing (20%): are the builder’s plans overpriced, does the builder offer a free plan, is there a free trial, is there a refund or money-back policy, are the plans worth the money
- Support (10%): what kind of customer support does the builder offer (live chat, ticketing system, phone, email), how long does a builder take to respond, does the builder offer a knowledge base or blog, does the builder provide tips and guides to users
How to Choose the Best Website Builder for a Restaurant?
The process of building your restaurant’s website may be challenging, and it requires a lot of hard work and commitment. To start off your developing journey, you will first need to choose the best website builder. Now, you must wonder how to choose the perfect one among plenty of them. Let’s have a look at some of the main points you should always keep in mind.
- Ease-of-use: the website builder you choose should be easy to use and straightforward. Especially if you are a beginner, you wouldn’t like some confusing platform that won’t bring you any results. By choosing a simple builder, you will save a lot of time and have a smooth experience.
- Restaurant website templates: starting from scratch can indeed be challenging, so you will need a website builder that comes with specifically designed templates for restaurants. This will make your job easier, and it will help you quickly customize your website.
- Full customizability: when you choose the best website builder, it is of great importance for it to offer full customizability. Due to that, you will have control over the way your restaurant page looks.
- Easy integrations: speaking of restaurant websites, you couldn’t develop one if it doesn’t provide an option for online ordering. The best platform should offer built-in tools, such as Online Ordering, online reservations, menus, etc., which will ease the customer’s experience.
- Marketing features: besides the built-in tools, it is also essential for the builder to offer marketing features, like SEO tools, email, etc.
- Customer support: choosing a website builder that provides customer support is one of the best things. If your website has customer support included, you will look more mature, enthusiastic, and also friendly.
The Top 7 Best Restaurants Website Builders
- Overall Score: 4.6
- Ease-of-use: 4.7
- eCommerce Features: 4.6
- Features: 4.7
- Pricing: 4.6
- Support: 4.6
If you are looking to build a stylish, design-centered website for your restaurant, look no further! Squarespace is a website builder that offers some of the best designs and templates on the market. It is primarily focused on helping its users build eye-catching and design-heavy websites, making it ideal for anyone looking for a more stylish website-building solution.
With Squarespace, you will get great design flexibility and excellent opportunities to integrate your website with many third-party apps.
Pros:
- High-quality templates
- Excellent design flexibility
- Useful restaurant features
Cons:
- Not as affordable as other builders
Squarespace is best known for its award-winning designs and templates. It is an ideal builder for creatives and businesses looking to build a professional, design-heavy website.
| Plan | Personal | Business | Commerce (Basic) | Commerce (Advanced) |
| Price | US $19/month | US $33/month | US $36/month | US $65/month |
| Number of Products | None | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Free Trials | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Additional Feature |
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Unique Features:
Features Suitable for Restaurants
Squarespace offers beautiful, restaurant-specific templates that you can use to build your restaurant’s website. With Squarespace, you can sell anything on your website, including food, gift cards, and merchandise. Also, you will get tools that will help you manage your inventory, process orders, and send emails.
Also, you will be able to add menu widgets and use Squarespace online reservations system – “Squarespace Scheduling†to make reservations. With Squarespace Scheduling, your customers will be able to check your availability, book tables, and make payments on your website.
“Tock†from Squarespace
“Tock†from Squarespace is an excellent all-in-one reservation system that you use on your website. It allows users to manage reservations, events, tableside payments, deposits, takeout, and more.
Also, if you are hosting an event at your establishment, you can use Tock’s ticketing system to manage events and timed entry easily.
Templates
Squarespace offers templates for restaurants and all kinds of other businesses and categories, including:
- Art & Design
- Photography
- Personal & CV
- Fashion
- Health & Beauty
- Professional Services
- Local Businesses
- Food
- Entertainment
- Travel
- Restaurants
- Media & Podcasts
- Events
- Real Estate & Properties
- Home & Décor
- Weddings
- Community & Non-Profits
- Nature & Animals
Squarespace is another popular website builder that offers excellent design flexibility and templates. It also offers great restaurant-specific features, making it an excellent choice for restaurants that want to create a more stylish website. If you want to learn more about Squarespace, you can do so by reading our expert review on the builder.
- Overall Score: 4.9
- Ease-of-use: 5.0
- eCommerce Features: 4.9
- Features: 5.0
- Pricing: 4.8
- Support: 4.9
Wix is overall one of the best website builders available on the market. It offers excellent features, and it is very beginner-friendly. It is one of the most popular website-building platforms out there, and it serves more than 200 million users from all over the world.
Thus, its services and features can also come in handy to restaurant owners and those who want to take their restaurant business online. It offers more than 500 beautiful, high-quality templates, out of which 73 are specifically made for restaurants.
Pros:
- Powerful features
- Restaurant-specific templates
- Wix App Market
- It offers great creative freedom
Cons:
- Not suitable for handling complex orders
Wix is best known for its designer-made, high-quality templates, and powerful features. No matter what kind of website you need, you can find everything you need with Wix and build the website of your dreams with it.
| Plan | Connect Domain | Combo | Unlimited | VIP |
| Price | US $4.50/month | US $8.50/month | US $12.50/month | US $24.50/month |
| Number Of Products | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
| Free Trial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Additional Feature |
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Unique Features:
eCommerce Features
Wix offers a plethora of useful and powerful eCommerce features with which you can sell online and manage your inventory. Namely, with Wix, you can choose from 73 restaurant-specific templates for your website and online store, build a custom logo with Wix’s Logo Maker, create a custom company name with its Business Name Generator, add a custom domain, automate your taxes, take payments via all the major credit cards, PayPal, and Stripe, and more.
You can also sell on multiple channels, including eBay, Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon. With Wix Multilingual, you can translate your store into more than 150 languages and display prices in local currencies. Wix also has its own Wix Point of Sale (POS) solution and allows its users to sell both digital and physical products.
Managing your restaurant is made easy with Wix. Namely, you will be able to manage everything from one place, including orders, payments, and inventory.
Other useful features that Wix offers include:
- A mobile-optimized storefront
- The ability to hire an eCommerce expert
- A Free SSL certificate
- More than 50 secure payment gateways
- A currency converter
- Express checkout
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Free shipping
- Built-in SEO tools
- Catalog & inventory management
- Email marketing campaigns
- A smooth refund process
- The ability to offer discounts and coupons
- Integration with Google Analytics
- Traffic reports
- Integration with Google Shopping apps
- And more.
Overall, Wix has proved time and time again that it is a force to be reckoned with in the website-building market. It is suitable for beginners and offers many powerful features and an extensive App Market where you can find apps for virtually everything. If you want to learn more about Wix, you can do so by reading our expert review on the builder.
Next Steps in Building the Perfect Restaurant Website
After choosing the best builder, it is time to get down to the real business – building your restaurant website. Many people think that building a website requires coding, but due to the improved technology, and the bunch of builders, building a website for your small business can be a piece of cake.
Step #1: Choose a Website Builder
The first and the most important step is to choose the best builder that will help you succeed in developing a website as you imagined. The best choice for a small business website, such as a restaurant, is to go for all-in-one site builders. These platforms allow you to create your page easily and quickly and also save some time and money.
Step #2: Register for an Account or Web Hosting
This step is determined by the type of builder you choose. If you choose an all-in-one page builder, you won’t have to register for web hosting, as it already comes with one, but if you decide to use WordPress, you’ll have to sign up for web hosting.
Step #3: Register Your Domain Name
Do you all know what a domain name is? Let’s put it this way – register your address on the web. Now that you know what we’re talking about, let’s see the importance of this step. Choosing the right domain name is pretty essential for your online business. The most frequently used one is the brand’s name and .com at the end. However, you can also use top-level domains, like .net, .edu, .org, or even location-based ones – .us, .ca, etc. Once again, if you choose an all-in-one website builder, you can register for a domain name a lot easier. In fact, some builders may even provide a free domain name after purchasing some of their plans.
Step #4: Choose the Right Template
No matter what kind of website builder you choose, you will need to pick a theme that fits your content. Almost every platform comes with various templates that are divided into categories, so it shouldn’t be hard to find a restaurant template you prefer. However, before you choose a template, you should have set your goals for your website’s appearance.
Step #5: Customize Your Page
After you finish each step from above, you will come to the part that requires customizing. We’ll get to what a restaurant website should include, but keep in mind that your page shouldn’t be overwhelmed with animations, information, and very bright colors. It should be simple, easy to navigate through it, and concise with information.
Step #6: Review and Launch Your Restaurant Website
Before publishing your page, there is just one more step to do – reviewing your website. If you want your website to engage customers and do its job perfectly well, you must test it and read through its content once again. Also, one of the most important things is to provide a fast-loading website. Studies have shown that almost 40% of the customers leave the slow-loading websites. You don’t want this to happen with your small business page, do you?
What Should a Restaurant Website Include?
Customizing your restaurant website is one of the most important things, but it can also be one of the funniest parts of your job. Try not to overwhelm your page with unimportant content. To avoid this, let’s see what the main things your website should include are.
#1: Basics
What can be more important than including the basics? The center of your homepage should be the address, working hours, and phone number. Without this basic information, the customers might not enjoy their experience, and your page will lose traffic. Also, if your restaurant is located in a few places, make sure to list them all.
#2: Add Links
Another vital thing to include on your website is links that will lead the customers to the restaurant’s social media accounts. Nowadays, we’re all checking social media at least once a day. By providing links, you may engage more visitors to the social media accounts.
#3: Spotlight Your Menu
What is a restaurant website without a menu? The menu is at the center of attention. Almost anyone who opens your page will visit the menu to see what your restaurant offers. The menu determines where the customers will eat, so make sure you have some mouth-watering dishes.
#4: Online Ordering
With the coronavirus situation, the number of people who order food in their homes has increased. But, online ordering was also popular even before the pandemic. Sometimes, you don’t have enough time to sit in a restaurant, or you just don’t feel like doing that, so you decide to order online. That’s why your ordering service should always be in great condition. Make sure to put your online ordering service on the homepage.
#5: Offer Gift Cards
Marketing is crucial to any business. By offering gift cards and similar promotions, you will not only increase your page’s traffic but you will also open a path for your restaurant to break through. Who doesn’t like some good promotion?
#6: Highlight Loyalty
Paying attention to your loyal customers is an excellent pro for your business. Due to having loyalty cards, or programs, you will keep your customers but also draw the attention of new ones. You can provide bonus points with buying every meal, or something similar to that. It is up to you!
#7: Encourage Subscriptions
As we already mention, marketing makes your business grow. To achieve that, you should include a subscribe part on your website, where customers can leave their personal information and receive news from your restaurant.
#8: Include Photos
Have you ever caught yourselves getting hungry from just looking at photos of some tasty food? Including photos of your meals, restaurant, or even your work team, will capture the attention of many. Especially with the food photos, everyone would want to order something from you. Consider this as a psychological trick.
According to our team, these eight things are essential for every restaurant website. However, this doesn’t mean you need to include all of them or that you can’t include anything else. It is very important to learn that you should also tell your story when you create a website. So, tell your story to the Internet in the best way you know.
Final Thoughts
Since the pandemic hit, ordering food online has become a daily routine for millions of people. If you want to capitalize on this trend and increase your profits, you need to build a website for your restaurant. However, choosing a website builder that can help you build your website while also offering good value for money and efficient features can be challenging.
That is why we created our recommendation system, which you can use to compare each builder and decide which one suits your needs. Our list of the “Best website builders for restaurants†includes our top 7 picks for the best options on the market, and you can choose your favorite easily from it. Let’s summarize.
