A restaurant website costs more or less depending on one question: does it just need to tell people what you serve and where, or does it need to take bookings and orders? A menu site for a neighbourhood café is a small job. A site for a group of restaurants with online ordering and a reservations system is a big one.
This guide covers what a restaurant, café or pub website typically costs in the UK, what customers actually need from it, and the ongoing platform fees that often cost more than the website itself.
What diners need from a restaurant website
Most people visit a restaurant website to answer a handful of questions quickly, usually on a phone, often while standing somewhere deciding where to eat. Before spending anything on features, make sure the site does these well:
- The menu, as readable text on the page, not a PDF to download and pinch-zoom.
- Prices, so people can judge whether it suits their budget.
- Opening hours, kept up to date, including bank holidays.
- Location, with a map link and parking or transport notes.
- A way to book: a button that works on a phone, or a clear phone number.
- Dietary and allergen information, or a clear note on how to ask about it.
- Whether you take walk-ins, and whether children and dogs are welcome.
- Photos of the food, the room and the atmosphere that are actually yours.
- Speed matters here more than in most sectors. People often look up a restaurant on a phone with weak signal, on the street or in the car. Large image sliders and embedded videos are the usual reasons restaurant websites load slowly.
Restaurant website costs by type
| Type of site | Typical build cost | Typical running cost | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder with a menu template | £0–£300 | £15–£40 a month | New cafés, pop-ups, food vans |
| Simple menu-and-contact site by a designer | £500–£2,500 | £15–£75 a month | Independent cafés and pubs |
| Custom site with reservations connected | £2,000–£6,000 | £30–£150 a month plus booking platform | Restaurants taking regular bookings |
| Online ordering and takeaway | £3,000–£10,000 | £50–£200 a month plus payment fees | Restaurants with a big takeaway trade |
| Multi-venue group site | £8,000–£25,000+ | £100–£500+ a month | Groups with several sites |
Reservations: platform or built in?
Most UK restaurants take online bookings through a reservations platform and link to it or embed it on their website. Platforms charge in different ways: a monthly subscription, a fee per cover booked through their marketplace, or both. The cost depends on the platform, the plan and how many bookings come through their own app or listings rather than your website.
The alternative is reservations built into your own website, where bookings come straight to you. This suits restaurants that want to avoid per-cover fees and own their customer list. Whichever route you take, work out what bookings cost per cover at your volume. That number matters more than the website build price.
When comparing platforms, ask for three numbers: the monthly fee, the charge per cover for bookings made through your own website, and the charge for bookings made through their marketplace or app. Some charge little or nothing for bookings from your own site, which makes a strong booking button on your website worth even more.
Online ordering and delivery apps
Delivery marketplaces bring customers you might not otherwise reach, but they take a substantial commission on each order, commonly reported in the region of a quarter to a third of the order value depending on the service and whether they handle delivery. Many restaurants use them for discovery and push regular customers towards ordering direct.
Direct online ordering on your own website costs more to set up but only carries card processing fees per order, typically a small percentage plus a few pence. If you sell food for delivery or collection online, you must also make allergen information available to customers before they buy and when the food is delivered, as the Food Standards Agency sets out for distance selling.
If you run your own ordering, think through the practical side before launch: order cut-off times, delivery radius, how orders reach the kitchen, and who answers the phone when a customer rings about a missing item.
What pushes a restaurant website's cost up
- Menus that change daily or weekly and need to be easy to update.
- Several venues, each with its own menu, hours and booking.
- Events, private dining and gift voucher sales.
- Online ordering with modifiers (sizes, extras, dietary swaps).
- Integrations with your till, reservations or loyalty systems.
- Menus in more than one language for areas with lots of visitors from abroad.
- Professional food photography, which is worth it and costs extra.
Mistakes that cost restaurants bookings
- PDF menus that are slow to open and impossible to read on a phone.
- Opening hours on the website that disagree with Google.
- A booking button that opens a broken widget or a different site with no way back.
- Beautiful photo sliders that make the page slow and push the menu out of sight.
- No prices, which puts off people trying to decide quickly.
- No clear information about private dining, events or large-group bookings, which are often the most valuable enquiries.
Keep your website, Google and booking platforms in sync
Restaurants appear in more places online than most businesses: the website, Google Business Profile, booking platforms, delivery apps, review sites and social media. Diners notice when they disagree. A menu showing last season's dishes, or hours that differ between Google and the website, costs bookings and trust.
Make your website the master copy and update it first, then update the other listings from it. Choose a set-up where changing the menu or hours takes minutes, not an email to a designer and a two-week wait. Before every bank holiday and seasonal menu change, run through each listing in turn.
Where we fit
For cafés, pubs and restaurants that take bookings through an existing platform, our Monthly plan covers a custom site with a proper text menu that you can edit, your booking platform linked from every page, and your Google Business Profile tidied up, for £299 setup and £99 a month. Reservations, online ordering or gift vouchers built into your own site, with no per-cover fees to us, can be added to any plan, quoted on your call, and come as standard on Pro at £6,950 and £299 a month.