How much does a restaurant website cost in 2026? Real quotes from 60 agencies

We sent the same brief — single-location bistro, 80 seats, needs reservations, online ordering, mobile-first — to 60 agencies and freelancers across the US, UK, and Australia in February 2026. Quotes ranged from $0 to $42,000.

The median was $4,800. The mode was around $3,500. Neither tells you what's worth paying for. Here's the actual breakdown.

The four price tiers we found

• $0–$500: DIY templates (Squarespace, Wix, Webflow templates). Works if you have one location, simple menu, and someone in-house who can keep it updated.
• $1,500–$4,000: boutique freelancer or solo designer. You get a custom layout but usually a generic stack, manual menu updates, and no integrations.
• $5,000–$15,000: small agency. Custom design, POS integration, online ordering, basic SEO. This is the sweet spot for most independents.
• $20,000+: full-service agency. Multi-location, multilingual, custom CMS, ongoing retainer. Worth it for groups, rarely worth it for a single location.

What drives cost more than the agency tier

Two restaurants got quotes 3× apart from the same agency. The difference wasn't design — it was integrations.

• Photography — a half-day shoot with a food photographer adds $800–$2,500 but lifts conversion more than any design refresh.
• POS / reservations integrations — Toast, Square, OpenTable, Resy. Each integration is a 4–10 hour build. Bundling 3 of them is the single biggest line item after design.
• Accessibility (WCAG AA) — adds 10–15% to total cost but is increasingly required by law in California, Colorado, and the EU.
• Multilingual — Spanish, Mandarin, French. Costs scale linearly. Skip unless your neighborhood data justifies it.
• Ongoing CMS access — paying $200/mo for someone to update menus is more expensive over 3 years than paying $1,500 once for a self-serve CMS.

What we'd actually do

If we were starting today with a single-location bistro, we'd spend $1,200 on Squarespace + a paid template, $1,800 on a half-day food shoot, and $0 on integrations beyond what the platform includes natively. Total: $3,000, about 18 hours of effort, replaceable if it doesn't perform.

The trap is custom websites that are too expensive to throw away. Restaurants change menus, concepts, and names more often than agencies want to admit. Build for replaceability.