Choose a Restaurant Website Builder in the UK

Picture an owner who spends a Sunday on a website. The builder's front page says £9 a month, the menu goes up, and an order page is added from the app market. Then the owner reaches the part that takes money. On the plans page this guide read, the £9 Light plan does not list Accept payments. Core, at £16, does, and the plan the page itself marks as recommended is Business at £25. Wix's own support page for Wix Restaurants says: "To access advanced features available for Wix Restaurants, upgrade your site to a plan that supports payments." The headline price was never the price of an ordering restaurant.

That is one builder and one step, and the pattern repeats along the route. Booking is a separate product with its own subscription. Online ordering is another. The menu is typed into each, and a sold-out dish has to be switched off in every place that shows it. Card payments add a processing fee on top of every plan, and a domain that is free for the first year can renew at a standard rate in the second. Each item is small. Together they turn a £9 plan into a stack of bills.

Then there is the part no plan page mentions. A site can be live at a working link and still be absent from Google. A 2023 survey by the booking-software vendor ResDiary, based on 827 UK diners and 208 UK hospitality venues, found that "almost half of diners will research a venue by looking at menus online before making a booking". If the menu is a picture, or the page is never indexed, those guests find a directory or a delivery marketplace first. On Uber Eats' own UK merchant page the delivery tier is 30% (33% for Uber One members), so £5,000 of orders routed through that tier is £1,500 of commission in a month.

This guide prices the whole route for an independent UK restaurant: the plan you need on each builder, the booking and ordering tools you add, a twelve-month worked example, the search set-up and the UK legal content.

A general website builder publishes pages for any business. It does not carry the restaurant's operating logic: a menu that knows about allergens and sold-out dishes, a diary that knows your tables, an order page that knows about collection and delivery, and a guest list they all feed. Where a general builder offers bookings or ordering, it does so through an app, a plugin or a link to another provider, each with its own price.

A restaurant platform puts those parts behind one login and one menu. So name the job you actually have: a brochure site (hours, menu, map, phone), a site that takes bookings, a site that takes orders, or a group with more than one site. A builder chosen for the first job gets repriced the moment the second arrives, so ask what it costs by the time it does what you need.

TableSpark is built for the restaurant jobs. Its restaurant website builder starts from a photographed menu, offers 50 templates, and keeps site, menu, bookings, ordering and guest records in one account. Starter is £19 a month excluding VAT. The rest of this guide shows what that is set against.

The table sets out the plan prices each provider shows on its own page, read on 10 October 2026, with the point where a restaurant outgrows the entry plan. The first row is the restaurant platform.

These prices are not like-for-like, because providers charge for different things: a website plan, a booking diary, an ordering page and a restaurant platform are different products, and several of the first are needed to match the last. Read the "Included points" column, not only the price.

Wix shows £9 for Light, £16 for Core, £25 for Business and £119 for Business Elite a month, on a yearly subscription "paid in full at the time of purchase", with prices that "do not include applicable taxes". For a restaurant the step that matters is £9 to £16. Core is 78% dearer than Light and is the lowest plan whose feature list includes Accept payments. A year of Core is £192, excluding VAT and other taxes, paid in one go, and the plan Wix recommends is £300 a year on the same terms. The plans page shows no renewal price and the card rates for Wix Payments in pounds were not read, so no honest twelve-month total can be quoted for a Wix restaurant from the pages read. Wix Restaurants Orders and Wix Table Reservations are both listed as free to install. Free to install is not free to run: the plan under them, the card fees and the search set-up still count.

Squarespace shows two sets of figures. On the pay-annually toggle, Basic is £12, Core £17, Plus £29 and Advanced £79 a month. On monthly billing it is £16, £24, £36 and £89. The annual figures were on screen beside a banner offering 30% off any new website plan, and the undiscounted annual price was not displayed, so they are promotional. For a restaurant the plan that matters is Core: Basic carries a 2% online store transaction fee, and the page says "Upgrade your plan for 0% transaction fees". Moving from Basic to Core adds £5 a month on the annual figures or £8 on monthly billing. The free domain applies in year one on annual terms and "will renew at our standard rate, plus applicable taxes, after the first year". The page lists no restaurant booking or ordering feature.

WordPress.com shows Personal at £3, Premium at £7, Business at £20 and Commerce at £36 a month, billed every 12 months and excluding taxes. Premium adds payment buttons with PayPal and Stripe. Plugins, which is how a booking feature would be added, start at Business, so that plan is £20 a month, more than six times the £3 entry figure, before the plugin is priced. The page shows no renewal price.

Hostinger is the only builder in this research that publishes renewal prices, which makes the gap plain. Premium shows £2.99 a month on a 48-month term: "Get 48 months for £143.52 (regular price £575.52). Renews at £10.99/mo." The renewal is more than three and a half times the headline. Cloud Startup is £7.99 a month on the term and renews at £20.99. The Ecommerce add-on is £1 for three months and renews at £6.99 a month, so a Premium site with the add-on renews at £17.98 a month. The £143.52 prepayment is four years of commitment before the first renewal.

Shopify Basic is £19.00 a month on yearly billing and £25 on monthly billing, with Grow and Advanced at £49 and £259. It is an online store platform, its pricing page lists no restaurant booking feature, and the page text does not say whether the figures are excluding VAT. Square Online has a free plan at £0 and paid plans from £20. The page says all paid plans come with a free custom domain worth £17.95, and it charges 1.4% + 25p on UK cards online. It is a selling-online product, and the page read does not describe table booking.

Nothing in the builder table takes a table booking inside the plan. Squarespace's page lists no restaurant booking or ordering feature, Shopify's lists no booking feature, and WordPress.com says booking needs a plugin it does not price. So the booking diary is a second subscription, and the ordering page a third. These are the ones that publish a price.

A booking diary. simpleERB lists Starter at £21 a month for up to 300 covers, Plus at £47 for 1,200 covers and Pro at £80 for unlimited. Its page describes a free 250-cover trial and no lock-in, and says yearly billing gives a 10% discount. It prices table booking; the menu, the order page and the website are other bills.

An ordering page. Storekit lists Grow at £99 a month and Pro at £199 a month, both excluding VAT and per location, with set-up from £199 per location on Pro and Enterprise. "Every plan adds a flat per-order rate, never a commission", and the page does not state that rate. Flipdish lists plans from £119 a month, billed annually per site, or £139 if billed monthly, excluding VAT, with a branded website, online ordering and its own till, and states no per-order fees or hardware prices. Easy Eatery, a smaller UK restaurant builder, lists £49 a month plus a £499 one-off package, labelled an exclusive lifetime discount with three spots left. Its page says it supports "a small number of payment providers" and that your merchant services "may apply transaction fees for card payments".

Card payments. Stripe's UK standard rate is 1.5% + 20p on UK cards and 2.8% + 20p on premium UK cards. Every route pays a card rate, so it belongs in the budget even though it does not separate the routes.

The marketplace alternative. Uber Eats lists 30% on its delivery tier (33% for Uber One members), 13% on self-delivery and pick-up, and a one-off £650 activation fee excluding VAT. A direct order page exists to avoid paying that on a regular who already knows your name.

TableSpark takes 0% commission on direct bookings and orders; Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.

A table of prices settles nothing until a restaurant is run through it. The assumptions are illustrative, so change them for your own place. The restaurant takes table bookings, takes 200 online orders a month at an average of £25, which is £5,000 of online sales a month, and wants its own domain and a site Google can read.

To keep the comparison clean, every route pays the same card rate, Stripe's standard 1.5% + 20p. On £5,000 across 200 orders that is £75 plus 200 x 20p = £40, so £115 a month and £1,380 over twelve months, assuming every payment is on a standard UK card. A premium card at 2.8% + 20p costs more, so your figure depends on your card mix, and a route whose own page quotes a higher rate, such as Squarespace's 2.0% + £0.25, would cost more than shown. Domain registration is left out of every route because every route needs one. TableSpark sells a .co.uk from £6.33 a year, as its domain tutorial states.

TableSpark Full. Full carries the site, live menu, on-site reservations with deposits, online ordering, table QR ordering, the custom domain with managed SSL, guest records and the search set-up. It is £69 a month excluding VAT, so £69 x 12 = £828 excluding VAT, or £690 excluding VAT paying ten months for twelve. Add £1,380 of card fees and the year is £2,208 on monthly billing or £2,070 on the ten-for-twelve option.

A builder, a booking tool and an ordering platform. Squarespace Core is £24 a month on monthly billing, so £288 a year, or £17 on the promotional annual figure, so £204. simpleERB Starter is £21 a month, so £252. Storekit Grow is £99 a month, so £1,188, using the lowest flat tier because its per-order rate was not stated. The subscriptions total £1,728, or £1,644 with the promotional figure, and the year is £3,108 or £3,024 with card fees.

An ordering platform with its own site, plus a booking tool. Flipdish is £119 a month billed annually, so £1,428, or £139 billed monthly, so £1,668. simpleERB Starter adds £252. The subscriptions total £1,680 or £1,920, and the year is £3,060 or £3,300 with card fees.

A small restaurant builder. Easy Eatery at £49 a month is £588, plus the £499 one-off package, so £1,087 in year one and £2,467 with card fees. The page lists reservations, pre-order management, digital gift vouchers and free SSL. Its price is labelled an exclusive lifetime discount with three spots left, so ask what the price is once those spots are gone.

These figures are not like-for-like because providers charge for different things, and the example is only as good as the 200 orders and the £25 average assumed.

On the two assembled routes, the year is £816 to £1,092 above the TableSpark Full year of £2,208 on monthly billing, and £954 to £1,230 above the ten-for-twelve year of £2,070. That gap is before the items that could not be priced from a published page: the per-order rate on the flat ordering tier, the domain renewal after year one, the specialist work to make the site searchable, and your own hours. The figures are not VAT-equivalent either, since TableSpark's, Storekit's and Flipdish's are stated excluding VAT and the others were not confirmed.

The example is a year of subscriptions. The cash you hand over on day one is a different number. Wix asks for the yearly subscription in full at purchase, so Core is £192, excluding VAT and other taxes, on day one. Hostinger asks for £143.52 for a 48-month term and then renews at £10.99 a month. WordPress.com bills every 12 months. Squarespace shows a pay-monthly toggle beside its annual discount. A free-for-a-year domain adds a renewal date to the calendar.

TableSpark works the other way round: it is free until you publish, a plan only starts when you publish to your live address, and you can cancel any time. You can pay monthly, or pay for ten months and use twelve, which is £190 excluding VAT for Starter, £390 excluding VAT for Growth and £690 excluding VAT for Full. Changes between plans are prorated. For every route, compare the opening cash, the month you can walk away and the first renewal date before you commit.

For the wider question of what a restaurant website costs in the UK across every route, including an agency, read what a restaurant website costs in the UK.

A builder can put a page on the internet. A restaurant needs a site Google can discover, read and understand, and those are different products. A website can be live at a working link and still be absent from Google. Misconfigured robots or noindex directives, conflicting canonical addresses, orphaned pages, rendering problems, missing structured restaurant data or incomplete search verification can leave important pages undiscovered, excluded or misunderstood. Then guests searching your name, menu, cuisine or street may reach directories, commission-charging marketplaces or competing restaurants first, and the restaurant stays dependent on paid discovery instead of owned direct demand. That is a risk, not a certainty for every site, and nobody should promise indexing or rankings.

Google's documentation is plain about what each piece does and does not do.

A robots.txt file "is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google"; to keep a page out you block indexing with noindex or password-protect it. So one wrongly left setting can hide a page. Google "uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking", and it will not load content that needs a swipe, a click or typing. Menu text hidden behind a tap is menu text Google may never see. For structured data, Google's LocalBusiness page lists only two required properties, name and address, with opening hours, telephone, url, menu, cuisine served and price range among the recommended ones. A site with the required two is eligible, not complete.

A complete search-ready set-up on a general builder is therefore a job list: the menu as page text, not a picture; a title and description for every page; canonical addresses that agree; a sitemap and robots rules that stay correct as pages change; Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema with the recommended fields filled; internal links between menu, bookings and location pages; a phone layout that shows the menu without interaction; and search verification finished in Google Search Console. This research found no published price for that work, so it is not given a number. It is a plan upgrade, an app you assemble, a specialist's day rate, or a page that quietly never gets found.

TableSpark bundles that job into the restaurant website on every plan, Starter included: crawlable structured restaurant content, titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots controls, Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema, internal linking, mobile-first output and managed search-verification set-up. A sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console on every publish, and a custom domain gets its own verified property. Indexing and ranking stay decisions for Google. The how it works page shows the order in which this happens on a first publish.

If the restaurant trades as a company, regulation 24(2) of the Company, Limited Liability Partnership and Business (Names and Trading Disclosures) Regulations 2015 says "Every company shall disclose its registered name on its websites", and regulation 25 requires it to disclose on its websites the part of the United Kingdom in which it is registered, its registered number and the address of its registered office.

If you sell online, regulation 6 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 requires a provider to make available, in a form that is "easily, directly and permanently accessible", its name, geographic address, contact details including an email address, a trade register number where registered and, for an activity subject to VAT, its VAT number. Regulation 6(2) says prices must be indicated clearly and unambiguously and show whether they include tax and delivery costs. Whether a brochure-only restaurant site is an information society service is a question for your adviser; this guide does not say it is.

A builder gives you the space and you fill it: registered name, number and office in the footer or on a contact page, an email address, a VAT number if you have one, and prices that say whether they include VAT. TableSpark generates privacy, cookie and terms pages from your store details, marked AUTO in the Builder, so the policies match the site you have.

One cost no plan page prices is the time it takes to change something. Two checks make it concrete.

The 60-second test. With your phone in your hand, change one dish's price, mark one dish sold out and add next bank holiday's closure. Count the places you had to edit. On a stack of three or four tools the answer is three or four, each with its own login.

The sold-out test. When the kitchen runs out of a dish at nine on a Friday, how long before the website, the order page and the booking confirmation stop offering it? On TableSpark the sold-out switch per dish is on every plan: the dish stays on the site, struck through, and stops being ordered. Change a dish or a price once and it updates across every page, with one editor, no developer and unlimited edits on every plan.

The same cost repeats across a stack: the menu typed in again, the hours updated twice, the guest list split between tools. On TableSpark guest records sit under your restaurant's account, visible in its Inbox and guest list, and exportable as a CSV file, so they are your records, in your account, exportable.

Four questions move the cost more than the design does.

Run through this before you pay for any plan.

Where a box stays empty because the work would fall to you, the cost of that assembly belongs in the budget.

These are the screens and fields as they appear in the TableSpark tutorials. Starter covers steps 1 to 5, Growth adds step 6 and the custom domain, and Full adds step 7. Building is free until you publish.

Tips

• Photograph the printed menu flat and in daylight, and check every price against the paper before you apply the scan.
• Write each SEO description as a sentence you would say on the phone, with your cuisine and your town in it.
• Add every bank holiday and closure in one sitting.
• Test the booking form and the order page on your own phone, on mobile data, before you tell anyone the site is live.
• Open Search Console monthly and look at which pages Google lists. Indexing stays Google's decision.
• Export your guest list as a CSV now and then so a copy is always yours.

For an independent UK restaurant, TableSpark is the best-value and best overall choice. This comparison is built on the twelve-month total of the plan that does the job, not on entry prices: a site on your own domain, a live menu, bookings against real tables with deposits, direct ordering, guest records and the search set-up, in one plan, with no second subscription to find and no technician to hire for the part that makes the site findable.

TableSpark starts at £19 a month excluding VAT. Growth is £39 a month excluding VAT for bookings and a custom domain, and Full is £69 a month excluding VAT for ordering and up to five sites. Building is free until you publish. See the pricing page, and read the guides on AI website builders for restaurants, a builder compared with a web designer and online ordering systems.