The short answer

A restaurant website commonly costs $200 to $600 per year on a DIY builder, $2,000 to $6,000 from a freelancer, and $8,000 to $25,000 or more from an agency. Online ordering is the wildcard: it can add nothing (if you link out to a third-party platform), a monthly fee of roughly $50 to $300 (if you run your own ordering system), or a painful percentage of every order (if you rely entirely on delivery apps).

Restaurants are one of the few businesses where the cheap option is often genuinely competitive. Diners want four things from your site: the menu, the hours, the address, and a way to order or book. A $30-a-month builder site that nails those four beats a $15,000 agency site that hides the menu in a PDF.

What diners actually use your site for

Before pricing anything, be honest about the jobs the site does. For most restaurants the traffic pattern is simple: people find you on Google or a map listing, click through to check the menu and hours, and either show up, call, or order. Almost nobody browses your about page.

That means your budget should follow this priority order: accurate menu, current hours, mobile speed, ordering or reservations, then photos, then everything else. Money spent below the line you actually need is decoration. Our guide to how much a website costs covers the general tiers; the sections below cover what is specific to restaurants.

A menu sounds trivial and is usually the biggest ongoing cost driver. Prices change, dishes rotate, and someone has to update the site every time. Your options:

  • HTML menu you edit yourself. Free after setup, best for search and accessibility. Requires a builder or CMS someone on staff can use.
  • PDF uploads. Free and fast, but bad on phones and invisible to search engines. Common, not recommended.
  • Menu management tools. Some ordering platforms and builders sync your menu across the site, Google, and delivery apps. Commonly bundled into ordering subscriptions.

If you pay a designer, ask specifically what a menu update will cost after launch. A site you cannot update without paying $75 an hour turns into a stale-menu liability within months.

Online ordering: own it or rent it

This decision moves more money than the website itself.

Third-party platforms (delivery apps and marketplaces) typically charge commissions that commonly run 15 to 30 percent per order. The website cost is zero, since you just link out, but the per-order economics are rough at volume.

First-party ordering through a system embedded in your own site commonly costs a flat monthly fee, often somewhere between $50 and $300, plus card processing around 2 to 3 percent. Setup ranges from an afternoon on a builder with native ordering to a few thousand dollars for a custom integration.

A common hybrid: stay on the marketplaces for discovery, and push repeat customers to order direct through your site. If you sell merchandise, gift cards, or packaged goods on top of meals, you are edging into store territory, and the cost picture starts to look like our ecommerce website cost guide.

Reservations follow the same logic: a link to a booking platform is free to you, while embedded booking widgets are typically included with the platform subscription the restaurant already pays.

Photography: the line item people regret skipping

Food photography is the one place where restaurant sites reward spending. Phone photos in bad lighting cost you orders in a way that is hard to measure but easy to see. Typical options:

  • DIY with natural light and effort: free, workable for casual concepts.
  • A local photographer for a half-day shoot: commonly $300 to $1,500 depending on market, and the photos also feed your social accounts and delivery app listings for a year or more.
  • Agency-arranged shoots: often bundled into larger projects at a premium.

If your total budget is $2,000, a reasonable split is a $500 builder-plus-ordering setup and real money on photos, not the reverse.

DIY, freelancer, or agency

DIY builders commonly run $200 to $600 per year with a template, and several builders now include native ordering or integrate with ordering platforms. Fine for single locations with a simple menu and an owner willing to spend a weekend on setup.

Freelancers commonly charge $2,000 to $6,000 for a restaurant site with menu structure, ordering integration, and photo-forward design. Worth it for multi-location groups, concepts where brand matters (fine dining, destination spots), or owners with no time to DIY.

Agencies at $8,000 to $25,000 and up make sense mainly for restaurant groups, franchises needing location management, or hospitality brands where the site is part of a larger identity project. A single independent restaurant rarely gets its money back at this tier.

Ongoing costs at every tier: domain and hosting (commonly $50 to $300 per year), the ordering subscription if you have one, and the labor of keeping menus and hours current.

Quick budget checklist

  • Menu is real HTML, editable by someone on staff, mobile-friendly
  • Hours and address correct on the site and on Google
  • Ordering decision made deliberately: link out, embed, or hybrid
  • Photography budgeted as its own line item
  • You know the per-order cost of every channel you accept orders on
  • Post-launch update costs are in writing if you hired help

Run your own numbers before talking to any vendor: page count is small for restaurants, so the quote should be too, unless ordering or multi-location complexity justifies it. Price the DIY route first, price one freelancer against it, and let the gap tell you what the extra money is actually buying.