How much does a restaurant website cost in the UK?

Quotes for restaurant websites vary more wildly than almost any other category. The same brief can come back at £900 from one agency and £12,000 from another, and neither is obviously wrong until you understand what sits behind the number.

Here are the real bands, what moves them, and what to check before signing anything.

The bands

What you get	UK agency	Offshore team
Single-site brochure with a proper menu, contact and booking link	£1,500 – £4,000	£900 – £2,000
Reservations built in, delivery integration, blog, events pages	£4,000 – £8,000	£2,000 – £4,000
Multiple locations, online ordering, loyalty, custom build	£8,000 – £20,000+	£4,000 – £10,000

Broader industry data supports this shape. Clutch data puts most agency web projects under $10,000, and a 2026 survey of over 300 firms found most quoting between $1,000 and $15,000 for fixed-price work. Restaurant sites sit at the lower end because they are structurally simpler than e-commerce — the complexity is in the content, not the code.

What actually pushes the price up

Photography and menu content — the big one

This is the largest variable in every restaurant project, and the one most often left vague in a quote. If you hand over finished photography, a typed menu with prices, and your story copy, the build is fast. If the agency arranges a photographer, writes dish descriptions and produces the About page, add £1,000 to £3,000 and two to four weeks.

Neither is wrong. But it needs deciding at quote stage, because "we'll sort the photos later" is how a six-week project becomes a five-month one.

Reservations

Embedding a widget from a booking provider is straightforward. Building your own table management is a different project entirely, and for almost every independent restaurant the widget is the right answer.

Online ordering

Taking orders directly rather than through a delivery marketplace saves commission, which is the whole reason to do it. But it means payment handling, order routing to the kitchen, and someone answering the phone when it goes wrong at 8pm on a Saturday. Budget for it properly or stay on the marketplaces a while longer.

Multiple locations

Each location realistically needs its own page with its own address, hours, menu variations and Google Business Profile. Three locations is not three times the work, but it is not one page with a dropdown either.

The four costs that are usually left out

1. Hosting and domain. £8 to £30 a month for a typical restaurant site. Small, but it should be in the quote rather than discovered later.
2. Ongoing maintenance. Content management systems need updating and plugins break. Either you are paying someone or you are doing it, and a site nobody maintains becomes a security problem within a year.
3. Photography. A half-day food shoot in the UK typically runs £400 to £900. Worth every penny for a restaurant, and frequently missing from the line items.
4. Redirect mapping. If you already have a site with any traffic, every old URL needs pointing at its new equivalent. Skip it and you lose the rankings the old site earned. It is a few hours of unglamorous work and it is the item most quietly omitted.

Why the same site costs three times more in London

Mostly overheads. Office rent, salaries and employer costs in central London are several times those in most offshore markets, and that flows straight into the day rate. It is rarely a difference in the quality of the code.

What you genuinely pay more for locally is proximity — same time zone, in-person meetings, a legal entity in your jurisdiction. Those are real and worth money to some businesses. They are just not the same thing as a better website.

If you are considering an offshore team, the useful questions are about process rather than price: who is my named contact, what are their working hours in my time zone, do I own the domain and hosting, and can I see three sites they built that are still live today?

What "too cheap" looks like

A £300 restaurant website is a template with your logo dropped in. No menu structure, no redirect plan, no testing on a real phone. That is not always bad — a brand new small café may genuinely need nothing more for its first year.

But the test is not the price. It is whether the person quoting can tell you what they will do about your menu. If the answer is "we'll link your PDF", you are buying something that will be invisible in search, because search engines cannot read a PDF menu as text. Every dish name on it — the exact phrases people type — will not exist as far as Google is concerned.

What a fair proposal contains

• A page list, not a page count
• Who writes the copy and who takes the photographs, stated explicitly
• Which booking or ordering system, by name
• A redirect plan if you have an existing site
• What happens after launch, and for how long
• Confirmation that the domain, hosting and Google Business Profile are registered in your name

That last point is the one to insist on. The most common bad outcome in this industry is not theft — it is an agency going quiet while holding your domain, and discovering you cannot move without their cooperation.

A reasonable budget

For a single independent UK restaurant that wants to be found and take bookings: £1,500 to £3,000 for the build, plus photography if you need it, plus around £20 a month running costs. Six weeks from the day the content is ready.

Spend less and you are buying a template. Spend considerably more and you should be able to point at exactly which feature the extra money bought.