How Much Does a Restaurant Website Cost, and How Long Does It Take?

Every restaurant owner who has priced this up has had the same afternoon: three quotes, three very different numbers, and no way to tell which one is sensible.

Here is what the options actually cost, what they take, and the cost nobody puts in the quote.

What are the options, and what does each cost?

An agency. A few thousand up front, four to eight weeks, and a monthly retainer if you want changes. You get something genuinely good. You also get a process: briefs, revisions, and a person to email every time a price changes.

A freelancer. Less money, usually a few hundred to low thousands, and faster. The risk is what happens in month seven when you need the hours changed and they have moved on to a full-time job.

A DIY builder. Squarespace, Wix, WordPress. Twenty-four to thirty-six a month paying month to month, a few dollars less if you commit to a year up front, plus a domain, plus your weekend. This is the one most owners try, and it is the one most owners abandon half-built, because "drag the block where you want it" assumes you know where you want it.

Doing nothing. Free. Costs you every person who searched, found no hours, and went somewhere else.

What does nobody put in the quote?

Maintenance. Not the hosting bill, the attention.

A restaurant site is not a brochure. Prices move. The kitchen closes early. You add a Sunday brunch. Someone has to change those, and that someone is you at 11pm or your developer at an hourly rate.

This is why most restaurant websites are wrong. Not badly made, just out of date, which from the customer's side is the same thing. A site listing hours you stopped keeping in March is actively worse than no site.

What should a cheap restaurant website cost?

If all you need is a page that tells people what you serve, what it costs, whether you are open and how to get there, then the honest answer is: not much, and not a weekend.

That is what the PostMyPlatter Website plan is priced at. US$19.99 a month, no setup fee, no contract, cancel any time. That includes your address at yourname.postmyplatter.com and the hosting. There is nothing else to buy.

How long does it take to set up?

Minutes, and we will be specific about which minutes.

1. Pick your address. It is checked as you type.
2. Add a cover photo.
3. Pick a style and a color palette. Four styles, five palettes, every combination checked so the text stays readable.
4. Type your opening hours.
5. Add your menu.
6. Press publish.

Steps one to four are a few minutes of typing. The menu is the honest variable, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: thirty dishes typed out is thirty dishes typed out. Two things make it survivable. You start from a sample menu based on your cuisine, so you are renaming real rows rather than staring at a blank screen. And you do not have to type it at all, because up to five photographs of your physical menu board work instead. For a truck with one board, that is the whole job.

Do I need a developer, an agency or any coding skills?

None of them. You can do this without a developer, without an agency and without any technical or coding skills. No domain to purchase. No server to maintain. No code to write, and none to change later. No builder to learn.

If you can fill in a form, you can do this, and so can anyone on your team.

Who keeps it up to date after it goes live?

This is the part that decides whether a site is worth having in six months.

Your posts keep it current. Every food post you make in PostMyPlatter lands on the page the moment you save it, newest first, with today's special promoted to the top. There is no second step to remember.

Everything else runs from the same app you already post with. Change your hours, add a dish, mark something sold out, or schedule a holiday closure weeks ahead and forget it. No dashboard to learn, nothing to redeploy, nobody to email.

You also get a QR code menu: a code that opens your menu rather than your homepage, and a printable table card carrying your logo, name, address and phone. A6 at print resolution, four to a sheet, black and white so it runs off the back-office printer.

Agency, DIY builder or PostMyPlatter Website plan?

	Agency	DIY builder	Website plan
Up front	Thousands	Free to start	Nothing
Ongoing	Retainer	$24/mo and up, plus domain cost	$19.99/mo
Time to live	Weeks	A weekend, optimistically	Minutes
Who keeps it current	They do, billed	You do, in theory	Your posts do

The last row is the one to read twice. A cheaper site that goes stale is not cheaper.

See it before you decide. Three sample restaurant pages, or what the Website plan includes.

Also worth reading: how to create a restaurant website without any coding skills, and do you need a website if you already have Instagram?