Building a restaurant site

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Building a restaurant site

Last updated March 04, 2026 21:53

Establish your restaurant's online presence to share menus, take reservations, and promote specials.

A beautiful site extends your restaurant's brand and helps customers find your menu, locations, hours of operation, and latest specials. Use integrations like Tock or OpenTable to add reservations, takeout and delivery orders, and more to your site.

This guide reviews how to pick a starting design and how to set up other features tailored specifically for restaurant websites.

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Start with a restaurant design

While all Squarespace sites have the built-in design tools to create an exciting, original restaurant site, you may want to start with a design from the Restaurants category of the template store. These food-focused designs show off your cuisine while keeping key details front and center.

To get started, visit the template store and select Restaurants in the menu on the left. This filters the designs to only show restaurant-focused templates. Click Preview on any design, or click Start With to create a new site using that design.

To learn more, visit Choosing the right template.

Tip: Find more inspiration for your site or start with templates from our Squarespace Collection collaborations.

Choose a website billing plan with features you need

When upgrading your website to paid service, keep in mind some features mentioned in this guide are premium features, including:

• Menu blocks for displaying your menus
• Built-in commerce features for selling food and perishables online

If you need those features, we recommend subscribing to a Basic, Core, Plus, Advanced, Business, Commerce Basic, or Commerce Advanced plan. To learn more, visit Choosing the right Squarespace plan. You can change your billing plan at any time if you decide you don't need those features later.

Keep in mind, Tock is a separate subscription, and you can use its integrations with Squarespace regardless of your website plan. To learn more, review Tock's plans.

Display hours and location

You can prominently display your hours and location information in several ways:

• Create a page with a contact layout so visitors can find this information on your navigation menu.
• Add a text block and map block to a blank layout page, then set that page as your homepage.
• Add a contact section to any page.
• Add your hours and location to your footer, making them visible from every page of your site.

Add your menus

Use a menu section or page layout to create clear, stylish menus that blend with your site’s design. These sections include a menu block where you can add your restaurant's menu. Unlike .pdfs, all text in the menu block is indexable by search engines, which can help your SEO.

If you have more than one menu, you can place multiple pages with menu blocks in a dropdown to create a drop-down menu. To learn more, visit Adding dropdowns to your navigation.

You can also create a QR code that links diners to your digital menu.

Tip: You can embed a menu that offers online ordering functionality by connecting the Allday Ordering extension. While we work with third-party services to ensure Squarespace Extensions work properly, extensions fall outside our scope of support. We can help with connecting or disconnecting your extensions. For all other questions, contact the extensions provider directly.

Take reservations and online orders

You can use third-party integrations or extensions to set up reservations, online orders, or both on your site:

• Allday Ordering - Add online ordering and management to your site.
• ChowNow - Add a ChowNow page to your website for online orders.
• OpenTable blocks - Take reservations on your site.
• Tock blocks - Take reservations on your site and link to your Tock page for online orders.

If you use another external ordering service, add a navigation link to highlight your delivery options on every page of your site.

To link to your online order page in your site navigation:

1. Open the Pages panel.
2. Click + next to Main Navigation.
3. In the menu, select Link.
4. In the link editor, enter the navigation link text under Link Title, like Delivery or Order Now.
5. Under URL, add the URL visitors should use to place an order. This is sometimes called your “ordering link.”
6. Click Save.
7. To change the placement of your link in the navigation menu, click and drag it in the Pages panel.

For more help with navigation links, including how to create them in the Squarespace app, visit Adding links to your navigation.

Take reservations or orders via phone or email

If you'd like customers to call or email to make reservations or orders, display an email address and phone number on the homepage or contact page. This can help your business feel friendly and accessible.

For help formatting email addresses and phone numbers as links, visit Adding links to your site.

Use imagery

Beautiful images help promote your restaurant's identity, space, and cuisine. Use the following features to add images:

• Use gallery sections to display images of your location and top menu items. If you want to pair more text with your images, use auto layouts.
• Add image blocks to other sections of your site to showcase individual images.
• Combine text and imagery on any page by creating a section with a background image or video.

Promote your restaurant with engaging content

Create professional quality content to showcase your menu and your space with the Marketing Kit in the iOS Squarespace app. Feature the content on your site, or share it on your social media platforms.

Sell food and perishables online

You can sell items directly to customers through your site without solely relying on local retailers. Here are a few tips:

• If you sell products customers buy regularly, like coffee, create subscription products to bring in predictable, recurring revenue
• Display a stocklist to list retailers that carry your products
• Create regional shipping zones to offer location-based shipping, delivery, or pickup options
• Sell gift cards for customers to use on your online store

To learn more about adding an online store to your site, visit Getting started with Squarespace Commerce.

Promote your social media presence

If your restaurant is active on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, or other social media platforms, you can promote your profiles by displaying social icons. To learn more, visit Adding social icons.

Optimize for search engines

Including your physical location on your site helps Google identify your location and promote your results in local searches. Although search engines use complex algorithms and results can't be guaranteed, adding your contact info to third-party platforms like Google Business Profile, verifying your site with Google Search Console, and following these best practices can help your restaurant's search ranking.

Next steps

This is just the beginning of your restaurant's new site. Every restaurant is different, and you can use the following guides to customize your site for your unique vision:

• Promote specials or adjusted hours with an announcement bar.
• Add more pages for content like “Press,” “Private Events,” or an “About” page.
• Register your domain through Squarespace, or transfer a custom domain you already own.
• Visit our Getting started tutorial series for general tips on getting your site up and running.

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Building a restaurant site