Restaurant website design in 2026 costs from £800 for a one-page site with a menu, photos and a map — and from £3,500 for a restaurant website with online ordering, a basket and card payments. Timelines run from 2–3 weeks to about 2.5 months depending on scope. This guide breaks down where the money goes, which integrations you actually need, and when your own delivery site beats the marketplaces.
A restaurant website is not "just another brochure". A venue lives on covers and orders: the site either brings them in daily or gathers dust in a "built it and forgot it" tab. So the first question is not "which design do we like" but "which job should the site do": show the menu and address, take table bookings, or sell delivery.
We are Code-Site.Art, a Ukrainian studio working with clients across Europe — European quality at sensible rates. We built the site for the Tatarka street-food franchise and for the Bravo food delivery service, so the numbers below come from real projects, not from website-builder ads.
Which website does your venue need: three scenarios
A site for a 20-seat café and a site for a sushi delivery chain are different products with a 4–5x budget gap. Before you brief anyone on restaurant website design, answer honestly: where does the money come from — the dining room, bookings, or delivery?
| Site type | What's inside | Price | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-page restaurant site | Menu, interior photos, contacts, map, click-to-call | from £800 | 2–3 weeks |
| Site with table bookings | Multi-page site + booking form, staff notifications, CRM | from £3,500 | 4–6 weeks |
| Restaurant website with online ordering | Dish catalogue, basket, online payment, delivery zones, order statuses | from £3,500 | 6–10 weeks |
The first scenario is a classic landing page: one screen answering a guest's three questions — what's good here, where are you, and are you open right now. The second and third are a multi-page site or full e-commerce, and cutting corners on the platform backfires: rebuilding a site-builder page that "couldn't handle the basket" costs more than doing it properly once.
A digital menu instead of a PDF
Half of all venues still publish the menu as an 8 MB print-layout PDF. A guest on a phone waits for the download, pinch-zooms tiny type, can't find the price and closes the tab. What the venue loses:
- Google ranks PDFs poorly — dish pages never collect searches like "pizza delivery + area"
- updating prices means re-ordering the layout from a designer, so the site is permanently out of date
- you can't order from a PDF: the guest reads the menu in one place and phones the order in — half of them drop off on the way
A digital menu is a set of ordinary site pages: categories, dishes, photos, prices, "spicy" and "vegan" badges. A manager changes a price or hides a sold-out dish in the admin panel in under a minute — no designer, no developer. We showed how that works in our post on website admin panels.
Online ordering: food delivery is e-commerce
If the venue lives on delivery, the site is effectively an online store: catalogue, basket, checkout, payments, statuses. Everything that applies to e-commerce projects applies to food — the order cycle is just shorter and the customer hungrier. The minimum working set:
- A basket that survives navigation and remembers the order after the tab is closed
- One-screen checkout: address, time, payment method — no registration, no extra fields
- Delivery zones with a minimum order value and a fee per zone
- Instant kitchen notifications: Telegram, a receipt printer, or the venue's CRM
- Customer-facing statuses: "cooking", "courier on the way" — that alone halves the "where's my order?" calls
A project like this starts at £3,500 and takes 6–10 weeks including integrations. A custom platform with courier accounts, multiple venues and in-house logistics starts at £6,000.
Integrations: payments, delivery, bookings
Online payments
The baseline is card acquiring with Apple Pay and Google Pay — Stripe or a local provider, depending on your market. A typical integration costs £200–500. A complex chain — payments plus fiscal reporting plus sync with the venue's back office — runs £1,000–3,000, and it belongs in the budget from day one, not as a "we'll bolt it on later".
Couriers and delivery services
With in-house couriers, pushing each order to a Telegram group or CRM with the address and phone number is enough. With third-party logistics, the order goes out via the service's API and the customer tracks the status on your site. The second setup costs more to integrate but frees your staff from manual ring-arounds.
Table bookings
Most venues only need a "date, time, party size" form with a staff notification and a guest confirmation. Real-time floor sync and a hostess tablet matter for restaurants fully booked at weekends — that's a separate integration, from the same £200–500 in its simple form.
Marketplaces vs your own delivery site
The question every restaurateur asks: "why do I need a site when Uber Eats exists?" A fair comparison:
| Criterion | Marketplaces (Uber Eats, Glovo, Bolt Food) | Your own delivery site |
|---|---|---|
| Commission per order | 14–30% | 0% — only card fees ~2% |
| Customer base | Belongs to the marketplace | Yours: phone numbers, emails, order history |
| Time to first sale | A few days | 6–10 weeks of development |
| Marketing | You compete in a listing with the street next door | SEO, brand and repeat orders compound for you |
| Long-run cost | A cut of every receipt, forever | One-off build from £3,500 + support |
For most venues the right answer is "both, in different roles". Marketplaces are an acquisition channel for first-time customers. Your own site is where you move the regulars: drop a flyer with a "-10% on our website" promo code into every bag, and the next order arrives commission-free. At a $15 average ticket and 500 orders a month, a 25% commission is $1,875 a month — the build pays for itself within the first quarter.
Photos, speed and local SEO
Photos sell — but must not slow the site down
Food is sold by the picture: a dish page without a photo converts several times worse. But raw 5 MB camera files kill load speed, and a guest on 4G won't wait. The technical minimum: WebP/AVIF formats, lazy loading, responsive sizes. The menu page should open in 2–3 seconds on a mid-range phone.
Google Maps and "near me" searches
"Restaurant near me", "sushi delivery + town", "café with a terrace" — guests search locally, and half of those searches end in the map pack. A Google Business Profile with the menu and fresh photos, reviews, and local pages on the site all work together. The step-by-step plan is in our guide to the Google Maps top 3, and ongoing promotion is our SEO service from £300/month.
A tip for multi-site operators: give every location its own page with the address, opening hours and menu, rather than one generic "Contacts" section. That way the site collects "café + area" searches for each location separately, and your Maps listings get an address confirmation from the site — Google rewards that.
What to prepare before the build starts
Half of the project timeline depends on how ready the venue's materials are. Gather these before the first call with a studio — this checklist genuinely shaves 2–3 weeks off development:
- The current menu in a spreadsheet: name, description, price, category, "spicy" and "vegan" badges
- Dish photos in one consistent style — at least for bestsellers and sets
- Delivery zones on a map with a minimum order and a delivery fee per zone
- Merchant account details and a decision on receipt/fiscal reporting
- Where orders should land: Telegram, a kitchen printer, or your CRM
- Opening hours, addresses and phone numbers for every location — for the Google Maps listings
- Access to the domain and the Google Business Profile, if they already exist
Missing some of it? Not a problem: photography and menu copy can run in parallel with design. The one thing not to postpone is payments — onboarding with a payment provider and the bank paperwork sometimes take longer than the build itself. Our step-by-step way of working — from brief to launch — is on the process page.
Case studies: Tatarka and Bravo
Tatarka is a website for a street-food franchise. The site sells the business model, not the shawarma: the menu and atmosphere showcase the product, while a dedicated section gives future franchisees the numbers and terms. One site serving two very different audiences.
Bravo is a build for a food delivery service: a categorised dish catalogue, photography-led pages and the shortest possible path from phone screen to order. Exactly the case where the site is engineered as e-commerce, not as a brochure.
Wondering what a website costs overall in 2026 and what the line items are? We broke it down in our pricing overview, and covered the design moves that lift conversion in 9 design moves.
The rule of thumb: a venue's website is not about "looking nice" — it's about order flow. A menu updated in a minute, a basket that never loses a guest, and a Google Maps listing people actually find: that is what separates a working site from another brochure.
