Honest comparison
Wix is a hosted website builder that will get a kitchen online this weekend, with hosting, templates and an editor anyone can learn, and for a brand new business with no budget that is a sensible first step. What it is not is a supplier. Nobody at Wix will notice your menu prices are out of date, write you an article, build a location page when you open the second shop, or answer the phone when you cannot. If your site is a formality, Wix is enough. If your site is supposed to take orders, the work does not stop at launch.
The short version
Quick and cheap to start. Everything after launch day is still your job.
It is fast to start, it includes hosting and a domain option, the editor is genuinely approachable, and templates mean you are not staring at a blank page. Plenty of small kitchens have a Wix site that does its job: hours, address, a menu, a phone number. If that is the whole requirement and money is tight, we would rather tell you that than sell you something bigger.
Three places, in our experience of what people bring us. Speed, because a template plus apps plus unoptimised photography is heavy on a phone. Structure, because a builder makes one-page thinking easy and a page-per-location, page-per-service-area architecture hard. And publishing, because nothing in a builder writes this week's article or updates your combo prices for you. All three are the compounding parts, so they are the parts that matter after month one.
Restaurants on a builder usually end up with either a built-in ordering app that takes a share or a fee, or a link out to a delivery app that certainly does. Our build puts the ordering flow on your own domain, connected to the system you already use, so the channel you own stays the cheapest one you have. That is the single biggest financial difference between the two approaches over a year.
You give up the Saturday-morning hobby of rearranging your own homepage, and you give up the lowest possible monthly cost. In exchange you stop being the website person, the menu is correct because keeping it correct is somebody's job, and there is a number to call when the site matters most.
Side by side
Twelve things a takeaway, delivery or fast casual kitchen actually feels. Where a row describes another product, it describes how it generally works rather than claiming a limitation we cannot verify.
| What it decides | Wix | GetRestaurantSite |
|---|---|---|
| Page speed and Core Web Vitals | Template and app dependent, and heavier once photography and widgets are added | Custom coded to a 90+ PageSpeed target on mobile and desktop, guaranteed |
| SEO control | Basic controls are there; depth and structure depend on how the site is put together | Full control plus the architecture built for you: locations, service areas, menu sections |
| Schema and structured data | Some automatic markup, more of it through apps | Generated from the visible content, so it matches what a visitor reads |
| AEO and GEO readiness | Up to whoever writes the copy | Answer-first copy, visible FAQ blocks, llms.txt, consistent business facts |
| Hosting and security | Included in the subscription | Included: edge hosting, SSL, CDN, DDoS protection, unmetered bandwidth |
| Maintenance burden | Yours: every price change, photo and new page | Ours: 5 revisions a month of any size, done within 2 to 5 working days |
| Who does the work | You, or a relative who is good with computers | Designers, developers and writers on your plan |
| Content and blog | A blog tool exists. Writing it is still on you | 2 to 3 researched articles a week, published for you |
| Design quality | Template-led, and recognisable as such to a regular customer | Designed around your menu and brand, one system across the site |
| Accessibility and policy pages | Your responsibility, usually a generated privacy policy | Accessibility-minded build plus restaurant-specific policy pages |
| Cost model | Low monthly subscription, plus apps, plus your time, plus ordering fees | One monthly fee, build fee after launch, ordering on your own domain |
| Lock-in and ownership | The site is built in their editor and does not move elsewhere | Domain in your name, content export on cancellation, 2 business days notice |
If two or three of these describe you, stay where you are. We would rather say so than sell you a plan you will cancel.
Switching, or running both
Export what you can, and expect the rest to be a rebuild: builder sites do not transfer to other platforms, and that is true in both directions. We take the content worth keeping, rebuild the menu as real pages, and redirect old addresses so anything printed or linked keeps working. If your domain was bought through the builder, you can transfer it to us to manage or keep it where it is and point it at the new site. Either way it stays in your name.
From a kitchen that moved
I did not expect the writing to matter. Six weeks in, people were finding us through articles about catering for a game day, which is exactly the order we want.
Weekly articles and a Google listing that matches the site
Illustrative examples written by us to show the kind of outcome clients report, not verified customer reviews. Names and kitchens are composites. Verified reviews replace these once clients have given them.
No, and that claim is usually out of date. Builder sites can rank. What limits them in this niche is usually page weight, thin page structure and nobody publishing anything new, which are decisions rather than platform limits.
Not as-is. Builder sites do not export to another platform. We rebuild the pages worth keeping, keep your content and photography, and redirect the old addresses to the new ones.
Ordering is rebuilt on your own domain and connected to the system you use to fire tickets. Tell us what you run today during onboarding and we scope the connection.
No, and that is the point. Your site is designed around your menu rather than fitted into a template. You approve the design before launch.
About fifteen minutes of onboarding form, one call, and answering questions as they come up. We handle the build, the migration and the redirects.
The monthly fee is higher than a builder subscription and lower than hiring anyone. It includes the build, the hosting, the domain, the revisions and weekly articles, which on a builder are either extra or are your own unpaid hours.
Nothing stops you running both for a month. We build first and only point your domain when you approve the site, so there is no gap and no rush to cancel anything.
Yes. Cancel with 2 business days notice, take the domain, which is in your name, and we provide an export of your content and articles within 14 days.
A 30-minute walk-through with your dishes, your delivery area and your questions. Plans from $117 a month, the $647 build fee invoiced only after launch.
Wix is a trademark of its owner. GetRestaurantSite is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by it. Everything above describes how each option generally works for a restaurant, based on publicly available information on the dates cited, and is our opinion where it is not a cited fact.
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