Restaurant owners usually get pitched one of two extremes: a $500 template site, or a $25,000 fully custom build. Most don't need either.
The Five Pricing Tiers
- DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy) — $0–$30/month. Fast, generic, weak local SEO.
- Template WordPress build — $500–$1,500 one-time. Custom domain, borrowed design.
- Freelancer / entry agency — $1,500–$5,000. Custom design, single developer, faster turnaround.
- Small agency, full-featured — $3,000–$10,000. Online ordering, reservations, local SEO structure, real photography direction.
- Specialist / multi-location agency — $10,000–$25,000+. POS integration, multi-location architecture, ongoing performance management.
Most independent, single-location restaurants land in that $3,000–$10,000 middle tier — enough to get direct ordering and a working reservation flow without paying for enterprise features they'll never use.
The Decision That Costs the Most Long-Term: Reservations
Embedding OpenTable, Resy, or Tock into your site is cheap upfront — usually $200–$600 for the integration. But these platforms charge $1–$2.50 per seated diner. For a restaurant seating 100 covers a day, that's $3,000–$7,500 a month, and the platform owns your reservation data.
A WordPress-based reservation plugin costs more to set up properly but has no per-cover fee and keeps the data on your own site. Model the twelve-month cost of each option before deciding — not just the setup price.
A Real Example Budget
For a single-location independent restaurant wanting online ordering, self-hosted reservations, and proper local SEO:
- Custom WordPress design and build: $3,000–$6,000
- Online ordering integration: $300–$1,000
- Self-hosted reservation system: $400–$900
- Menu setup with allergen data: $200–$500
- Local SEO and schema markup: $300–$700
- Hosting (Year 1): $300–$600
Typical total: $4,500–$9,700
Common Mistakes That Waste Budget
- Paying for a custom ordering system at low order volume
- Skipping the photography budget
- Choosing OpenTable for the diner-discovery network you don't actually need
- Treating the menu page as an afterthought — it's the most-visited page on the site
- Skipping local SEO structure entirely
Full breakdown, process steps, and FAQs in the complete guide: https://amanurrahman.com/blog-post/restaurant-website-cost
