Restaurant website questions, answered

1. But I saw one that builds a website in 60 seconds, free

You did, and it is real. The 60 seconds is also a draft. You type your restaurant name, pick a cuisine, and the tool fills a template with stock photography and placeholder hours. What it is not yet is a working restaurant site: your menu is not in it, your prices are not in it, and nothing can take an order.

Online ordering is the part that matters and the part that takes longest. Most of the big builders quote around 72 hours to switch ordering on, because there is an account review behind it. That is not a criticism of them. It is just a different number from sixty seconds, and it is the one to plan around.

Who owns the site at the end

This is the question that decides everything else. On a hosted builder the site is a page inside their product: you have an account, not an asset. If you stop paying, or they close the free tier, it goes dark and takes its search history with it. When a URL disappears, Google eventually drops it, and the position you built for "tacos near me" over two years starts again from zero on whatever you build next.

Free until you take money

Read any free builder's pricing page to the bottom. Free covers the brochure: photos, hours, a map. The moment there is a transaction you are inside their payment system on their terms, and the fee schedule appears. That is simply how a free product pays for itself, and it is better assumed than discovered in month four.

When the free builder is the right answer

Honestly: if you are testing whether a food idea works at all, or you are a market stall doing six weekends a year, use it. It is faster than us and it costs nothing. There is no sense paying for a permanent asset before you know the business is permanent. It stops making sense once the site carries real money and real repeat customers. At that point you are running your storefront on someone else's lease.

2. What happens to my site if I stop paying you?

Nothing, because there is nothing to stop paying. You pay once and the site is yours. Three things end up in your name, and all three matter:

• The domain, registered to you as the owner. If we vanished tomorrow it stays yours.
• The hosting account: your account, your login, not held through us.
• The site files and database. Standard WordPress, not a proprietary format, so it can be backed up and moved to any host on earth.

So what does still cost money?

Two things, neither paid to us: hosting, typically $3 to $15 a month depending on the plan, and the domain, usually $10 to $20 a year. Most packages include the first year of both, so you will not see a bill until roughly twelve months after launch, and it comes from the hosting company, not from us.

The one case where a site does go dark

If the hosting bill goes unpaid the host will suspend the account, usually after a grace period and several emails. Paying the bill brings everything back exactly as it was. If it goes unpaid long enough that the account is deleted, the files go with it, which is why every build we hand over includes a backup you keep your own copy of. With the backup and the domain you can be live again on a new host in an afternoon.

And if you stop working with me?

You take the site with you and nothing changes on the screen. No licence to expire, no plugin phoning home, no branding to remove. Another developer can pick it up because it is ordinary WordPress, which is the whole point of building it that way. If you want the logins handed over, that is a five-minute job and we will do it without friction. It is your business.

3. Do you take a commission on my orders?

No. Not on a single order, ever. We are not in the payment chain at all.

A customer orders from your site and pays by card. That payment goes from their bank to your payment processor (Stripe, in most of our builds) and from there into your bank account on your normal payout schedule. That is the entire route. We never receive your customers' money, cannot hold it, cannot delay it and could not refund it if you asked. The Stripe account is opened by you, in your business name, and only you can log into it.

The one fee that does exist

Card processing. In the United States that is generally around 2.9% plus 30¢ per successful charge, paid to the processor, with a small extra percentage on international cards. Those rates are published on the processor's own pricing page and they are the same whether your ordering page came from us, from a builder, or from a developer abroad. Nobody escapes that fee.

So what is the catch?

Reach. A marketplace hands you demand you did not earn; your own site does not. Someone browsing the app with no particular restaurant in mind will never find you on your own domain.

Which is why we do not suggest leaving the apps. We suggest changing the order. Your own menu, phone number and ordering button go first, and the delivery app buttons go underneath. Regulars who already know your name order the profitable way, while the apps keep doing what they are good at, which is finding you strangers.

4. Who deals with refunds and items that sell out?

You do, and that is deliberate rather than a gap in the service. Both take seconds once you have done them once.

Refunds

Two clicks in your own Stripe dashboard: open the payment, press Refund, choose full or partial. The money goes back to the card it came from, usually visible to the customer in five to ten business days depending on their bank. That delay is the card networks, not you, and it is worth saying so up front.

Partial refunds matter more than people expect. One dish wrong out of four does not need the whole order reversed, and handing back exactly $12.50 while the customer is still on the phone is the best complaint-handling tool you have.

Sold-out items

Every restaurant runs out of something on a Saturday, and nothing annoys a customer faster than paying for a dish that no longer exists. So the menu is built to be switched, not rebuilt. Open the site on your phone, find the item, toggle it off. It disappears from the ordering page immediately. Turn it back on Monday and it returns with its photo, description and price intact. Where it makes sense we also set items to run only at certain times, so a breakfast burrito stops being orderable at eleven without anyone touching anything.

Chargebacks, which are a different thing

A chargeback is the customer going to their bank instead of to you, and the bank pulling the money back while it investigates. Restaurants get very few. Two habits prevent most of them: a clear business name on the card statement so people recognise the charge, and a confirmation email listing what was bought. If a customer cannot tell what the charge was, the bank hears from them before you do.

On a marketplace the platform decides all of this. It can refund a customer without asking you, deduct it from your payout, and answer your customer in its own words. Owning it means nobody can hold your money and nobody speaks for your business. The trade is that the decision is yours to make at eight on a Friday.

5. Can I offer delivery if I do not have drivers?

Yes, and you do not need to hire anybody or insure a vehicle. Your ordering page can hand the delivery to a courier network while the order itself stays entirely yours.

A customer orders on your website and pays you. Your system sends a delivery request to a courier network. DoorDash Drive and Uber Direct are the two most widely available in the United States. One of their drivers collects the bag and takes it to the address. The customer gets tracking, your name is on the confirmation, and you keep the whole menu price.

The important difference from being on the app

The same companies run both products and they are not the same deal:

• Marketplace listing. You appear in their app, they bring you a customer who was browsing, and they take a commission on the order, commonly 15% to 30%.
• Courier network. You brought the customer yourself. They are only carrying the bag, so you pay a fee for the trip rather than a share of the food.

The delivery fee is generally a per-order charge that varies with distance and demand rather than a percentage, which means a $90 family order and a $22 order cost about the same to deliver. On larger baskets the difference against commission is substantial.

Who pays the fee, and how far you go

Your choice: pass it to the customer at checkout, absorb it as "free delivery", or split it with a threshold: free over $35, charged below. Most restaurants land on the third, because it also nudges the basket size up.

Then set a radius you can actually serve well, often three to five miles, and let the site refuse addresses outside it with a polite note offering pickup instead. Hot food travels badly, and a twenty-five minute drive turns a good dish into a one-star review that outlives the order. It feels like turning money away. It is turning refunds away.

6. How long does the build take?

Seven to fifteen business days, and usually seven. What decides which end you land on is almost never the design work. It is how quickly the menu and the photographs arrive.

The clock does not start when you enquire, or when you say yes. It starts the day two things are done: the 50% deposit is paid and the design brief comes back filled in. The brief is a page or so: what you sell, who comes in, which dish you want photographed largest, whether pickup or delivery matters more. Most owners fill it in over a coffee.

What happens in those days

• Days 1–2. Structure and layout. Nothing pretty yet, and this is the stage that decides whether the site works.
• Days 3–6. The build: design, your menu entered properly, photographs placed and compressed, mobile checked at every step. Most of your visitors are on a phone, standing up, deciding where to eat in the next ten minutes.
• Days 6–9. The functional parts. Ordering, deposits or bookings, the contact form, the QR code, Google Business Profile connected.
• Days 9–12. Your review, then changes, sent all at once rather than in pieces.
• Launch day. Domain pointed, SSL on, forms and a test order checked live, and a walkthrough so you can edit it yourself.

What actually causes delays

In order of how often it happens: photographs, comfortably the biggest one; the menu in a usable form, where a clear photo of a printed menu is fine but prices changing mid-build is not; approvals with more than one owner, since two partners disagreeing about the hero image can cost more days than the entire build; and payment or courier account review, which Stripe and the delivery networks do on their own timetable.