Squarespace is the most visually polished of the general-purpose website builders. It's the platform people pick when they care how their site looks, and a lot of restaurant owners do. The friction shows up later, in three predictable places: the menu, the booking flow, and accessibility.
This is what you actually trade off when you pick Squarespace for a restaurant — and what changes when you pick a restaurant-specific tool like Remi instead.
TL;DR
- Squarespace looks good out of the box. Templates are beautiful, photos render well, type is solid.
- Squarespace was not designed for restaurants. Menu editing is a workaround. Online ordering means a third-party tool. Accessibility is up to you.
- Remi was designed for restaurants only. Menu is structured data. Photos auto-compress. ADA is the floor, not the ceiling.
What you actually pay on Squarespace
Squarespace's tiers in 2026:
| Plan | Listed price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Personal | $16/mo | Branding stays, no e-commerce, no scheduling |
| Business | $23/mo | Custom domain, no Squarespace branding |
| Commerce Basic | $27/mo | Sell products, online ordering plugin compatibility |
| Commerce Advanced | $49/mo | Abandoned cart, advanced shipping, gift cards |
For a restaurant, the realistic plan is Business or Commerce Basic. Add:
- Custom domain after first-year free trial: $20/yr
- Squarespace Acuity Scheduling (for reservations): $20/mo for the standard plan, or use OpenTable/Resy embeds (free but functionally weaker)
- Squarespace Online Ordering: not built in. Most restaurants use ChowNow ($119/mo + $0.25/order), Toast TakeOut, or DoorDash Storefront for direct orders
- Accessibility tooling: Squarespace's official answer is "use the Accessibility Checker plugin," typically $10–30/mo. Same overlay-style problem as Wix.
A typical Squarespace restaurant with a custom domain, online ordering, and accessibility tooling: $50–120/month, plus per-order fees from the third-party ordering platform.
Remi: $69/month, flat. Menu, gallery, custom domain, ADA-compliant themes included. Online ordering integrates with whatever payment processor you already use, with no per-order surcharge from us.
Menus: Squarespace's real friction
Squarespace's official answer for restaurant menus is the Menu Block (opens in new context). It's a custom block type that lets you enter sections, items, descriptions, and prices.
The Menu Block is fine for a small, stable menu. It starts to break for any of these:
- Daily specials. Editing on mobile is awkward. Specials live in a different block type, often as plain text, which means they're a separate edit when prices change.
- Multiple menus. Lunch, dinner, brunch, happy hour, tasting menu — each is a separate page or a long stacked block. There's no concept of "menu type" in the data.
- Dietary flags. No structured way to mark vegan, gluten-free, contains nuts. You either bake it into the description or use emoji.
- Price updates across the site. A dish featured on the homepage and listed on the menu page is two separate edits. They drift.
- Print-ready export. Not built in. Most owners maintain a separate document for print.
On Remi, the menu is one place. Edit a dish there, it updates the homepage feature card, the menu page, the structured data Google indexes, and the print-ready export. Lunch, dinner, and brunch are first-class menu types.
Accessibility: Squarespace's quiet problem
Squarespace's accessibility page (opens in new context) covers the platform itself — their dashboard, their billing, their support. It does not promise that every template renders WCAG-compliant content for every site.
In practice:
- Some templates have low-contrast color schemes that fail WCAG AA without modification.
- The image gallery component sometimes ships without proper alt-text inputs.
- Form blocks support labels but require the owner to configure them correctly. Most don't.
- The "Accessibility Checker" plugins available in the Squarespace marketplace are overlay-based — same legal-risk profile as the widgets we covered in the ADA piece.
Squarespace is not uniquely worse than Wix here. It's the same general-purpose-builder pattern: accessibility is the owner's job, the platform provides surface tools.
On Remi, accessibility is the platform's job. Every theme passes WCAG 2.2 AA. Image uploads require alt text. Forms ship with labeled fields. Contrast ratios are pre-tested per theme.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Squarespace | Remi |
|---|---|---|
| Listed price | $23–49/mo | $69/mo |
| Real all-in for a restaurant | $45–120/mo | $69 |
| Themes designed for restaurants | Templates labeled "restaurant," all general-purpose | 5, all restaurant-specific |
| Menu editor (structured data) | Menu Block (semi-structured) | Full structured (name, description, price, dietary, type) |
| Multiple menu types | Manual stacking | Native (lunch, dinner, brunch, etc.) |
| Online reservations | Acuity ($20/mo) or third-party embed | OpenTable / Resy / SevenRooms embeds |
| Online ordering | Third-party (ChowNow, Toast TakeOut) | Bring your own, no per-order surcharge |
| WCAG 2.2 AA compliance | Owner's responsibility | Built in, every theme |
| Photo handling | Manual compression, no alt-text enforcement | Auto-compression, alt text required to save |
| Print-ready menu export | Not built in | Built in |
| Schema.org Menu structured data | No | Yes |
Where Squarespace actually wins
Squarespace wins on three things:
- Visual design depth. The template gallery is bigger and more varied than any restaurant-specific platform's. If your restaurant's brand is unusual — a fine-dining concept with a strong design POV, an art gallery cafe, a pop-up with a specific aesthetic — Squarespace's template variety is real.
- General CMS power. If your restaurant also runs a blog, hosts events, sells branded merchandise, or has multiple revenue streams that don't fit a "restaurant site" mold, Squarespace's general flexibility helps.
- Long-form content. Pages with rich layouts, embedded videos, multi-column blocks. Squarespace nails this. Most restaurant sites don't need it, but if you do, it's there.
If those three sound like your restaurant, Squarespace is a defensible choice. You'll pay for the menu friction with your time.
Migration path: Squarespace → Remi
For owners considering a move:
- Export your content. Squarespace allows partial export (pages, blog posts) but not custom blocks. The menu data has to be copied manually. Plan an hour for this.
- Sign up for Remi. Pick a theme.
- Paste your menu into Remi's importer. Detection handles 90%+ of typical menus.
- Move your photos from Squarespace's image library to Remi's gallery. Drag-and-drop.
- Repoint your domain. If registered through Squarespace, transfer it. If through Google Domains/Squarespace Domains/Namecheap, update DNS.
Most migrations finish in a half-day. The slow part is recreating any custom long-form pages (About, our Story, etc.) — Squarespace's flexibility means those pages can be elaborate. Remi's themes give you good defaults; if you had something unusual, you'll pare it down.
Bottom line
If you want a beautiful design-first website for a restaurant with a stable menu and you don't mind doing accessibility yourself, Squarespace is a reasonable pick.
If you want a website that knows it's for a restaurant — structured menus, integrated reservations, ADA out of the box — Remi is built for that exact job. $69/month, no add-ons, your domain, your data.