Restaurant website creation

Most of your future customers start their search online, whether on Google, Google Maps or a recommendation engine. A restaurant without its own website lets third-party platforms control that first impression, choosing which information to show, in what order, and with which competitors displayed right underneath. With your own site you control that first impression from start to finish, you show your menu exactly the way you want it, you display up-to-date opening hours, and you offer direct booking without pushing the customer through a middleman.

Instagram and Facebook are great for building a community and showing the daily life of the restaurant, but they don't replace a website for one simple reason: social networks aren't designed for someone to find your opening hours, your dessert menu or the booking link in under ten seconds. A customer looking for a place to eat tonight won't scroll your Instagram feed, they'll type your restaurant name into Google and expect a clear page with everything they need to decide.

A website is also the only online space you actually own. If Instagram changes its algorithm tomorrow, if TripAdvisor modifies its terms, if a booking platform raises its commission, your website keeps working exactly the way you set it up. That stability is what justifies the investment for any restaurant that plans to be around for more than a season, and it's a foundation that no social media presence can replace.

The return on investment is direct and measurable. A well-built site, properly indexed on Google and linked to your Google Business Profile, generates a steady flow of new customers who wouldn't have discovered your restaurant otherwise. The cost of that site, detailed below, pays for itself within the first weeks for a restaurant that already has regulars and simply wants to be found by people who don't know about it yet.

For a restaurant that simply wants an online presence with a menu, opening hours, a few photos and a booking link, off-the-shelf platforms like Squarespace or Wix offer plans between 150 and 400 francs per year, hosting and domain name included. The result is functional, quick to set up and sufficient for an establishment that's just starting out or testing its online presence without committing a large budget. The limits show up when you want a design that doesn't look like the restaurant next door, or features these platforms don't natively support.

A custom restaurant website, designed and coded specifically for your establishment, costs between 2,000 and 8,000 francs depending on the number of pages, the design complexity and the features built in. For a five to seven page showcase site with an original design, an interactive menu, a booking module, professional photography showcased properly and well-configured local SEO, expect between 2,000 and 4,000 francs. Beyond that, you're looking at sites that include online ordering, event booking, multiple languages or integrations with POS software.

What drives the price is mainly the level of design customisation, the number of languages, French and German are often needed for restaurants in Switzerland, and the integration of third-party tools like an ordering system, a proprietary booking module or a connection with your POS software. A bilingual site naturally costs more than a single-language one, and an online ordering system with payment processing requires more technical work than a simple link to an existing platform.

On top of the creation costs, add the recurring expenses that keep the site online: between 10 and 50 francs per month for hosting, 10 to 30 francs per year for the domain name, and between 50 and 150 francs per month if you hand over technical maintenance and content updates to your web partner. These costs exist with off-the-shelf solutions too, usually as a monthly subscription, but they're often less visible because they're bundled into a single plan. For a complete cost overview, see the article on how much a website costs or request a quote.

The first and most common mistake is a site that takes more than three seconds to load on a phone. A customer looking for a restaurant while walking down the street won't wait for your homepage to finish loading, they'll move on to the next result in Google and book with your competitor. Loading speed depends directly on code quality, image weight and hosting performance, three things a custom site handles far better than a solution overloaded with plugins.

The second mistake is posting your menu only as a PDF. A PDF is a static document that Google doesn't read as well as a real web page, that phone users have to zoom in to decipher, and that you have to replace manually every time a dish changes. A menu written directly in the page, with prices, descriptions and allergen information, is easier to read, easier to update and far better understood by search engines.

Displaying outdated information is a mistake that costs dearly in trust. Summer hours still showing in November, a menu that no longer matches what you actually serve, a phone number that's changed or a booking link that leads to an error page, each of these details gives the customer the impression that the restaurant isn't serious. The site needs to be an exact reflection of what's happening in the dining room today, and keeping it updated is a normal part of maintaining a professional website.

Finally, not using the data your site provides is a missed opportunity. An analytics tool like Google Analytics or Plausible shows how many people visit your site each week, which pages they look at first, what search brought them there and how many of them click the booking button. This information guides your decisions: if your brunch page is the most visited but you don't yet offer online booking for Sundays, you know exactly what to fix first.