What a Restaurant Website Needs, and Which Tools Fit
A restaurant website needs four things to do its job: a menu visitors can read as real text (not only a PDF), a way to order food or book a table online, accurate hours and location, and a connected Google Business Profile so people can find you before they ever reach the site. Squarespace, Wix, and Toast each document their own way of handling ordering and reservations; none of them is a universal answer, and which one fits depends on whether you already use a POS system, a reservation platform, or neither. Here's what each piece actually requires, sourced from the vendors' own pages, checked September 2026.
Why does the menu need to be text, not just a PDF?
Google's own guidance on indexing PDFs is specific about what its systems can read: "The general rule of thumb is that if you can copy and paste the text from a PDF document into a standard text document, we should be able to index that text" — but that only applies "provided they're not password protected or encrypted," and if the menu is a scanned image rather than real text, "we may process the images with OCR algorithms to extract the text," which isn't guaranteed (Google Search Central Blog, "PDFs in Google search results," 2011). That post is older, but Google's Business Profile menu feature itself confirms the practical direction: it doesn't accept a PDF upload at all. Google's own menu editor works with typed-in text: "Restaurants can list their menu items on their Business Profile on Google," adding "menu items, along with their descriptions and prices" as data fields, organized into sections (Google Business Profile Help, "About the menu editor", checked September 2026). If your only menu online is a PDF, none of that content exists as text anywhere Google can use it directly.
The practical fix isn't complicated: put the menu on its own page as headings and text (Appetizers, Mains, Desserts, each dish named with a price), and keep a PDF as a secondary download for people who want to print it, not as the only copy.
What does each platform actually offer for a restaurant?
None of these vendors builds one single "restaurant mode" — each documents specific pieces that you assemble.
Squarespace builds restaurant sites around a dedicated help page. It recommends "a menu section or page layout to create clear, stylish menus," and separately, "you can also create a QR code that links diners to your digital menu" (Squarespace Help Center, "Building a restaurant site", checked September 2026). For hours and location, the same guide says to "create a page with a contact layout so visitors can find this information." For ordering, Squarespace documents adding "a ChowNow page to your website for online orders," and separately, Tock: "take reservations on your site and link to your Tock page for online orders." If customers just call in, the guide's fallback is to "display an email address and phone number."
Wix covers the same three jobs through three separate apps under "Wix Restaurants." The Wix Restaurant Menus app builds the menu; the Wix Restaurant Orders app "works together with the Wix Restaurant Menus app" for online ordering, and requires "at least 1 fulfillment method (pickup, delivery or dine-in)" turned on before it can accept an order (Wix Help Center, "Wix Restaurants: An Overview" and "Adding and Setting Up Wix Restaurants Orders", checked September 2026). Dine-in ordering works by letting "customers scan a QR code at your restaurant and place their order from their own device." Table reservations are a separate app, Wix Table Reservations, and it has a plan requirement worth knowing before you build around it: "You need to upgrade your site to use Wix Table Reservations," and without the upgrade, "customers won't be able to book a table on your site themselves — you'll only be able to add reservations manually" (Wix Help Center, "Adding and Setting Up Wix Table Reservations", checked September 2026). That upgrade requirement is consistent with Wix's free plan generally — as covered in our guide to what Wix's free plan includes, payment acceptance of any kind isn't available at all until you're on a paid plan.
Toast is a different kind of product: it's a restaurant POS company whose website builder is meant to run in sync with your point-of-sale system, not a general site builder you add restaurant features to. Toast's own product page presents it as a restaurant website builder connected to Toast's POS, so menus and online ordering come from the same system. Reservations run through a separate Toast product, Toast Tables. Toast's fit is specific: it only makes sense if you're running Toast POS, or planning to, since the sync between site and POS is the entire pitch.
Which one fits my restaurant?
| Situation | Reasonable starting point |
|---|---|
| Already on Toast POS, or evaluating it for the register | Toast Websites, since menu and pricing sync from the POS automatically |
| Independent site, want a specific ordering brand (commission-free ordering, no POS switch) | Squarespace with ChowNow, or Wix Restaurant Orders |
| Need real reservations with covers management, not just a contact form | Squarespace with Tock, or Wix Table Reservations (check the plan requirement first) |
| Just started out, taking calls and walk-ins only | Any of the three — skip the ordering/reservation app and use a phone number and a Contacts/hours page |
No platform here should be picked purely because it's the most feature-complete on paper. A single-location restaurant that just needs hours, a menu, and a phone number doesn't need Toast's POS sync or Wix's fulfillment settings.
What about hours and location?
Get these right in two places, not one. On the site itself, a dedicated hours/location page (or a footer block) keeps visitors from showing up to a closed door. Separately, Google Business Profile is where most people actually check hours before they leave home. Google's own guidance frames business hours as something customers rely on directly: the hours settings exist to help "customers to find your business's most up to date and accurate hours of operation for a normal week" (Google Business Profile Help, "Edit your business hours", checked September 2026), and it supports separate settings for a lunch break within the day and different hours for delivery or takeout versus dine-in through "More hours." If your kitchen closes earlier than the dining room, or you run different hours for pickup, set those separately rather than posting one blanket set of hours that's wrong for part of the day.
Do I need a Google Business Profile menu too, separate from my website?
Yes, in the sense that it's a separate, additional listing, not a replacement for the site's own menu page. Google's menu editor is specifically for food and drink businesses, and it displays under "Menu" on your Business Profile once approved — Google says changes can take "24–48 hours" to show on Maps and Search. Keep the two in sync manually; nothing here connects your site's menu page to your Business Profile's menu automatically unless a specific integration (like Toast's POS sync) documents that connection.
What if the ordering or reservation app goes down, or I switch providers?
Have a fallback that doesn't depend on the app: a phone number and email visible on every page, exactly as Squarespace's own guide suggests as a baseline. A simple native contact form is a reasonable backstop too — our guide to Wix Forms covers what that app captures if you're on Wix and want a plain call-or-message option alongside the ordering and reservation apps, not instead of them. If you switch ordering providers (ChowNow to something else, or Wix Restaurant Orders to a different app), the old provider's order history and customer list typically don't transfer automatically — export what the old tool lets you export before you disconnect it, and update every page, QR code, and printed table tent that links to the old ordering page.
Where does Figment fit in?
Nowhere directly for the ordering or reservation piece. Figment publishes a website from a Figma design through its Figma plugin; it has no menu builder, ordering system, or reservation product of its own. A Figment-published restaurant site would still need to embed one of the systems above — ChowNow, Tock, a Wix-style ordering widget, or a Toast link — the same way any restaurant using a design-first builder has to plan for a separate ordering and booking layer.
Bottom line: get the menu onto the site as real text first, since that's the one piece every other decision depends on. Then match the ordering and reservation tool to what you already run — Toast if you're on Toast POS, ChowNow or Tock if you're building a Squarespace site, Wix's own apps (with the Table Reservations plan requirement checked) if you're on Wix — and keep hours and location current in both places: your own site and your Google Business Profile.
