How to make a food delivery website that keeps the margin

TL;DR: How to make a food delivery website

This guide shows you how to build a website for your delivery kitchen, from choosing a domain and a template to setting up the four pages customers look at most: your menu, your order page, your delivery areas and your contact details. Yola's website builder includes ready-made Menu, Services and Pricing blocks, so when a supplier raises a price, you can update your menu yourself in two minutes. The guide also shows you how to photograph your food exactly as it arrives in the box, because if a dish looks nothing like its picture, a customer's first order is likely to be their last.

The second half is about keeping the margin. You set ordering up on your own site with the online store, add a customizable form for the catering and office orders that have to be quoted, publish your health inspection grade and food handler certification, keep a specials and closures page current by hand, and build pages around "[cuisine] delivery [city]" so the searches near you land on your site. The delivery apps still bring you customers you would never have reached. The difference is that a regular ordering direct is an order you keep the margin on.

What to include

Top features of a food delivery website

How to make a food delivery
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what somebody reads off the sticker on the lid. Use the kitchen's name, spelled exactly the way it is spelled on your sign, your menu leaflets and your packaging, and take the .com while it is there. Where the name is a common one, putting the city on the end works well, and it matches the way people search anyway.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. Somebody reciting your name to a colleague who is ordering lunch for six drops both of them every time. Use the same spelling on your Google Business Profile, on your menu boards and on the delivery app listings you already have, because a name that does not match quietly splits your reviews in two.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same place you build the site, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

None of this needs code. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the way you would edit a document, so the morning a supplier price moves you change the menu yourself instead of emailing somebody who will get to it on Thursday.

Answer a few questions about the food you cook and where you deliver, and Yola's AI Website Builder hands back a first draft to work from. The free plan has basic AI and the full AI tools sit on the paid plans, so treat whatever comes back as a starting point and check every dish name, price and delivery time against what the kitchen actually does. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site. Starting from a template that already has a menu layout, a gallery and a contact form means you are editing a page rather than designing one.

Start from a template

Food delivery website templates

Six pages carry nearly all of it. Two people land on a delivery kitchen's site: somebody hungry now, who wants the menu, the price and whether you reach their street, and somebody planning ahead for an office lunch or a family order on Sunday.

Keep the set small on purpose. Every extra page is another thing that goes stale while you are on the pass, and the six below are the ones people open.

Build these first, then add anything else once the site is live:

Name the things you sell the way the people buying them say it. Somebody hungry is looking for Thai delivery or a family box, not a service offering. Keep the list to work you will genuinely take on a busy night, because a catering order accepted to look capable turns into a bad Saturday.

Most of the prices belong on the page. Single dishes, bundles and the delivery fee are a figure. Catering, platters and standing office orders are a quote, since the headcount, the date and the drop time all move the number. A starting figure with what it includes sitting beside it filters your inbox better than any form does.

Yola's ready-made Menu, Services and Pricing blocks lay this out with the name, a short line and the figure together, so the week beef goes up you change it between services. Where one of these carries real search demand of its own, and office catering usually does, give it a page rather than a line in a list.

Shoot the food in the box. Not styled on a slate under a lamp, but boxed the way a courier hands it over, on a kitchen table, in daylight, ten minutes after it left the pass. A dish that looks nothing like the photo is how you turn a first order into the only order, and repeat orders are the whole business.

Photograph the things that carry the order: your three or four best sellers, a family box open with everything in it, a platter laid out the way it lands on an office table, and the packaging itself if it holds heat well and is worth mentioning. Shoot straight down for anything in a container and straight on for anything stacked. A phone in good light beats an expensive camera in a dark kitchen, and a quiet hour before service costs you nothing.

Name the files for what is in them, chicken-katsu-family-box.jpg rather than IMG_2841.jpg, and repeat that wording in the alt text so the photos can surface in a local image search. Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds the set, and on a paid plan the Custom code block lets you build a custom gallery laid out your own way. Paid plans also come with premium stock images and 1M premium icons, and the menu is the one place not to use a stock photo: a burger somebody else cooked sets an expectation your kitchen then has to meet.

A short clip earns its place where it shows something a photo cannot, a curry being ladled or a box going together at speed. Yola does not host video, so you put it on your usual video platform and embed it on the page.

This is the step the rest of the page is built around. Every order that goes through somebody else's app carries a cut of what the customer paid, and on a kitchen running thin margins that cut is most of the margin. An order placed on your own site does not carry it, which is why a regular ordering direct is the order worth having.

Yola has an online store, so a customer can pick dishes, pay and be done without phoning you. Treat it as what it is, a store selling products rather than a restaurant system. Yola ships no live order screen, no driver dispatch and no delivery tracking, so decide before you switch ordering on how an order reaches the pass and who is watching for it during service. On a paid plan the Custom code block can embed a third-party ordering, dispatch or tracking tool where you want one, and that is an integration rather than something Yola does itself.

Put the rules next to the order rather than in a footer: the minimum, the delivery fee, the areas you cover and the time the kitchen stops taking orders tonight. Give the delivery time you are actually running if you can, and give it honestly. An order that turns up forty minutes later than promised costs you the next one.

Catering and office orders work the other way round, because they get quoted rather than checked out. Yola's contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, so you choose exactly what it asks: the date, the drop time, the headcount, the address, any allergies in the room and a budget per head. The Forms block guide walks through setting one up, and Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment somebody submits, so they know it landed.

Be clear about what a submission through that form is. It is a request, not a confirmed order, and nothing is happening until you have replied with a price and they have said yes. One line saying so under the form stops an office manager assuming forty boxes are on the way. Answer the same day, because whoever is arranging lunch for a Tuesday meeting is asking two other kitchens as well.

Somebody ordering from a kitchen they have never stood in is trusting you with something they are about to eat, and in most places the proof that you are safe to do that is already public. Your local health department issues the permit, inspects the kitchen and publishes what it found. Where your grade or score is a good one, put it on the site with the date of the inspection rather than waiting for somebody to go and look it up.

Word every line as what you actually hold. Where your state or county requires food handler cards or a certified food protection manager, say who holds them and which program issued them, ServSafe or your state's own. Where the jurisdiction publishes a food hygiene rating, show yours. Say so if you carry liability cover, because an office placing a first catering order often asks about that before anything else.

Allergens deserve a plain sentence rather than a legal one. Say how you handle them, what you can keep separate and what you cannot promise in a shared kitchen, and put the same wording on the menu page. The permit and the grade belong in the footer, with the grade repeated beside the order button, which is where somebody is actually deciding.

One page kept current saves you a day of messages. This week's specials go on it, the days the kitchen is closed, the last order date before a holiday, and how far ahead catering and party platters need booking. A limited run or a pop-up goes here too, and so does the Monday you are shut for a deep clean.

Give every entry a date, what it is, what it costs and how to order it. "Christmas Eve orders close 20 December" earns its place at the top of that page, because it is the thing people phone to ask. Clear out last month's entries or keep them, whichever reads better, but never leave a special that ended three weeks ago sitting where a new one should be.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page you edit by hand, and it is genuinely quick once the first few lines are laid out. Copy a line, change four words, publish. Do it on the same morning each week, before service rather than during it. Claiming a platter or a limited run goes through the same customizable form as the rest of your catering requests.

Nobody searches for your kitchen by name until they have already eaten your food. Before that they type the cuisine and the city, so the map pack, those three listings with the little pins at the top, and the local results underneath are where a first order comes from. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages. The wording is yours, and the Google Business Profile is work you do on Google.

Before you tell anybody the site is live, order from it yourself on a phone. Add two dishes, pay, and watch where the order lands and how long it took you to place it. Tap the phone number and check it dials. Read the delivery areas page on a small screen, since that is where most people are standing when they read it.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts on its own between a phone and a laptop, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. Check page speed on the pages doing the work, which are home, menu and order. A menu page heavy with photos is usually the slow one, so size the images down before you upload them.

After launch the job is small and constant. A price moves, a dish comes off, a supplier lets you down and the special changes, a holiday shuts you for two days. Give it one slot a week, before the Friday rush rather than during it, and the site stays true. A site that keeps moving holds its search ranking better than one last touched in the spring.

Common food delivery website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of things go wrong on delivery kitchen sites, and each one costs you an order that was already half placed.

How much does a food delivery website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo once you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Set against a Friday night's takings, that is less than one family box a month.

Paying somebody else to build a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, depending on how much design and photography goes into it, and a menu change afterwards usually carries a fee of its own.

The monthly figure is not the number that matters most here. An order through a delivery app carries a commission, and it carries one again the next time that customer orders, and the time after that, for as long as they keep ordering. An order placed on your own site does not. The site covers itself somewhere in the first handful of direct orders, and being able to change your own prices the morning a supplier invoice arrives is worth something on top of that.