6 Best Restaurant Website Builders (2023)

Squarespace receives the best restaurant feature score (a near perfect 4.9 out of 5) thanks to its built-in menu widget and online reservations system, Squarespace Scheduling. Scheduling makes it easy for your customers to view your availability, book tables, and even make payments. And you shouldn’t have any trouble managing orders.

Squarespace does allow inventory updates based on your online orders,  but you can only update whole menu items, rather than individual ingredients. This could mean a little more effort to work out how many ingredients you have left after a busy day.

With additional apps like Tock, you can easily manage your restaurant in one place. Tock allows you to manage reservations, tables, waitlists, and delivery order systems, all in one place.

Customers can personalize their online orders thanks to Squarespace’s integration with ChowNow.

With the ChowNow integration, customers can view the menu, submit their order, and pay using a collapsible ChowNow order page. Luckily, this all takes place directly on your Squarespace site, without redirecting away from it.

Squarespace has also introduced a dedicated POS to sync the inventory of your real-life restaurant. You can offer delivery or store pickups, but there are no integrations with delivery apps, such as Deliveroo, just yet.

Squarespace doesn’t do too badly when it comes to sales features, offering a range of payment gateways and 0% transaction fees – as long as you choose from its two ecommerce plans!

However, compared to Wix and Shopify, which both score over 4.5 out of 5 for sales features, Squarespace is a less powerful option. It is worth noting that while Squarespace does only score 3.7 out of 5 for sales features, this is an 8.6% increase since we tested it last year. It offers fewer payment options and no stock monitoring features, but has been making improvements this year.

Squarespace now offers a Square integration, making it easier to sync your inventory when running pop-up stands or market stalls. It also offers Stock Monitoring reporting now and an increase in payment options, although it’s still the lowest of all other platforms.

Design is where Squarespace really shines, offering users the best designs out of all the restaurant builders we’ve tested. With a design score of 4.5 out of 5, an 8.89% increase since last year’s testing, users have access to improved food-specific template designs and the ability to edit right on your mobile. During our experience, we found it can be a little fiddly to adjust images and text via mobile, which many other builders are, with the exception of maybe Wix. Even so, Squarespace is still a cut above the rest!

While editing a Squarespace website isn’t as fast as it is with GoDaddy (which uses artificial design intelligence), Squarespace does have outstanding Brand and user experience (UX) features compared to GoDaddy. It comes with 16 beautiful, Restaurant-specific templates, complete with built-in features, such as a menu widget – to make building your site easier.

Squarespace lets your product photography shine with high-quality images, so that people can almost smell your mouth-watering food!

Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, but you can try it out for free for 14 days before choosing from one of its paid plans, which range from $16 to $49 per month, billed annually.

The cheapest plan with ecommerce functionality is the $23 per month Business plan, but to remove transaction fees, you’ll need to look at the $27 per month Basic Commerce plan and above.

Compared to its rivals, Squarespace offers better value than Shopify, but less than Square Online. It has also seen an improvement in its value score from last year’s 4 out of 5, to its 2023 score of 4.2 out of 5. Although its plans have seen an increase in price, the value of the features and tools you get for $16 per month, can be compared with that of Wix’s Core plan, which will cost you $27 per month.

Along with Wix, Squarespace is the easiest ecommerce restaurant builder to use. Both score a solid 4.4 out of 5 — Squarespace’s score increasing a whole 0.2 higher than last year. Making it just as easy to use as Wix, which is famous for its easy drag-and-drop editor!

Our users found Squarespace easy to use during our testing because of its straightforward editor and easy to navigate backend. In fact, Squarespace recently rolled out Fluid Engine, its latest drag-and-drop editor for maximum customization.

One of the  Squarespace product testers said:

“I loved the background grid for organising your layout. It was so good for making sure everything was aligned properly – my page ended up looking so much sleeker and neater than other platforms.”

In comparison, users found Wix’s backend and inventory management a little confusing. So, if you’re looking for a smooth, simple building process, and easy management, Squarespace is a great choice.

Since last year’s tests, Squarespace has seen a huge increase of 37.1% in its help and support score, rising to 4.8 out of 5. This is because Squarespace has real humans answering questions 24/7 through online support, including live chat, email, and on its  socials.

Squarespace provides all the usual support channels and a thorough knowledge base – but it doesn’t offer phone support. So, if you prefer to pick up the phone to get support, Squarespace might not be the right choice – instead we recommend Wix if you prefer phone support.

Of all the restaurant builders we tested, Wix has the best restaurant features (along with Squarespace), scoring a near perfect 4.9 out of 5. You’ll have access to plenty of features to help run your business, and it gives you creative control over your menus and bookings.

We love Wix’s fully customizable menu widget – you can choose whether you want to display pricing, dish options, dish labels, or images. You can also customize the menu design to match your on-site branding.

Wix also comes with a built-in reservation widget, allowing customers to place bookings directly through your restaurant’s website. You can amend the number of people allowed to make a booking at any one time, limit how many people are allowed per party, and set a notice period for reservations.

You can also set up an automatic confirmation email in your reservation settings dashboard.

A further Wix perk is the recent integration with Square for Restaurants. It makes food delivery much quicker and allows you to streamline your operations. You’ll be able to:

• Use only one tablet in store
• Easily set up your menu by importing
• Review in-store orders in one place with the Square dashboard
• Directly refund in Square
• Turn on inventory tracking for when your stock levels are low
• Make 24-hour reservations
• Update your Wix site on Square’s POS

The only thing we would have liked to see from Wix is a phone reservation call to action. While other builders like Squarespace let customers ring you directly through an on-site call to action, with Wix, you can’t link to a phone number.

Wix saw a small increase of 1.6% in its score for sales features because of an uplift in its big data capability and because it now has more stock management functionality.

When it comes to picking a payment gateway, Wix has over 40 to choose from, including Stripe, Square, Klarna, Paypal. A bonus is that it doesn’t charge transaction fees! Wix also has its own, in-house payment gateway called Wix Payments, which is worth checking out if you want to manage your payments all in one place.

Some other sales features you can get with Wix are:

• Unlimited products added to your site
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Stock monitoring
• A customizable checkout page
• Shipping cost amendments
• Add promo codes and other discount options

Wix has the best features for a reason, and these additions will help you run a successful restaurant website and sell your food online.  You should be able to find any missing features you want on Wix’s huge app market!

One of our favorite things about Wix is the level of creative freedom it gives its users, while remaining super easy to use. Its menus and reservation forms are all customizable, allowing you to keep your branding consistent across your website. You can also easily add images and text across the board.

No matter the style of your business, Wix has over 77 food and restaurant templates to choose from, so you’ll have plenty of options.. What we love about Wix’s restaurant templates is the range of food businesses available – and they all come with relevant features already built-in, such as online reservations.

Wix also got outstanding results during testing when it came to the design subcategories of UX , branding, mobile editing, and your ability to edit images smoothly — receiving 5 out of 5 for all of those.

The only complaint we have with Wix’s templates is that you can’t switch once you’ve published your site, unlike a lot of other providers – so make sure you’re happy with your design before committing!

Wix has a free plan, which means you can try out the builder to see if it’s right for your restaurant business. Wix pricing plans range from $16 to $159 per month when billed annually. The plans are:

• Light: $16 per month
• Core: $27 per month
• Business: $32 per month
• Business Elite: $159 per month
• Enterprise: custom pricing

Wix scores 3.2 out of 5 for value for money, which is mainly because of its somewhat pricey entry at $16 per month (billed annually). This means it offers decent value, but you don’t get as much for your money as you do with Squarespace, Square Online, or Jimdo.

We’d recommend upgrading to a paid plan for restaurant websites to remove Wix ads from your site, improve storage, and connect a professional domain name. Because if you want a site that looks professional, runs faster then you’ll want to avoid ads and confusing domain names.

Wix is known for being very beginner-friendly and, since our last round of testing, has improved its ease of use score by 10%. This means it is now tied with Squarespace as the easiest restaurant website builder.

You might be wondering why Wix hasn’t received a higher ease of use score – Wix is usually unbeatable when it comes to ease of use. Well, we found that the limits on its features were impacting how easy our users found it to create their website. During testing, users pointed out that:

“You have to be so careful of how you customize your template. As you add new elements to your site, it quickly becomes messy and cluttered.”

Also, to allow for customization of online orders, you’ll need to manually edit the variant options to include a notes section so any comments about their order can be added. This is a lot more hassle than a builder that automatically includes a feature for customers to edit their order!

Wix’s backend is the reason we don’t recommend it for larger restaurant businesses – it’s nice and easy as long as you’re selling 10 products or less.

Wix scores 4.8 out of 5 for its help and support offering. You get access to Wix’s help center, 24/7 callback service, live chat, email, social media, and advanced specialist support, too!

Our favorite part of Wix’s support options is its in-editor support — the question mark bubbles appear on screen to provide helpful hints, tips, and guidance, so that you don’t need to leave the editor for answers while you build.

One of the reasons Wix doesn’t score full marks for its customer support is that you have to pay more to receive priority support, unlike Squarespace. Still, with 24/7 support on all plans, you should find answers no matter your budget.

Shopify saw the largest website feature score increase (10%), offering internal features that include on-site testimonials, audio uploads, product comparison functionality, and suggested purchase popups.

Another nifty improvement: both Shopify and Wix saw a 9% increase in site speed this year, which is important if customers are wanting to purchase food as soon as possible.

Shopify now includes a built-in menu feature on its restaurant-specific ‘Express’ template, which is great to see.

However, there are a few drawbacks that prevented Shopify from achieving a higher score. For example, there’s no built-in reservation system, and we hesitate to recommend any of its third-party reservation apps based on the poor user reviews.

You can add a call to action that lets visitors ring your restaurant directly, but you’ll need coding skills to set this up.

Due to its powerful range of sales tools, Shopify has a solid sales feature score of 4.7 out of 5. Shopify’s features reflect an ecommerce focus, so you’ll get all the tools you could need to build and grow a serious online food and beverage business.

Shopify’s sales tools are designed for online stores, giving you get access to:

• Abandoned cart recovery
• Multi-channel integration (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Ticktock, and more)
• Dropshipping
• 100+ payment gateways
• Multiple currencies
• Built-in automatic tax calculation

One particular feature that stands out is that  your customers have the option to customize their orders. This means you can easily accommodate any allergies or dietary requirements. You can also add variants, such as meal size, meat options, sides, and more.

This is perfect for a lot of ambitious businesses. While we don’t recommend Wix for restaurants selling more than 10 products, a large inventory is something Shopify can handle with ease — ideal for food businesses that serve up lots of complex dishes.

Shopify has a range of free and paid templates, all of which feature stylish designs. There are over 20 themes in the “Food and Drink” industry category, 17 of which are premium themes. The prices for Shopify’s food and drink themes start at $150 and go up to $350, which is quite pricey but they are incredibly professional and offer plenty of features.

Shopify’s Emerge theme is worth checking out if you want a high-end and stylistic restaurant website, the price for Emerge is $320.

What we noticed in this year’s testing is that Shopify has increased its omni-channel design and users can now build their internal marketing from one dashboard.

It also has several new themes, which is why it’s increased in its design score overall. However, it’s still not the number one for design as there are payment restrictions and there isn’t the widest range of restaurant-specific themes. If a lot of design options is what you’re after, then take a look at Wix.

Value for money is where Shopify suffers a little, with the lowest value score out of all the builders on this list (3 out of 5). Shopify’s plans range from $29 – $299 per month, when billed annually. Shopify may be powerful, but you’ll need to  pay for themes, transaction fees, and the cost of add-on apps, so you’re likely to be paying quite a lot for it.

We don’t usually recommend Shopify for small restaurants that are on a budget, but it’s perfect for large restaurant or food business chains with large volumes of stock to be sold, or numerous deliveries to fulfill (and the budget to boot). Shopify’s plans are:

• Basic Shopify: $29/month
• Shopify: $79/month
• Advanced Shopify: $299/month

Prices start at $29 per month (when paid annually), which is a lot if you’re also having to shell out for third-party apps that add extra functionality to your store. You’ll need to fork out $39 per month if you choose to pay monthly..

It’s also worth noting that you’ll have to pay transaction fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments, which is Shopify’s in-house payment gateway. The transaction fee ranges from 0.5-2%, depending on your plan.

However, Shopify does come with a three-day free trial on all plans, and a $5 Starter plan where you can sell online through social media alone — potentially awesome for social media bakers. Additionally, Shopify will offer the first three months for $1 per month on the Basic plan, so you can test it out before putting all your eggs into this basket.

It’s a pretty powerful ecommerce builder, and Shopify is pretty easy to use. On the whole, you don’t need coding skills, and its themes are simple to edit and make your own. Adding products, changing colors, tweaking text – it’s all pretty straightforward. 

During testing users said:

 “Shopify is unique in that it starts you off by focusing on adding products, rather than designing your storefront. This made the process feel more cohesive when incorporating the two.”

While it’s an easy enough platform it isn’t the easiest, and is considered middle of the road when compared with its competitors on this list. Some users highlighted that the navigation bar felt more complicated than other builders. Other product testers expressed frustration when they needed to return to the dashboard and begin the confusing process of linking pages in the backend.

Shopify has a solid range of support options, including:

• 24/7 phone
• 24/7 live chat
• Email
• Help center
• Community forum
• Social media support
• Video tutorials
• Advanced specialist support

The only area where Shopify lacked in support was in its onsite editor help. Unlike Wix where you have help in the editor while you’re building your website, with Shopify you’ll need to go to the support channels. However if you want to reach out for answers, there’ll something to satisfy your curiosity.

Square’s large increase in feature score comes from the app market, making it far easier for shipping items. Additional features include professional product photos, checkout links for email selling, and the ability to make appointments. All of which are important for attracting and gaining customers.

Even before these improvements, Square had some good features, like its built-in menu creator. It is fully customizable, allowing users to edit images, pricing, and descriptions, enter nutritional information for customers, and even add delivery and pick-up options.

The only drawback is that Square Online doesn’t have a built-in reservation system. Instead, you’ll need to use its integration with the OpenTable app. Square is also the only platform to see a reduction in site speed performance, dropping by 10% since we started testing in 2021.

Square Online doesn’t have the same powerful sales features offered by Wix and Shopify, but it still has a lot to help your store run smoothly — and for a fraction of the price. 

Square Online impressed us with its improvements to its restaurant sales features in this year’s testing. You can create customizable invoices and it now has a completely customizable checkout page, which includes a logo, header, branding, and checkout buy buttons. It also has better fraud detection for security, because it has implemented new security tools.

Adding products is super easy, you get powerful inventory management, and (our favorite) you can allow customers to easily personalize their items. Perfect for food orders!

Square Online is ideal if you’re already using Square as a payment processor, or for your business’ EPOS – you’ll discover seamless integrations between your restaurant’s physical and digital presence.

Square Online falls down when it comes to design and customization. First off, Square Online only has one restaurant-specific template, and you may find customizing your design frustrating.

Square hasn’t dedicated any time to developing its template offering this year, instead focusing on their total business package offerings for payments, POS (point of sale), and online store. In the long run it makes sense to focus on the necessary tools, but it comes at a cost for them, as competitors offer more aesthetic designs that sell like hot cakes.

Customization options are also pretty limited, if you want full customization from color schemes and be able to fine tune headings and paragraph colors we recommend Squarespace or to drag elements on the page where ever you want then Wix. However, if you want your template to guide your design, then you may enjoy the structured feel of Square Online’s editor.

One thing that really stands out about Square Online is how affordable its plans are. You can even sell for free with Square Online, which is pretty rare!

The free plan is generous. It lets you:

• Sell an unlimited number of products
• Automatically sync inventory, items, and orders with your Square POS
• Offer pickup, delivery, or shipping

The cheapest paid plan costs $29 per month (billed annually), and this lets you remove ads and connect a custom domain for a professional site. Then the next and only other plan is $79 per month (billed annually), but it does lower your transaction fee from 2.9% + 30¢ to 2.6% + 30¢.

It’s worth mentioning that you can simply add Square Online payment links to an existing website for free, so you only need to pay for Square’s transaction fee. You can add links to Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress websites. This is an affordable option worth knowing about if you want to let customers check out and pay directly on your site.

For the number of features you get, Square Online’s prices offer great value for money, seeing it score 4.3 out of 5 (the second best value restaurant builder we’ve tested)!

Square Online is easier to use than Jimdo, but not as easy to use as any other builder on this list.

The good news is, setting your site up takes nearly no time at all. All you need to do is answer a few questions about your business, such as your business name and industry, and you’ll be given a general website layout based on your answers.

If you’re a complete beginner to building a website, Square Online might not be the option for you, instead an easier to use builder like Squarespace. We’d even recommend Wix for beginners as it’s just as easy and it has a free plan – ideal for testing out your building skills.

Square Online’s help and support has suffered a little when compared with its competitors!

Square Online offers support via:

·       Phone

·       Live chat

·       Social Media

·       Email

·       Knowledge center

·       Advanced specialist support

Square Online’s support score decreased by 11.3% this year. The only reason it scores low for support is because it doesn’t offer video or GIF tutorials and has no editor help as you build — whereas other builders do, like Wix.

One of the things we were most impressed by during testing is how useful Square Online’s knowledge center is – our users found it easy to find the information they were looking for. The other great thing about Square Online’s support is that you can access it on the free plan – you don’t have to upgrade to unlock more support channels.

Out of the other restaurant website builders on this list, GoDaddy is second to last for features in our research, scoring 3 out of 5. The main reason for this is GoDaddy doesn’t have a built-in reservations feature – you’re reliant on its OpenTable integration.

However, you will find a handy menu widget built into your template. You can choose from multiple design options for a menu that matches your branding, use images, and add your own text.

Something we would like to see from GoDaddy, is an app store that will allow you to add features, plus better blogging tools like comments and analytics. GoDaddy also needs better business tools and the option to add a phone call to action — to make it easy for customers to call your restaurant in a single click.

But what you do get with GoDaddy is some fantastic SEO and marketing tools to help get more eyes to your site! GoDaddy is ideal for those just showcasing a restaurant menu and address, as it will bring more people to your business.

GoDaddy allows you to list up to 5,000 products on the cheapest ecommerce plan ($14.99 per month). Then, for $29.99 per month, on the Commerce Plus plan, you’re able to sell an unlimited number of products. If you’re selling items or products, we’d recommend it as its ecommerce plan has an overall score of 3.8 out of 5.

However, if you’re looking to sell your food via delivery or takeout, GoDaddy might not be the right builder for you as  it only scores a 2.8 out of 5 for this category. In testing we noticed that GoDaddy lacked in key areas like multi-channel integration, scalability, and restaurant-specific features. You could easily create a menu and do it incredibly quickly, but making reservations and orders was more of a hassle than it was worth.

GoDaddy has 19 professionally designed, easy to generate templates, including restaurant-specific designs. In this year’s testing, GoDaddy saw a drop in design score of 12.2%, down to 3.6 out of 5.

This is because the “Restaurant & Food” templates all looked incredibly similar to one another, and its industry types lacked in range. Also, when testing the mobile site editing, we noticed that it would affect your desktop view, which was a little frustrating. The main drawback to GoDaddy’s designs is that customization is pretty limited – our users found it hard to create something truly unique with its editing tools.

The best way to use GoDaddy is to let its ADI editor create a range of tailored template layouts for you, and then pick the one you like most. This way, your starting point is a template that is already relevant with restaurant features, such as built-in menus, and contains your business name and information (instead of a generic design).

GoDaddy’s ADI setup makes it the fastest way to create your restaurant’s website, making it perfect if you need to build an online presence quickly.

Scoring 3.7 out of 5 for value in our research, GoDaddy offers better value for money than Wix and Shopify, but less value than Squarespace. GoDaddy has a free plan, which is great for trying out its editor, and four paid plans:

·       Basic: $9.99 per month, billed annually – renews at $11.99 per month

·       Standard: $10.49 per month, billed annually – renews at $15.99 per

·       month

·       Premium: $14.99 per month, billed annually – renews at $21.99 per month

·       Ecommerce: $16.99 per month, billed annually – renews at $24.99 per month

GoDaddy’s starting price is an affordable option, even when you look at its renewal cost – the $11.99 per month renewal is still cheaper than both Wix and Squarespace’s cheapest plan!

However, we recommend the $14.99 per month Premium plan for restaurants because it includes useful features that aren’t available on the cheapest plan. These include:

·       Advanced SEO tools

·       Unlimited social media integration (share as many posts, across as many channels, as you like)

·       Take payments for appointments – useful if you require a deposit for large table bookings

·       Remind customers of upcoming bookings via email and text

Thanks to its intuitive ADI editor, GoDaddy is super easy to get started with. All you have to do is answer a few simple questions, such as the type and name of your business — and GoDaddy creates a tailored template for you to customize. The GoDaddy product testers said:

“It was easy to use, I could find everything I needed to find. If I needed to make a simple website for a business, this is the one I would choose.”

However, once  you start customizing, it’s not as intuitive. Although it’s user-friendly, and uses a simple layout, GoDaddy’s editor offers limited customization. This can prove frustrating if you have a clear plan for your web design, and it makes certain tasks – such as resizing images – harder than they should be.

During testing, our users found Squarespace and Wix easier to use than GoDaddy, despite GoDaddy’s design assistance!

GoDaddy saw a huge boost in its help and support score since last year  (7.9% increase), showing that it is dedicated to improving customer support. The increase in its score is because it now offers email support along with additional video and GIF tutorials in the help center.

It offers the usual channels for you to access support, including:

• Phone
• Social media
• Live chat
• Knowledge Center
• Community forum
• In-editor help
• Email (new feature!)

The only thing missing is advanced specialist support (such as webinars or fast-track priority).

Even though it scores an above average 2.8 out of 5 in our research, we were pleasantly surprised by Jimdo’s great additional features. These include:

• rankingCoach
• Smart Block
• A logo maker
• AI powered tools
• Local Business Listing

This is plenty if all you want is  a storefront website to showcase your food. Of course, if you need a website to process reservations, payments, and menus, then Jimdo isn’t capable at all. It’s definitely worth the extra spend for any of the builders mentioned before this.

Jimdo offers slightly better design than Square Online, but still comes in second to last out of the builders on this list. Jimdo started off with over 100 templates, but has since cut back to just 40 templates and a blank template. There is only one that is related to food and beverage, and it focuses on  beverages.

The good news is that the Jimdo templates can be applied to a restaurant business! However, if you’re after styles and aesthetics, you might want to turn your attention to Squarespace, that has some of the best designed templates on the market.

Jimdo is now integrated with a Mobile Editor though, allowing all of its templates to be scaled for desktop or mobile.

Jimdo wins in this list for value for money with a score of 4.4 out of 5. Jimdo’s plans are a bit different and vary depending on region, so you’ll need to check the plans with in your state. In the US, the platform offers two paid plans:

·       Start Plan ($9 per month)

·       Grow Plan ($14 per month)

Sure, you get a lot more with other builders like Squarespace, but its higher starting price is why we reduced its value score when compared with Jimdo’s much cheaper plans.

Like GoDaddy (but far less intuitive), Jimdo has an ADI builder, which makes it relatively painless to create a site. Jimdo sinks when it comes to ease of use as it lacks customization and its editor is frustrating to use. One Jimdo product tester said:

“Jimdo is too simplistic to really be able to recommend to anyone. It really railroads you into its own idea of whatever industry it prescribes you and gives you very little customization.”

That said, we also found it was very easy to keep things simple and clean. For example, when you add a new section it will immediately ask what you the block for, which makes it easy to implement elements immediately.

Jimdo lacks valuable help and support, receiving the lowest score in testing of 2.2 out of 5. Jimdo offers:

• Social support
• Live chat
• A knowledge center
• On-site editor support

During testing we found it struggled to answer complex questions, and was missing phone support, video tutorials, email, and a community forum.

This year’s testing showed that the support provided took 1-2 business days and that you need to pay a premium to receive faster support of one hour. This could be cumbersome if you run into trouble and need an instant solution for your restaurant’s website.