How to create a pizzeria website in one evening (6 steps)
Six steps, and only the first is a real decision: buy a domain, pick how the site gets built, put in the menu and hours, add allergen information, connect your Google Business Profile, then test it on a phone over cellular data. A pizzeria with its menu and hours already written down can be live the same evening.
1. Buy the domain first
Do this before anything else, in the business’s own name, with your own email address on the account. A .com is cheap, and it is the one piece of your online presence that is truly yours. The most common regret in this trade is finding out the domain is registered to a web designer you stopped working with years ago, or to a nephew who has moved to Denver.
Pick the name customers say out loud, not a keyword. tonysbrickoven.com beats best-pizza-delivery-columbus-ohio.com: the second one hasn’t helped rankings in a decade, and it looks like spam on a receipt.
2. Choose how it gets built
| Route | Live in | Who changes a price? |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant-specific online tool | An evening | You, from your phone |
| General website builder | A weekend | You, once you learn the editor |
| WordPress | A few days | You, plus updates and backups |
| Freelancer | 2 to 6 weeks | Them, when they have time |
| Agency | 6 to 12 weeks | A support ticket |
The right-hand column is the one to decide on. You can recover from almost any other mistake, but a menu you can’t edit yourself goes stale and stays stale.
3. Put the menu in properly
Not a PDF. A PDF is a photo of a menu: a screen reader can’t read it aloud, it pinches and zooms badly on a phone, search engines get very little from it, and changing one price means exporting the whole thing again.
- Every pie and every side as its own item, with its own price.
- Sizes (12, 14, 16, 18 inches) and crusts as options, not as near-duplicate items.
- A short description where it earns its place. Skip it on the cheese pizza.
- A way to mark something sold out without deleting it.
4. Hours that know what time it is
5. Allergens, in writing
The FDA’s 2022 model Food Code asks restaurants to tell customers in writing which of the nine major food allergens (milk, egg, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts, soybeans and sesame) are in unpackaged food, on the menu, a placard or electronically. It applies where your state or county has adopted that edition, and putting the information next to each item on your site is the version that still works on a Friday rush.
What the allergen rules actually require
6. Connect your Google Business Profile
More people will find you through the map than through your site, and the two have to agree. Put the website link on the profile, make sure your name, address and phone number match exactly, and set the same hours, including holiday hours, in both places.
Add structured data that describes the restaurant, its menu and its hours. It lets Google show your hours in the search result instead of guessing them from a paragraph. It is a few lines of markup, and it is the difference between being listed and being shown.
Then check it the way a customer will
Not on the laptop you built it on. On a phone, over cellular data, one-handed, standing in a parking lot. Time how long it takes from tapping the link to seeing a price. If it’s more than about three seconds, nothing else on the page matters yet.
- Does the phone number dial when you tap it?
- Does the address open the maps app?
- Is the open or closed status right, right now?
- Can you find the price of a large pepperoni without pinching the screen?
What to skip
A homepage slideshow nobody swipes. An “Our Story” page about your passion for authentic ingredients. A contact form, when the answer is a phone number. Autoplay music. Tracking scripts you added for analytics you will never open.
The site has one job: say what you make, what it costs, whether you’re open and how to get to you, fast, on a phone, at 7pm on a Friday.