In short. Four routes. A site you build yourself on Wix or Squarespace costs 30 to 60 € a month, forever, and takes a weekend. A well kept Google listing is free and essential, but it is not a website. A generalist agency charges 1,200 to 3,500 € once, over three to eight weeks. A custom build starts at 450 € with me, in two to six weeks, and the code belongs to you. The deciding factor is not the monthly price, it is what you keep on the day you leave.
The advertised price is almost never the expensive part.
The question that actually decides it: at the end, who owns the site? I have watched owners pay 40 € a month for four years, close to 2,000 €, and walk away with nothing. No files, no code, no guest list.
I build restaurant websites, so I have a stake in your answer. Saying it up front. Here are the four real routes, what they cost, and what they leave you with.
1. DIY website builders
Wix, Squarespace. Roughly 30 to 60 € a month.
Fastest route there is. Pick a template, drop in photos, live by Sunday night. For a bistro with no online presence, a clean Wix site beats nothing by a distance. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.
The limits show up later. Restaurant templates all look alike, and your future guest checks four places before choosing. Local visibility plateaus because everyone shares the same structure. And the subscription never ends. You are not buying a site, you are renting one.
The thing nobody checks before signing: ask whether you can export your guest list and your content, and in what format. The answer decides whether you can ever leave.
Best for: recently opened, tight budget, needs to exist now.
2. Google listings and directories
Free, and not a website.
Plenty of owners believe they have a site when what they have is a page on someone else's. Uber Eats, Deliveroo, TripAdvisor: these are channels, not your home.
Your Google Business Profile, though, is essential and free. Fill it in properly: current menu, exact hours, real photographs, replies to reviews. On "restaurant + your city" searches it often carries more weight than the site itself.
It does not replace one. It sends people somewhere, and that somewhere should be yours.
3. Generalist web agencies
Between 1,200 and 3,500 € to build, paid once.
A local agency, usually WordPress. You pay once, the site is yours, and you decide afterwards about maintenance.
The upside is real: someone handles it, you have a person to call, the result is not a template. So is the downside. Plenty of generalist agencies have never worked with a restaurant and hand you an elegant brochure site that ignores the menu changing every six weeks, allergen requirements, and the fact that 80 percent of your visitors are on a phone hunting for your opening hours at 7pm on a Friday.
Ask to see two restaurant sites they built. Not law firms, not plumbers. Restaurants. And ask who holds the domain name and the hosting when the contract ends.
4. Specialist custom development
With me, from 450 €. Elsewhere, the agency range.
This is my trade, so read it with that in mind.
A Next.js build loads faster than WordPress carrying a stack of plugins, which matters when someone looks you up on mobile data in the street. The code belongs to you. No mandatory subscription keeps it alive. And I build it to be readable by Google and by ChatGPT and Perplexity, which started mattering properly in 2026. More on that on my SEO and GEO services page.
The genuine drawback is time. Two to six weeks, not a weekend. And it needs real photographs and real copy, which many owners do not have ready. That is almost always what stretches a project, never the development.
Examples: Le Jardin Secret and Maison Lumière. Demos rather than clients, and I would rather say so. Real projects sit in my case studies.
What I deliver and at what price: restaurant website creation.
The four options compared
The same table, row by row: what each route costs, whether you own the site at the end, and how long until you are live.
- Wix / Squarespace: 30 to 60 € a month, forever. You do not own the site. Live in a weekend.
- Google Business Profile: free. Not a website. Filled in within an hour.
- WordPress agency: 1,200 to 3,500 € once. You own the site. Three to eight weeks.
- Custom development: from 450 € once. You own the site. Two to six weeks.
What about online bookings?
That is the question that arrives right after the website, and it deserves separate treatment.
If you take fewer bookings than you can handle by phone during service, a visible number and a simple form are enough. Do not buy a tool for a problem you do not have.
Beyond that you need a real booking system. I install Riziva on the sites I build, at 89 € a month with no per cover commission. Whatever tool you choose, the thing to examine is the billing model. A flat subscription tells you what you pay. A per cover commission rises exactly when your restaurant does well: a 40 cover Saturday costs you more than a dead Tuesday, though the software did identical work.
Run the numbers on your real volume before signing anything, not on the headline price.
The calculation nobody offers to do with you
Take your monthly subscription, whatever it is. Add variable commissions if you pay any. Multiply by 36 months.
Compare that to a site you own outright.
A 50 € monthly subscription comes to 1,800 € over three years, and you still own nothing at the end. At 129 €, it is 4,644 €. None of that condemns anyone: if the tool saves you two hours a day, it pays for itself. Just do the sum instead of choosing on instinct.
My own prices are public for comparison: see pricing.
How to actually choose
You open in three weeks with nothing. Wix, plus your Google profile, and revisit in a year. An imperfect site that exists beats a perfect one still being discussed.
Your site is six years old and invisible on Google. That is a rebuild, and no subscription replaces it. See my guide on restaurant website development.
You want to own it. Custom or agency, paid once, and you stop paying rent to exist.
Still unsure? Send me your restaurant's address and where you are today. I will tell you honestly which of the four suits you, even when it is not mine. Write to me here, I reply within 24 hours.
The detail of how I work and what it costs: restaurant website creation.
