The pizzeria website guide
A pizzeria website exists to answer four questions fast: what you make, what it costs, whether you’re open, and how to get to you. Everything else is optional. This guide covers what it should contain, what it costs, and how to get it live without an agency.
Why a Facebook page isn’t enough
A Facebook page is somebody else’s property, shown to whoever their algorithm decides, and it buries your menu under whatever you last posted. It’s a good place to talk to people who already follow you. It’s a bad place to be found by someone who has never heard of you and is deciding where to eat in ninety seconds.
The specific failure is search: a search engine can’t reliably read your prices, your opening hours or your address from a Facebook post, so it can’t put them in front of someone searching nearby. A web page can say all three in a form machines understand.
What a pizzeria website should contain
- The menu, with prices. Not a PDF. A page, readable on a phone, that you can change in seconds.
- Opening hours per service, with a live open/closed state. Two-service days are the norm, and “12–10pm” when you close at 2pm is how you get a bad review from someone who never ate your food.
- Directions that open in the phone’s navigation app.
- Allergens per dish — a legal requirement under EU Regulation 1169/2011, including for takeaway.
- A phone number that is a link, so tapping it calls you.
- Ordering, if you want it — and ideally without commission.
What it costs
| Route | Setup | Recurring | First-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Specialist online tool | €0 | €0 – 470 | €0 – 470 |
| General website builder | €0 | €200 – 420 | €200 – 420 |
| Self-hosted WordPress | €0 – 300 | €70 – 650 | €70 – 950 |
| Freelancer | €600 – 2,000 | €70 – 400 | €670 – 2,400 |
| Agency | €1,500 – 4,000 | €0 – 960 | €1,500 – 4,960 |
None of these are the biggest number in your year. A pizzeria doing 40 orders a week at €24 through a platform at 30% pays about €15,000 in commission annually — roughly three times the most expensive site in that table, every year.
Domain name or subdomain?
Start on a subdomain if you like — it works, and you can put it on your Google listing today. But register your own .com or country domain early even if you don’t point it anywhere yet. It costs around €12 a year and it is the only part of your online presence nobody can take from you.
Getting found
Local search is the whole game, and it comes down to three things:
- A complete Google Business listing with real hours, recent photos, and your website link. Reply to reviews, including bad ones.
- A fast page. People search on phones, often on poor connections. A site that takes eight seconds has already lost.
- Structured data describing your restaurant, menu and hours, so search engines can display them rather than guess at them.
Notice what isn’t on that list: blogging, keywords stuffed into paragraphs, and paying someone monthly for “SEO”. For a single-location pizzeria, the three above account for nearly all of the result.