As a restaurant owner or operator, you’ve probably been searching all over the web trying to find the best web hosting for restaurants. It’s pretty confusing, right?
There are different sites telling you to go with a site builder like Wix or Squarespace, while other sites are saying that building your own restaurant website on WordPress is the way to go…
So, that leaves the question: “What is truly the best web hosting for a restaurant website?” And on top of that, “Who is the best hosting company for restaurants?”
In order to help you answer those exact questions (and more), we’ve broken done some of the most popular web hosting companies for restaurants in a way that’s easy-to-understand so you can choose the best restaurant website host for your needs!
One super quick thing before we proceed—if you’re nice enough to click one of our links on this page and buy web hosting for your restaurant or food-business, we might get a commission from that company. This doesn’t affect our recommendations in any way whatsoever, and we’d totally be thankful if you did 😊
Now, let’s dive right into the hosts!
Choosing the Best Website Hosting for Your Restaurant—Recommended Hosting Companies
The way we see it, there are really three different options when it comes to restaurant web hosting companies—and all three are excellent options—it really just depends on what you need.
For example—are you going to be doing online ordering from your website, or is it just a placeholder with a PDF menu that’s relatively static? Are you going to allow customers to make reservations on your website?
All of these factors come into play when choosing a restaurant web host, and we take our recommendations VERY seriously. Despite many companies offering us money over and over again, we only recommend companies that we know offer high quality, affordable hosting for restaurants. Here are our recommendations:
Most affordable option for small-to-medium restaurants: Bluehost
One of our absolute favorite web hosts for restaurants (or anything) is Bluehost. We use them all the time, and they’re top-notch with US-based 24/7 telephone support. If you have a small to medium size restaurant and want the best hosting for the money, Bluehost is 100% your best option. Any even better, they’re only $2.95/month with our Bluehost coupon. They would probably be our #1 pick overall for restaurant web hosting. Check them out!
Medium-to-high-end option for medium to large restaurants: SiteGround
If you’ve got a medium-to-large restaurant, and get a lot of traffic to your website, you may want to consider SiteGround—especially if you want to do have “techie” features like online ordering, reservations etc. Bluehost can definitely do it, but if you get a lot of traffic to your restaurant website, SiteGround might be a little better equipped for that. They’re amazing, and one of our all-time favorite web hosts. Our coupon link gives you SiteGround for as little as $6.99/month. Take a minute to check them out!
Best High-End Option for Hosting Restaurant Websites on WordPress: WP Engine
If you’re on this page looking for hosting, you’re probably familiar with WordPress (the web’s most popular website platform). If you have a small-to-large restaurant website, Bluehost or SiteGround will do an excellent job on WordPress—there’s no doubt about that. But if you want the top-end WordPress hosting with all the bells and whistles, WP Engine is (in our opinion), as good as it gets if you need high-end restaurant WordPress website hosting. With our exclusive WP Engine coupon, you can get a whopping 4 months free when paying annually, for a cost of only $20/month. Check out WP Engine for your restaurant today!
Restaurant Website Builders vs. Hosting Your Own Site—Which Should You Choose?
This is an important question to think about—should you use one of the pre-fab, site builders like Wix, Squarespace, etc. or should you build your own site on a platform like WordPress, on your own server/hosting?
Our strong recommendation is to build your own website on a popular platform like WordPress, on your own server. Let’s take a look at why we recommend this:
1) You have a LOT more flexibility for design options
When you’re using a site builder like Squarespace or Wix, you are limited to a small amount of templates that they choose for you, and you’re limited on the customizations that you can make on these templates.
What this means is that although you can make different customizations via their editors, your site often ends up looking like everyone else’s, which isn’t a good thing in the restaurant business.
The reason this is true is because in order to allow people to make changes with little technical expertise, they need to keep things simple and limit the number of templates that are available and customizations that can be made. This keeps the code simpler on their end, so they try to pick templates that people would be most happy with—but this doesn’t end up working for everyone, and again—it limits choice.
Alternatively, when you build your own restaurant website, on your own hosting, on a platform like WordPress, the options are pretty unlimited in terms of what you can do.
Yes, it does require more technical expertise, and yes—this is something you need to plan for, but we believe that the ability to build EXACTLY what you want outweighs the ease of using a site builder. There are so many amazing WordPress tutorials on YouTube nowadays (even some great ones on our site), that it’s easier than ever to set up your own restaurant website. Let’s move onto reason #2 why we recommend building your own site.
2) You have a LOT more flexibility for various features
Aside from the design, you can add an endless amount of features and integrations to your website if it’s on your own server, and this isn’t something that you can easily do if you’re not using your own web hosting for your restaurant website.
For example, what if you want to integrate with an online ordering service and Squarespace doesn’t allow it? Well, you’re stuck then…
What if you want to allow users to book reservations on your website, and it’s not an option on Wix or whatever site builder you’ve chosen? Well, again—you’re out of luck.
What if you want to have a slick menu that has some really cool features in it that that give users nutrition or allergy information? Well, that’s a custom thing and isn’t really possible on site builders. We think you’re probably getting the point here…but the gist of it is that if you want to give your visitors the best user experience, then creating your own site on your own restaurant web hosting account is the best way.
3) It can be cheaper in the long run if you’re doing it yourself
Really, the best argument in favor of a site builder is that you can get up and running with your website without much technical expertise, which is true to an extent. But the way that we see it—that’s about the only benefit.
It can be really good to learn some basic web design skills on your own, and it doesn’t take much work with all of the free tutorials online available nowadays.
When you sign up for something like Bluehost for $2.95/month, you can save a lot of money in the long run over the cost of a business site builder like Squarespace—many of their plans are nearly $20 or more per month!
Also, if you don’t have the knowledge required to run your restaurant website, and don’t intend on gaining it (which we don’t recommend), there are generally people around (college students, potential restaurant employees) who are tech savvy enough to run/build/maintain your website for free or a low cost, and you can still come out ahead of the cost of a site builder with a MUCH better site in the end.
Selecting the Best Web Hosting for Restaurants: Frequently Asked Questions
Before we end this guide on choosing web hosting for restaurant websites, we wanted to take some time and cover some popular questions surrounding the topic. Without further ado, here’s the restaurant web hosting FAQ:
1) What if I change my mind about the restaurant web hosting I bought? What if I decide to go a different route?
All three of the hosts we recommend for restaurant website hosting (Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine) all offer the option of a money-back guarantee. You need to view the specific terms on their websites, but it’s generally something similar to a 30-day guarantee etc. So, you’ve really got nothing to lose buy trying them out and building your own restaurant website!
2) What if it turns out that it’s too hard for me to build my own restaurant website?
Well—we don’t think it is—we think you can do it! Again, there are SO many amazing, free tutorials on the web now help you understand how to quickly get your own website up and running, it’s easier now than ever!
But, as we mentioned above—if you truly feel like it’s something that you’re not up to doing, all of the hosts we recommend above have the option to get a refund within an initial time period.
We’d also like to mention that they all three have *amazing* tech support, so if you’re confused in the process about anything, they’re available to help! We have used their tech support time and again, and have found all three to be incredibly helpful.
3) What’s the most secure way to host a restaurant website?
We recommend using an SSL certificate (available for free at all three of those hosting companies) as well as taking various steps to secure your web server and files.
All three of the restaurant web hosts we recommend have information on the topic and their tech support is super helpful with it comes to website security.
4) How does all this work with a custom domain name?
When you’re hosting your restaurant website, you’ll need to have a custom domain name such as a .com, etc. With the hosts we recommended, 2/3 of them (Bluehost and SiteGround) allow you to register domains AND sign up for hosting—in fact, sometimes they even offer a free domain when you buy hosting!
Once you have a domain name, you’ll need to take the time to connect it to your hosting accounting using the Domain Name System (DNS) so that when sometime types your restaurant domain name in their browser, they’ll be connected to your website.
This sounds a bit technical but it’s SUPER easy, and there are a lot of great tutorials for it available online in many different places. If you’re having trouble with this and you’ve purchased hosting from one of our recommended providers, their tech support gurus can easily help point you in the right direction.
Keep in mind that even if you use a site builder, you’ll still need to deal with pointing your domain name to a specific server—site builders don’t make this part any easier. You can also use a registrar like NameCheap (our favorite) to register your domain name if you haven’t already done so.
5) What if I’m currently with a different restaurant hosting company? Can I move to one of the ones you recommend?
Absolutely! All three of the companies that we recommend (Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine) will all assist with migrating a site from a different hosting company.
This is a pretty easy process to do, but if you’re not up to the task their tech support is extremely good at helping with migrations.
That concludes our guide on choosing the best web hosting for restaurants, and we hope it was informative—and of course, we wish you best on getting your awesome restaurant website live in no time!
Gentry 
Gentry