10 Best Restaurant Website Builders to Attract More Diners

A restaurant website has one job that a generic small-business site does not: it has to take an order. Hours, photos and a menu are table stakes. The thing that pays for the platform is a guest who orders directly from you instead of through an app that keeps a fifth of the ticket.

That is the lens this comparison uses. Below are ten restaurant website builders with pricing checked against each vendor’s own page in October 2026, what each one is best for, and two platforms to be careful with. If you are still working out the budget for this alongside everything else, the website line sits inside the wider cost to open a restaurant; if you are already open, it is one piece of the restaurant management tech stack.

The Bottom Line

• Published pricing in 2026 spans an enormous range: $0 a month for Square’s free tier and GloriaFood’s core system, roughly $18-$40 a month for general builders like Wix, and $179-$499 a month for restaurant-specific platforms like Popmenu and Owner.com.
• Marketplace apps charge roughly 15-30% commission, and Uber Eats raised its US Marketplace rate to 20% in March 2026 (ChowNow, 2026). Against 3-5% net margins, that gap is the whole argument for owning your ordering channel.
• Pick on ordering economics first, templates last. The prettiest site that routes orders through a 20% commission is the expensive one.
• Verify pricing yourself before you buy. Several platforms on this list changed their pricing or ownership during 2026, and one is shutting down in 2027.

What a restaurant website builder actually needs to do

Five capabilities separate a restaurant website builder from a general website builder:

1. Direct online ordering for pickup and delivery, ideally commission-free, with your own payment processing.
2. A menu that is real HTML, not a PDF. PDFs don’t rank, don’t work on phones, and can’t be ordered from.
3. Reservations or waitlist, either built in or integrated with whatever book you already use.
4. Mobile speed. Most restaurant traffic is someone on a phone deciding where to eat in the next twenty minutes.
5. Local SEO basics: editable page titles and descriptions, a proper address block, and structured data for hours and menu.

Everything else is preference. Templates matter less than operators expect, because a clean single-page site with good photos converts about as well as an elaborate one.

The 10 best restaurant website builders compared

Prices below were taken from each vendor’s own pricing page in October 2026 unless the row says otherwise. Two vendors block automated access to their pricing pages; those rows are marked and attributed to a dated third-party comparison instead.

Wix

Wix publishes four premium tiers: Light at $17.77, Core at $29.77, Business at $39.77 and Business Elite at $159.77 a month on yearly billing, in USD for reference. It also runs a restaurant-specific product line covering menus, online orders and reservations.

Use it when you want real design control and a low monthly bill, and you’re comfortable assembling ordering from Wix’s own restaurant tools rather than buying a purpose-built platform.

Squarespace

Squarespace’s pricing page lists Basic, Core and Advanced tiers with a 14-day free trial and a year of domain registration on annual plans. Tech.co’s 2026 pricing coverage puts Core around $39 a month on monthly billing, with Basic lower; the live page’s figures vary by billing term and region, so check your own cart.

Use it when design quality matters most and you want the shortest path to a site that looks expensive. Ordering generally comes from an integration rather than a native restaurant module.

Owner.com

Owner.com publishes two plans: Flexible at $249 a month plus a 5% per-order restaurant fee, and Flat Rate at $499 a month with no per-order fee, which it recommends above roughly $5,000 a month in online sales. Both include a website, online ordering, a branded mobile app, automated SEO pages, loyalty and email and text marketing. Both also apply a 5% order support fee charged to the customer.

Use it when you want the whole direct-ordering machine (site, app, marketing) managed for you, and your online volume is high enough that $249-$499 a month is cheaper than the commission it replaces.

ChowNow

ChowNow lists Launch at $249, Grow at $349 and Elevate at $449 a month, with a setup fee of $119-$499 and card processing at 2.95% plus $0.29. Direct orders through your site, branded app and ChowNow’s own marketplace are commission-free. The pricing page also discloses the extras honestly: a $99 annual Apple developer fee for a branded app, $250-$420 for printers, and $7.98 per order for its Flex Delivery option.

Use it when commission-free ordering is the priority and you want a flat, predictable monthly number rather than a percentage of every ticket.

Toast

Toast’s online ordering and website tools are sold as part of its POS ecosystem. Its pricing page blocks automated access, so the figures here come from a dated third-party comparison rather than Toast itself: a $0 starter kit and paid plans from about $69 a month as of mid-2026 (Smart Restaurant Owner, 2026). Confirm current terms with Toast directly.

Use it when you already run Toast POS. The value is one menu and one set of reporting across in-house and online orders, not the website itself.

Popmenu

Popmenu is a restaurant marketing platform built around a dynamic, photo-led menu that also handles ordering and reservations. Its pricing page also blocks automated access; a dated third-party comparison lists Starter at $179 a month ($159 billed annually), Essentials at $299 and Premier at $499, plus about $1 per online order (Chowly, 2026). Verify before signing.

Use it when marketing is the bottleneck rather than ordering. The menu interaction, review handling and campaign tools are the product.

Square Online

Square’s pricing page confirms a free tier that includes an online ordering profile, a basic website or online store, and online booking. Published comparisons put online processing at about 3.3% plus 30 cents on the free plan (Chowly, 2026); Square’s own page didn’t display the online rate when we checked, so confirm it in your account.

Use it when budget is the binding constraint. A free site that takes direct orders at card-processing cost beats a beautiful site that sends every order through a 20% marketplace.

GloriaFood

GloriaFood’s core online ordering is free and commission-free, with paid add-ons for a website, branded app, payments and marketing. Its own homepage, however, carries an end-of-life notice: GloriaFood reaches end of life on 30 April 2027, with support for existing customers until then and FoodAmigos recommended as a migration path.

Use it when you need direct ordering running this week at zero cost and accept that you’ll be migrating before April 2027. For a new permanent build, start somewhere else.

Menubly

Menubly builds interactive online menus, QR code menus and a one-link mini website, with built-in pickup, delivery and dine-in ordering and no commission on orders. Its free plan covers the mini website, online menu, QR menu and basic ordering; Pro is $9.99 a month, or $7.99 billed annually, adding full menu customisation, PDF menu conversion and a custom domain. There’s a 30-day trial with no card required.

Use it when you mainly need a fast, phone-first menu and QR codes rather than a full website. Food trucks, cafes and small counter-service spots especially.

WordPress with Elementor

The self-hosted route: WordPress for the site, Elementor for the page building, and a restaurant ordering plugin for the transactional side. Elementor’s cheapest paid tier is Essential at $60 a year, and its pricing page states plainly that no Elementor plan includes hosting. Elementor Host is sold separately.

Use it when you want to own the stack with no platform lock-in and either have someone technical or are willing to be that person. Cheapest at scale, most expensive in time.

Flat fee, commission or free: what these platforms really cost

The sticker price is only part of the cost. Three pricing models are in play, and the right one depends almost entirely on your online order volume.

• Free or near-free (Square Online, GloriaFood, Menubly free tier). You pay card processing and nothing else. Below roughly $3,000 a month in online sales, this is almost always the right answer.
• Low flat fee (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress + Elementor). $18-$40 a month for the site; ordering is bolted on. Good when the site’s main job is discovery, reservations and a menu people can read.
• High flat fee (ChowNow, Owner.com, Popmenu, Toast). $69-$499 a month, with ordering, apps and marketing included. These make sense once the commission they displace exceeds the subscription.

The arithmetic that decides it: a restaurant doing $10,000 a month through marketplace apps at 20% is paying $2,000 a month in commission. A $349 platform that moves even a third of those orders direct pays for itself several times over. At $1,500 a month in marketplace volume, it does not.

Run your own version of that sum before you look at a single template.

How to choose a restaurant website builder

1. Write down your monthly online order volume and what you currently pay in commission. That number picks your pricing tier.
2. Decide who processes payments. Platforms with their own processing are simpler; platforms that let you keep your processor are cheaper at volume.
3. Check it integrates with your POS. Two menus maintained by hand will diverge within a month, and the divergence always shows up at the worst time.
4. Test on a phone, on cell data. Load your shortlist’s own demo sites. If a demo is slow, yours will be too.
5. Confirm you can edit titles, descriptions and the address block. Local search is most of a restaurant site’s organic value.
6. Check the exit. Can you export your customer list and point your domain elsewhere? GloriaFood’s end-of-life notice is a useful reminder that platforms do end.
7. Only then look at templates.

Two platforms to approach with caution

GloriaFood is free and works, but it has published an end-of-life date of 30 April 2027. Fine as a stopgap, wrong as a foundation.

BentoBox appears on most older roundups of restaurant website builders and is often recommended in them. As of this update its domain, bentobox.com, redirects away and we could not reach a working product or pricing page for it; 2026 coverage reports the product has moved under Clover and is offered to Clover POS customers, with pricing no longer published. We have left it off the list above rather than describe a product page we could not open. If you’re interested, go through Clover directly and get current terms in writing.

What to put on the site once it’s built

The build is the easy part. The pages that actually earn traffic and orders are unglamorous:

• A real HTML menu with prices. Searchable, linkable, phone-readable. One page per menu if you have several.
• An ordering button above the fold on mobile. Not in a hamburger menu.
• Hours, address and phone as text, matching your Google Business Profile exactly.
• Ten good photos of food, room and people. Phone photos in daylight beat stock.
• A reservations or waitlist link that works without an app download.
• One email capture with a reason to sign up. Your email list is the only marketing channel no platform can take away from you.

That last point justifies a small budget line. Most website builders include a basic signup form but very little to send afterwards, so operators pair the site with a dedicated email tool. GetResponse is one of the common choices for small businesses, with automation and landing pages alongside the newsletter side, and its published plan pricing scales with list size rather than per-send. If you want the site to do more than sit there between orders, interactive add-ons are the other lever: tools like Outgrow’s AI assistant let you put a guided quiz or conversational helper on the page, which helps with dietary filtering, catering enquiries or event bookings, where a form loses people.

Driving people to the finished site is a separate job, and mostly a local one. Our guide to attracting customers with proven local tactics covers the off-site half of this.

Then leave it alone and update the menu. Restaurant sites fail from neglect far more often than from bad design.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best website builder for a restaurant?

It depends on online order volume. Below about $3,000 a month in online sales, Square Online’s free tier or Menubly’s free plan is hard to beat. Above that, a commission-free flat-fee platform like ChowNow or Owner.com usually costs less than the marketplace commission it replaces. For design-led sites with lighter ordering needs, Wix and Squarespace are the strongest general builders.

Can I build a restaurant website for free?

Yes. Square’s free tier includes an online ordering profile and a basic website, Menubly’s free plan covers a mini site with QR menu and ordering, and GloriaFood’s core ordering system is free, though GloriaFood ends support on 30 April 2027. You’ll still pay card processing on orders, and a custom domain costs roughly $10-$20 a year.

Do I need online ordering on my restaurant website?

If you do any takeout or delivery, yes. Marketplace apps charge roughly 15-30% per order, so every order you move to your own site is margin you keep, plus the customer’s contact details, which marketplaces do not hand over.

Is a website builder better than hiring a web designer?

For most independents, yes, at least to start. A builder gets a working, orderable site up in days for tens of dollars a month. A designer makes sense once the site is a significant revenue channel and you need something custom. And even then, many build on WordPress or Squarespace anyway.

How much should a restaurant website cost?

Budget $0-$40 a month if you build it yourself on a general builder or free tier, or $69-$499 a month for a restaurant-specific platform that includes ordering, an app and marketing. Add roughly $10-$20 a year for a domain. A one-off custom build typically starts in the low thousands.

Picking one and moving on

Most operators overthink this. Start from the order economics: work out what you currently pay in marketplace commission, then choose the cheapest platform that lets you take a direct order properly. If that number is small, take the free tier and spend the saving on food photos. If it’s large, a flat monthly fee is the better deal and the arithmetic will be obvious.

Whatever you pick, make sure the menu is real text, the order button is visible on a phone, and you can export your customer list. Those three things outlive any platform on this list.