Building a restaurant site

A beautiful site extends your restaurant's brand and helps customers find your menu, locations, hours of operation, and latest specials. With Tock, Squarespace's all-in-one tool for restaurant management, you can 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 Tock and other features tailored specifically for restaurant websites.

Use Tock for all-in-one restaurant management

Tock is Squarespace's all-in-one tool for businesses in the hospitality industry. With Tock, you can seamlessly manage reservations, waitlists, table management, takeout and delivery order systems, events, and more all in one place. We're always developing more ways for Squarespace users to harness Tock technology, so we recommend Tock for all your restaurant needs.

To get started, visit Tock's website. To learn more about Tock and Squarespace, visit Using Tock for restaurant and event management.

If you're not ready for a Tock account yet, you can still create a basic site for your restaurant to display your hours and location and your menus.

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.

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 platform for selling food and perishables online

If you need those features, we recommend subscribing to a Business or Commerce 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.

Take reservations

Use a reservations block to add Tock booking to any page on your site.

Customers can pick their party size and the desired date and time for their reservation directly on your site, then they'll be taken to your Tock page to complete the reservation. You can style the block to fit your restaurant's brand. 

Take reservations via phone or email

If you'd like customers to call or email to make reservations, 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.

Offer online ordering

Increase pickup and delivery orders by adding online delivery links to your site. You can use a Tock reservations block or a navigation link to link to your Tock delivery options.

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 delivery order page in your site navigation:

1. In the Home menu, click Pages.
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 Link, 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, move 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.

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 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 folder to create a drop-down menu. To learn more, visit Adding drop-down menus to your navigation with folders.

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.
• 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 videos

Create professional quality videos to showcase your menu and your space with the Video Studio app. Feature the videos on your site, or share them on your social media platforms.

Learn more about Video Studio.

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 social sharing

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, pushing your contact info to third-party platforms like Google My Business with Location Management, 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.