How much does a restaurant website cost in 2026?
A UK restaurant website costs roughly £500–£3,000 from a freelancer and £2,000–£6,000 from an agency, or £0–£400 a year on a specialist tool. The spread is not about quality — it is about who makes the changes afterwards. Decide that first and the price follows.
Restaurants are not generic small businesses
Most UK web-design pricing is quoted for a brochure site: five pages, a contact form, done. A restaurant is not that. It is a page whose contents change every week — prices, a dish that is off, Christmas hours, a Tuesday offer — and the cost of a restaurant website is dominated by what each of those changes costs you.
| Route | First year | Cost of a price change |
|---|---|---|
| Specialist restaurant tool | £0 – 400 | Seconds, yourself |
| General website builder | £200 – 420 | Minutes, yourself |
| Self-hosted WordPress | £60 – 850 | Minutes, plus keeping it updated |
| Freelancer | £560 – 3,350 | £40 – 90 an hour, when they are free |
| Agency | £2,000 – 6,900 | A retainer, or a ticket |
Ranges compiled from UK web-design pricing guides, September 2026.
What drives a quote up
- Table booking — usually a third-party widget, £0–£100 a month depending on cover volume. Ask whether the quote includes the subscription.
- Online ordering — the single biggest variable, and the one where commission models hide. Ask for the percentage, not the monthly fee.
- Multiple sites — a group needs shared branding and separate menus, hours and addresses. Genuinely more work.
- Photography and copy — often excluded from the quote and then quietly your problem. Confirm in writing.
- Multilingual — real cost, and worth it in tourist areas.
What does not drive it up, and should not
Being findable is not a premium feature. Structured data describing the restaurant, its menu and its opening hours is a few lines of markup and it is what lets search engines show your hours directly. Any quote that lists "SEO" as a monthly retainer for a single-site restaurant deserves a specific question: what, concretely, will you do each month?
For one location the honest answer is that after the first month there is very little to do beyond keeping the Google Business listing accurate and the site fast. That is not a retainer.
Set a budget in the right order
- Work out what you currently pay in delivery commission per year. For most places this dwarfs every number in this article.
- Decide who edits the menu. If the answer is not "someone in the building", stop and reconsider the route.
- Buy the domain yourself, in the restaurant's name, today. £10 and it is the one asset nobody can take from you.
- Then choose a build route, knowing the first two answers.