If you wouldn’t let someone else pick the colors, furniture, and decor of your restaurant, why would you use a DIY Restaurant Website Builder?

Picking your website’s look should be as relevant to you as choosing the decor, the furniture, or the kitchen equipment. If your restaurant’s decor is your restaurant’s first introduction to any prospective visiting clients, your website and social media are the same for any potential online client.

Many clients that reach out to Webdiner ask us about what we think about using a Restaurant Website Builder as an alternative. They look at platforms like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace, and they wonder why aren’t more restaurants doing it? They’re so cheap! And if you’re ok with having a banner ad on your website showing that it wasn’t done professionally, you can get it for as low as $5/ a month! Then, all you have to do is take care of hosting and do domain management, pay for those things, and you should be set!

Then, you look at agency prices, where websites are valued at around $5,000 or $10,000. It not only seems overwhelming. Sometimes, it’s impossible to be able to invest that much on a website. And you can always make it look just as good with a Restaurant Website Builder. But is that even possible?

Even with most restaurants scrambling to establish an online presence that allows them to gather enough online orders, there are plenty of reasons why restaurants are still betting on alternatives to a Restaurant Website Builder. Here are a few:

#1 – Using a Restaurant Website Builder Makes Your Website Just Another Among Many – And We Mean Many…

Simplifying the way it all works, Website Builders make creating a website without any code possible by preparing it for multiple possibilities by default. That has two undesired outcomes. The first is limiting the number of results. The second is crowding the code on the back end and everything that comes from it – more on points #2 and #3.

Most Website Builders will only allow you to use templates. That means that they’ll give you an illusion of being able to “fully customize” your website but only within the rules. It becomes a paint by numbers exercise. You can paint whatever color you want, but it has to be within the lines that were drawn for you. This greatly limits your ability to stand out and share what makes your restaurant unique.

Let’s take a look at Wix.com. Wix boasts having over 500 templates. Let’s be extremely generous and say that “over 500” now means having 750 templates. Wix also says that they currently have over 180 Million Users. If we assume that all of those 750 templates are used equally, and they have exactly 180,000,000 users, that would mean that you would be the 240,001st user of any given template. It’s hard to stand out online as it is, just imagine if you have almost a quarter of a million websites that look just like yours!

#2 – If You’re Creating a Restaurant Website to Get Discovered, Why Make It Difficult?

Above, we already told you how Website Builders crowd the backend of your website with unnecessary code. That code is what communicates with Search Engines and lets it know what your website is about. That’s how Google knows how to rank your website.

Think of it as using an interpreter that is really good in one language but bad on their second language. Their interpretation will only be a very simplified version of the original. And that means that all the value that your website offers is lost in translation.

Plenty of these platforms position themselves as “SEO Friendly” or even optimized. But the fact is that most (if not all) of them lack the features and customization capabilities that truly make a website Search Engine Optimized.

When one of your main reasons to have a website is to get discovered by most people, hampering your chance of being discovered how most restaurants are discovered is clearly a problem. That’s why creating a website through a Restaurant Website Builder is not your best option.

#3 – Website Builders May Make Your Website Slower

We live in the age of convenience. Knowledge travels fast. And people are used to things moving fast, almost instantaneously.

Using Restaurant Website Builders, you’ll be sharing a server with hundreds of other websites, most of them not optimized, and putting an enormous amount of strain on the server. That strain then reflects onto your website, making it slower.

And time is of the essence. Google recommends that pages should load under 5 seconds at 3G. Just one more second of wait has a negative impact on conversions of around 7%. And those numbers keep on getting worse and worse as the wait grows longer.

Additionally, without any possibility of discussing server settings or having access to any data, you’ll be left in the dark, wondering if it is the speed or any other number of reasons that is causing the issue.

#4 – You’ll Be Building Your House On Someone Else’s Land

One of the main reasons to advocate for building your own website opposing to just posting on social media is to claim ownership of the platform you are sharing on. At the end of the day, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. are all owned by other people with their own agenda. And their agenda may change drastically or be forced to suddenly.

Tik Tok creators are facing a ban on the US, Vine took a swift blow all of a sudden, Mixer didn’t last long… Whenever the goal is to establish and grow a community, traditionally a long-term effort, it is absolutely necessary to have control of the landscape you are doing it in.

The same applies to your website. Perhaps even more so, as it usually is the safe haven for your content. You want to have your website in a platform you can control, that you have access to, and that can grow just as you intend to grow.

Restaurant Website Builders are often static, don’t allow exporting, and don’t offer the flexibility and longevity that you should be looking for.

#5 – How Can You Know Where You’re Heading If You Don’t Know Where You Are?

The reason why many Restaurant Owners use Website Builders is that they are trying to keep costs to a minimum. Let’s imagine that it’s your case. And you build your website using a Restaurant Website Builder, deal with its shortcomings and you just park it for a while. Your restaurant grows, continues growing, and it reaches a point where you start wondering if it has anything to do with the website.

You scramble trying to find data on what is working, what isn’t, but you can’t find it. That’s usually the case with Website Builders.

Now, imagine that because of this, you decide that now is the time to contact an agency like Webdiner to create a custom website for you. You’d love to identify what was working on the website and what wasn’t and needs to be improved but you have no idea. All that data, just lost.

So you find yourself almost starting from scratch in a new platform, without metrics to compare to, not knowing how much you’ve grown online.

Webdiner Restaurant Website Design

Webdiner creates websites custom made to your restaurant and its needs. We offer competitive pricing (even when compared to these DIY Website Builders!) that doesn’t come close to agency prices. Additionally, we work with restaurants so we are more in tune with your needs and your business.

If you’d like to schedule a free demo to discuss your Restaurant Website Design needs, click here to schedule a demo.