Websites for Chicago restaurants, cafes and bars
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Quick answer: WordPress Chicago, a service of 45Squared, builds restaurant websites for Chicago restaurants, cafes, bars and bakeries on WordPress. You get a menu that reads well on a phone, hours you can change yourself, and one tap to reserve or order through the service you already use. New sites get a fixed quote after a short call, and hosting is $35 a month. Send the form to start.
- New site
- About a week once content is ready
- Price
- Fixed quote after a short call
- Managed hosting
- $35 / month
- Moving from Wix or Squarespace
- From $1,500
Restaurant websites for Chicago
WordPress Chicago is the Chicago service of 45Squared, a Midwest web studio that has built WordPress sites since 2015. For restaurants, cafes, bars and bakeries we build sites around the four things diners look for: the menu, the hours, the location and a way to book or order. You own the site, the domain and the logins. A new site is quoted at a fixed price after a short video call and typically takes about a week once we have your menu, photos and logo. Hosting is $35 a month.
What a restaurant website needs
- A menu as a real web page, readable on a phone, with prices and dietary notes your staff can edit.
- Hours that are always right, including holiday and private-event closures.
- One tap to reserve or order, through the services you already use.
- The address, transit and parking notes, so a guest coming from the Blue Line or by car knows what to expect.
- Real photos of the room and the food, not stock images.
- Pages for private dining, catering or events, with a short inquiry form that reaches your inbox.
Your site and your Google listing
Most diners meet you first in Google’s map results. Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and it recommends keeping your hours current, including special hours for holidays, adding photos and replying to reviews. Your website should agree with that listing on name, address, phone, hours and menu. We also add Restaurant structured data, which can describe your menu, cuisine, opening hours and whether you take reservations, so search engines and AI assistants read the facts straight from your site.
Built for phones and every guest
Google indexes the mobile version of a site, and most restaurant searches happen on a phone, often on the move. We build mobile-first, keep pages light so they load on a weak signal, and check every site against WCAG 2.1 AA before launch. That matters for guests using screen readers or larger text, and it’s one more reason to drop the PDF menu: an untagged PDF isn’t considered accessible, and a web page menu is easier for everyone.
Prices and getting started
New restaurant sites get one fixed quote after a short call, because a one-page cafe and a group with three locations are different jobs. If your current site is on Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy, moving it to WordPress starts at $1,500 with 30 days of support. Managed hosting is $35 a month with updates, daily backups and monitoring. Selling gift cards or merchandise online adds a WooCommerce shop. See pricing, or send the form below with your restaurant’s name and current site.
Common questions
Should our menu be a PDF or a web page?
A web page. A PDF menu is hard to read on a phone, has to be re-made for every change, and is often invisible to screen readers, since an untagged PDF isn’t considered accessible. A menu built as a page loads fast, can be searched by Google, and can be updated by your manager in a few minutes. You can still offer a printable PDF as well if guests ask for one.
We already use a reservation and online ordering service. Do we have to switch?
No. We link your site to the reservation and ordering services you already use, with a clear button on every page, so guests are one tap from booking a table or placing an order. If you want to sell gift cards, merchandise or pre-orders directly from your own site, we can add a WooCommerce shop, and there’s no platform fee on top of payment processing.
Can our staff update the menu and hours themselves?
Yes, and they should. We build menus and hours as simple fields in WordPress, so changing a price, adding a special or setting holiday hours takes a few minutes and needs no code. We train whoever will do it on a short video call after launch and leave a short how-to. Keeping the site and your Google listing in step matters more than any design choice.