What a restaurant website costs, line by line

Where the money actually goes

Domain

A .com is roughly $12 to $20 a year. Read the renewal price, not the first-year offer — the first year is often discounted and the second year is the real number. Buy it before you print anything, because the menu, the signage and the delivery listings all end up carrying it. It renews every year no matter who built the site, and it stays yours only while you keep paying. Register it in your own name, at a registrar you can sign in to yourself: who built the site and who owns the domain are two separate questions.

The site itself

A builder subscription with hosting and an HTTPS certificate included commonly runs $16 to $30 a month, or $190 to $360 a year. A freelancer building a three-to-five-page restaurant site commonly quotes $800 to $3,000 once; a studio that also handles the photography and a booking integration runs $3,000 to $10,000 and up. What decides which end you land on is the page count, whether someone else writes the copy, and whether the site only has to display a menu or actually has to take orders. Whichever route you take, open the menu page on a phone before you launch: almost everyone looking up a restaurant menu is holding one.

Menu photography

This is the line a restaurant site has that other small-business sites do not, and it swings the widest. A half-day food shoot commonly runs $300 to $1,200; a full day with a food stylist and a shot list covering the whole menu is $1,000 to $3,000. What sets the price is the number of dishes, whether a stylist is involved, and the licensing — whether the same images may also go on the delivery apps and your social accounts. Get the licensing in writing before the shoot, not after; adding it later usually means a second invoice.

Booking, ordering and delivery links

Three different pricing shapes, and they are easy to blur into one. A full reservation system is typically $100 to $300 a month, sometimes with a fee per seated cover on top. Taking orders on your own site adds card processing, commonly around 2.9% plus a fixed fee per transaction. A button linking out to a delivery platform costs nothing on the website — the cost is the platform's commission on each order, in the US widely reported in 2026 at 15% to 30% depending on the service level, and only the figure in your own contract counts. Naratake's restaurant starting points lay out the sections a restaurant page needs — menu, hours, map, contact — with the reservation and ordering fields already placed, so you are not starting from a blank page. Where the plan line falls: Storefront Pro is the plan where ordering and reservations go live on the published site, and Storefront builds and previews them. Card payment on a Naratake site runs on your own live Stripe keys, pasted in by you, so the money lands in your account rather than passing through ours. The pricing page has the rest.

A multilingual menu, and every later edit

Human translation of a 60-to-80-dish menu runs roughly $100 to $350 per language, priced per word. Machine translation is free and fine for opening hours, but not for dish names, allergens, or halal and vegetarian labeling — a wrong word there is a safety problem, not a style one. Then comes the line nobody volunteers in a quote: menus change. Before you sign, ask what one price change costs and how long it takes to go live. An hourly rate of $75 to $150, or a minimum charge per request, is normal, and four seasonal updates a year add up faster than the build fee suggests.

Three routes to the same restaurant page

A website builder

You pay monthly and do the work yourself. Checked in 2026, the Wix and Squarespace plans that let you connect your own domain sat between roughly $16 and $30 a month on their public pricing pages; every provider reprices, so read that page on the day you buy. Naratake sits on the same shelf, so add it to the row: Storefront $49 a month or $468 a year, Storefront Pro $79 a month or $758 a year, both with hosting, automatic HTTPS and one custom domain, and Pro publishing online ordering and reservations at 0% commission through your own Stripe account — only Stripe's card fee applies. The cash cost is visible and easy to total; the real cost is your hours — budget fifteen to forty for a first site, with photography counted separately. One thing to plan for on any of them: when the subscription stops, the published site goes offline, so treat it as a standing bill like electricity. What differs is what you keep — on Storefront Pro the complete source has already been downloaded to your own machine.

Hiring someone

You pay once and what you are buying is design judgment, which is worth most when the brand itself is being invented rather than applied. If the sign, the menu and the colours already exist, you are paying a designer to transcribe them, and a starting point plus one of 15 design styles does that job for the price of a month. Get two numbers, not one: the build fee, and the price of changing a dish or a price afterwards. The menu is the most-edited page a small business owns, so that second number is the one you will still be paying in year three. Ask one more thing before you sign: when the work is finished, whose name is on the domain and the hosting account? The answer should be yours.

Doing it yourself

In cash it is the domain plus whatever you publish on; the real cost is time, and the first time it is not small. Fifteen to forty hours is an honest estimate for a menu page, an hours-and-location page, and a contact page with a phone link that actually dials. If those hours come out of evenings you were never going to bill anyway, this genuinely is the cheapest route. If they come out of the two weeks before opening, they are the most expensive hours of your year. That is the real trade, and only you can price it.

Money you do not actually need to spend

• Photographing the whole menu on day one. Shoot the eight to twelve dishes people actually order, plus one wide shot of the room. A phone by a window at lunchtime, no flash and the overhead lights off, clears the bar for the rest — and a gallery of twelve good photographs is worth more than forty passable ones.
• A reservation system before you have bookings to lose. Under about ten tables a night, a phone number somebody answers, a simple form and a free Google Business Profile will hold. Buy the system when you can name the bookings you missed last month; that is also the point at which you know which system you need.
• Translating the entire site. Translate the menu, the allergens, the address and the hours. The brand paragraphs on the home page are the most expensive words to translate and the least read by the people who needed the translation.
• Paying for visibility before you have filled in what is free. A Google Business Profile with correct hours, a phone number, a menu link and real photographs costs nothing, and it is the card that appears when somebody searches your name on a map. Anything sold as an SEO package can wait until that listing is complete — that card, not a keyword report, is what a hungry person half a mile away actually taps.

Questions people ask about the price