The pizzeria website guide: what to put on it and what it costs
A pizzeria website has one job: answer four questions fast. What do you make, what does it cost, are you open right now, and how do I get there or get it delivered? Everything else is optional. This guide covers what the site should contain, what it really costs compared with app commissions, and how to get it live and found without hiring an agency.
Why a Facebook page or an app listing isn’t enough
A Facebook page is somebody else’s property, shown to whoever the algorithm picks, and it buries your menu under whatever you posted last. It’s a fine place to talk to people who already follow you. It’s a poor place to be found by someone who has never heard of you and is deciding where to eat in the next ninety seconds.
A DoorDash or Uber Eats listing has the opposite problem: it is easy to find, but it isn’t yours. The platform decides where you rank, it shows your customer a dozen competitors on the way to your menu, and it takes a percentage of every order, including the ones from regulars who would have ordered from you anyway.
What a pizzeria website should contain
- The menu, with prices and sizes. Not a PDF. A page that reads on a phone, with sizes in inches (12, 14, 16, 18), that you can change in seconds when cheese goes up again.
- Hours per day, with a live open or closed state. “11am to 10pm” when you actually close between lunch and dinner on Mondays is how you get a one-star review from someone who never tasted your pizza.
- Directions that open straight in the phone’s maps app, and a note about parking if it’s tricky.
- Allergen information. Customers with one of the nine major food allergens need to know what is in each pie, and many state and local health codes now expect you to tell them. See the allergen guide for what applies to you.
- A phone number that is a link, so tapping it calls you.
- Online ordering, if you want it, ideally without commission.
What the apps cost compared with a site
Website prices vary from free tools to agency projects in the thousands, and the website cost guide breaks them down. But the number that matters most in a year is rarely the website. It is the commission on orders that go through a marketplace. DoorDash, for example, publishes three plans for restaurants:
| Plan | Delivery orders | Pickup orders |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | 15% | 6% |
| Plus | 25% | 6% |
| Premier | 30% | 6% |
Take a pizzeria doing 40 delivery orders a week at a $30 average ticket on the Plus plan. That is $300 a week, or $15,600 a year, in commission alone. Move even half of those orders to your own site and the savings pay for any website on the market many times over.
Your own domain or a subdomain?
Start on a free subdomain if you like: it works today and you can put it on your Google Business Profile right away. But register your own .com early, even if you don’t point it anywhere yet. It costs little, and it is the only part of your online presence nobody can take away from you, not a platform, not a landlord, not an ex-partner who set up the Facebook page.
Getting found
Local search decides almost everything, and it comes down to three things:
- A complete Google Business Profile with real hours, holiday hours, recent photos and your website link. Answer reviews, including the bad ones.
- A fast page. People search on phones, often on a weak signal in a parking lot. A site that takes eight seconds to load has already lost the order.
- Structured data that describes your restaurant, menu and hours in a format search engines read, so they can show those details instead of guessing.
Notice what isn’t on that list: blogging every week, keywords stuffed into paragraphs, or paying someone monthly for “SEO.” For a single-location pizzeria, those three items account for nearly all of the result.