Restaurants, just like any other business, need a strong online presence to tell their customers about their services, especially their menus, location and ordering information. However, since hiring a web developer is quite expensive, there are a number of website builders that restaurant owners can use to build websites for their restaurants. In this article, we will discuss the best website builders for restaurants.
Wix
Wix is one of the most popular website builders today, and one of the easiest to use. Started in 2006, it was initially based on Flash which has well-known problems. However, this changed in 2012 when they changed their base technology to HTML5, with huge success. Today, Wix boasts of over 37 million websites built using the platform.
Wix is intuitive and user-friendly, especially due to its drag and drop editor that allows users to select, resize and position anything within the builder with a lot of ease. It allows users to place elements anywhere that they want and comes with the ability to animate text as well as most of its elements. This makes it one of the best website builders for restaurant owners since they can design beautiful websites with intuitive menus and restaurant elements. Furthermore, its simplicity means that anyone, even those without web development skills can easily use it to come up with an amazing website for their photography business.
Wix also comes with an ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) feature for those that do not have time to design their own website. This feature asks you a couple of questions then designs the website for you based on your answers to those questions. You can also enter an existing website or social profiles for Wix to crawl information from these sources and design a website for you based on the information it has crawled. With this feature, you will have your website within a couple of minutes.
What makes Wix a good choice for your restaurant?
Wix comes with a full fledged solution for creating restaurant website. Wix restaurants has following modules.
- The Wix Restaurants Dashboard: Allows you to set up and manage your restaurant, menu and orders.
- The Wix Restaurant Menus App: Allows you to display your own stunning menu on your site.
- The Wix Restaurant Orders App: Allows you to take online orders and receive payments. This is an optional premium feature.
- The Wix Reservations App: Allows your guests to book tables at your restaurant. This is an optional premium feature.
In addition to the above modules, Wix has a huge variety of restaurant-specific templates.
Wix Pros
- Free domain for one year except on the cheapest plan.
- Amazing and well-designed templates for photographers.
- Extensive app market to help increase the functionality of a website.
- Wix’s automatic backup is important in restoring to a previous version when you make mistakes
- SEO features are well thought compared to most of its competitors
- Compared to other website builders, it is flexible and allows moving of elements
- The Wix Artificial Design Intelligence tool is important for those who want a website within no time
- Generous free plan
Wix Cons
- There are limits on the bandwidth on the lower plans
- Wix does not allow customizing of the HTML and CSS code for those looking for further customization
- You can not change to a new template once you have started working on another one
Wix Pricing
| Plan | Connect Domain | Combo | Unlimited | VIP |
| Price Per Month | $ 4.50 | $ 8.50 | $ 12.50 | $ 24.50 |
| Storage | 500 MB | 3 GB | 10 GB | 20 GB |
| Domain | Not Free | Free from 1 year | Free from 1 year | Free from 1 year |
| Bandwidth | 1 GB | 2 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Squarespace
Squarespace is a software as a service company launched in 2004 that allows users to build websites using templates and an easy to use drag and drop editor.
Even though Squarespace is quite easy to use, it comes with a minimalistic interface whose usability has a lot of room for improvement. This has made most users spend quite a significant amount of time before they completely get used to the interface.
What makes Squarespace ideal for your restaurant
- Squarespace has beautiful set of templates focused on restaurants websites
- It lets your create resutaurant menus
- You can accept reservations on your website
- You can easily display business hours.
Squarespace Pros
- Over one hundred responsive and free templates.
- A feature rich blogging functionality.
- Responsive support team available 24/7.
- It has a mobile app that allows you to customize your website on the go.
Squarespace Cons
- It is a little bit difficult for beginners to understand the website editor.
- Some users have reported low speeds on Google PageSpeed tools.
- It does not support deep menu hierarchy on its websites.
Squarespace Pricing
| Plans | Personal | Business | Basic Commerce | Advanced Commerce |
| Price Per Month | $ 12 | $ 18 | $ 26 | $ 40 |
| Domain | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| SSL | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Storage | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Weebly
Founded in 2006, Weebly has grown to become one of the most used website builders we have today. It is all-inclusive and provides everything you need to get started on building and hosting your restaurant website.
Just like Wix, you get a free plan with Weebly but with a customized URL. With the drag and drop feature and its ease of use, Weebly does not have a learning curve – meaning that you will have a website up and running quickly.
Weebly lacks in the theme design department. There is a limited selection of restaurant-specific themes. However, Weebly lets you create your own custom theme. So if you want a unique look, you can hire a designer to create it for you.
Weebly has a restaurant specific App which lets your accept reservations, display menu and accept food orders. This app is created by a third party developer and is available via Weebly app market place.
Weebly Pros
- Simple, mobile-friendly and stylish templates.
- The free plan is quite generous compared to what competitors offer.
- There is a basic eCommerce feature on the free plan.
- Bandwidth is unlimited on all the plans.
- Easy to use drag and drop website builder.
- Comes with an App center that allows you to add features to your site within just a few clicks.
- It allows you to add team members who can help you with the website customization.
Weebly Cons
- Weebly has limited design capabilities compared to some of its competitors such as Wix.
- Supports only three payment gateways.
- The media manager does not allow you to use the same image more than once.
- It does not have a backup and restore feature.
Weebly Pricing
| Plans | Free | Connect | Pro | Business |
| Price Per Month | $ 0 | $ 5 | $ 12 | $ 25 |
| SSL | Free | Free | Free | Free |
| Storage | 500 MB | 500 MB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Domain | Domain with Weebly Branding | Connect a Custom Domain | Connect a Custom Domain | Connect a Custom Domain |
Let’s Eat
Let’s Eat was started in 2008 with the aim of making it very easy for newbies to build their own restaurant websites. It also suits developers with experience using website builders for their businesses.
Being a restaurant website builder, Let’s Eat focusses on making sure that restaurant owners, the majority of who have no web development skills, can use the system to easily build their own websites. This website builder has a simple, intuitive and logically structured interface with easy navigation. It even has an integrated set up wizard that guides one through the website development process. For those with web development skills, you can integrate CSS and HTML code to enhance the functionality of your website. However, you cannot edit the initial website code that comes with it.
The website builder comes with a number of features to make the process of building your website easy and straightforward. Such features include a menu builder that allows you to build a menu specific to your restaurant. This allows the creation of a detailed menu with dishes and their descriptions and prices. Another amazing feature is a coupon generator. This feature allows you to create printable online coupons for your clients.
Other amazing features include a calendar feature for creating upcoming events and information about different occasions happening in your restaurant, a marketplace with third-party applications to help in enhancing the functionality of your website, a statistics section, online marketing, social media integrations, and email marketing.
Let’s Eat Pros
- Focus on the food industry
- Has features specific to the food industry
- Marketplace allows the integration of third-party apps to enhance functionality
- Responsive and retina ready designs
- It is affordable especially to a beginner
Let’s Eat Cons
- Most of the themes are outdated and similar
- The customer support is poor compared to other website builders
- Has a limited template collection with poor design customization
- Lacks a visual editor
Let’s Eat Pricing
Let’s Eat costs $ 10 when paid monthly and $ 99 when paid annually. With this subscription, you get all the features including the use of a custom domain, menu builder, creating coupons, uploading photos, events calendar, built-in web stats and employee logins.
Flavor Plate
Flavor Plate is another specialized restaurant builder that is only focused on the creation of restaurant websites.
Flavor Plate comes with an easy to use editor that allows one to launch their website within no time.
It offers a lot of restaurant-specific features such as
- Restaurant Specific Templates
- Online reservations,
- Online Orders
- Gift Cards
- Event Calendars
- Email marketing Integration
Flavor Plate Pros
- It is easy to use even for beginners
- Comes with restaurant-specific features
- Mobile-friendly website editors to build your website on the go
- 60-day moneyback guarantee
Flavor Plate Cons
- Limited customization options
- It comes with basic SEO features
- Pricing is not flexible
Flavor Plate Pricing
Flavor Plate costs $39 when paid monthly. You get a 10% discount if you pay annually.
Conclusion
If you run a restaurant, you should not have a reason as to why you do not have a website for the restaurant. These website builders are easy to use, and affordable as well. Have you used any other website builder for your restaurant website? Let us know in the comment section below.