Websites and apps for restaurants

Most people looking at a restaurant's site are standing on a pavement or sitting on a sofa, phone in hand, deciding where to eat in the next hour. They want four answers and they want them fast: the menu, the hours, the address, and a way to book or order. Everything else is a bonus.

That makes the job unusually concrete. The menu should be real text, not a photo of a printed menu or a PDF, so it loads quickly, reads well on a small screen and can be found by search engines. Hours must be current, including holidays. The address should open in a map with one tap. The booking or ordering button should be on the first screen.

Photos of the food you actually serve, taken in decent light, do more than any design trick. After that, a site wins on tone: a taqueria and a tasting-menu room should not look like the same template with the colours changed. The type, the spacing and the words should feel like the room.

Our concept study for restaurants, Élan, was made to show that standard. Its line is "Menus that read the way the food tastes." It is a concept, not a client, and labelled that way on our studio page. Every free build starts from your own details and the photos and reviews on your Google listing, so the first version already looks like your place rather than a stock restaurant.

When the same people come back often. If a good share of your trade is regulars ordering the usual, a pickup crowd at lunch, or families who come every Friday, an app makes that habit easier: order ahead or at the table in two taps, and points on every order with a reward when they get there.

It also changes who keeps the margin. When we read DoorDash's merchant pricing on October 29, 2026, its Marketplace plans took 15%, 25% or 30% of each delivery order depending on the plan, and 6% on pickup. Our app plans are a flat fee with 0% commission on orders. Marketplaces are still useful for reaching new customers; your regulars do not need to go through them. The restaurant app cost guide works through the numbers.

• Website: $99 a month, or $1,499 once to own it. Live on your own domain within 48 hours, with your domain, hosting and security handled, and menu and hours changes made whenever you email.
• App: $99 a month. Ordering ahead or at the table, points and rewards, installable from the browser with no App Store wait, and menu, prices and offers updated for you.
• App + Stores: $199 a month plus $499 setup, for your own app in the App Store and on Google Play with push notifications.
• Website + App: $169 a month for both.

No contract on the monthly plans. Taking card payments online is a custom build and not part of these plans. Every plan is on the pricing page.

A website build takes about 20 minutes and an app about 15, from a sentence about your restaurant or your Google listing. A designer checks it before you see it. Once you choose a plan, the website is live on your own domain within 48 hours.

The most useful thing you can send us is your current menu with prices, as text or a clear photo. If your Google listing already has good photos and your hours, we use those, so you do not have to send them again.

We do, on the monthly plans. Email us the change, or reply to any email we have sent, and a designer makes it. There is no editor to learn and nothing to break during service. The menu changing every season is normal, and it should not cost you an evening each time.

On the owned plan the site is yours outright, with one free revision; hosting and updates after that are an optional $175 a year.

• A PDF menu that has to be pinched and zoomed on a phone.
• Hours on the site that disagree with Google.
• No booking or ordering button until the bottom of the page.
• Old prices. Nothing loses trust faster than a bill that does not match the site.
• A slow first load, usually from huge uncompressed photos.

Fix those and most restaurant sites are already better than the ones around them. Want to see yours? Build it free and judge it on your own phone.