Best website builder for pubs

Why we believe Squarespace is the best website builder for pubs

I've spent years watching pubs try to shoehorn a restaurant template around what is, underneath, a very different business. The pub's website isn't there to romance a chef. It's there to tell the regular what's on tap tonight, the football crowd what time you're opening for the early match, and the couple planning a 40th whether you do Sunday afternoon private hire. The builder has to make those three jobs easy enough that a bar manager edits the site between shifts. That lens is what pushes me to Squarespace for most working pubs.

Where Wix earns the runner-up spot

Wix takes the runner-up slot for one honest reason. Its event-calendar widget and its handling of a printable food-menu PDF are slightly smoother than Squarespace's when a publican is wiring everything up without a designer. That matters for a specific kind of operator, and it's worth naming.

You're handling the build yourself and want fewer fiddly bits

A first-time publican with no design help in the background will find Wix's out-of-the-box event widget and its food-menu handling a touch less finicky than Squarespace's. Both do the job. Wix feels slightly closer to done on day one. If shipping the site in a single weekend without anyone to ask is the priority, that edge is real.

You rely on a Wix-specific loyalty or bookings app

Wix's app market reaches further into niche hospitality tools than Squarespace's extensions. If your loyalty stamp platform, table-management app, or delivery integration has only been built for Wix, it can save a rebuild or a workaround later. Most common needs are covered on both. The corners belong to Wix more often than people admit.

Your site really is just a menu, hours, phone, and an event list

For a pub where the website is genuinely a menu, hours, address, phone, reservation link, and a weekly event list (no commerce, no gift vouchers, no private-hire deposits), Wix's entry tier comes in lower than Squarespace's commerce plan. For a pub that takes almost everything through the phone, the walk-in, and a reservation app, the gap is worth acknowledging.

The trade-off with Wix is the thing pubs always bump into second. The editor rewards patience that a duty manager juggling deliveries and the drayman does not have. Template quality across the library is uneven. SEO controls have improved though still feel tuned to a different business. If the person editing the site is going to be the bar manager rather than the owner, that friction lands on the worst person to be fighting with a CMS. Go in clear-eyed.

How the other major website builders stack up for pubs

Scored 1 to 10 against the jobs a working pub site actually does (neighbourhood local, Irish or British-style pub, or gastropub with a serious kitchen, kitchen trading most days, rotating draught lineup, private hire a meaningful slice of revenue).

The pub operator's stack: POS, reservations, Untappd, and your own site

A pub's website sits inside a stack of operational tools that publicans actually run the business on. Pretending the website does everything itself is how sites end up neglected. The website's job is to be the canonical public front, route the regulars to the right routine, and handle the inquiries (private hire, large bookings, press) that don't belong on any other platform. Everything else lives elsewhere, and the builder that plays nicely with the rest of the stack saves real time.

POS and kitchen. Toast, Square for Restaurants, and Lightspeed cover most working pubs. Toast leans into food-heavy operations and gastropubs. Square for Restaurants is cleaner for drink-led pubs with a simpler kitchen. Lightspeed has depth on bar inventory and keg tracking that matters once the draught lineup gets large. The website doesn't replace any of them. It links into order-ahead flows where they exist, and stays out of the way otherwise.

Reservations. OpenTable, Resy, and the smaller tools (SevenRooms for bigger gastropub operations with events, Tock for ticketed beer dinners and tap-takeovers). Neighbourhood pubs with walk-ins and phone bookings often get away without a reservation platform at all and just take the phone. Gastropubs with a Sunday-lunch rush or a tasting menu almost always need one. The embed has to open cleanly from the website. A reservation button buried under three clicks costs covers.

Untappd for tap-list credibility. Untappd's operator tools publish a live tap list to its app's map, which is where craft-beer drinkers actually look. For a pub trading on its draught lineup, a verified Untappd presence earns more new-visitor trust than any "we take our beer seriously" paragraph. The website links to it. Craft Beer and Brewing magazine covers this landscape with more depth than any platform blog for operators who want the inside view on what drinkers actually notice.

The sports-bar versus destination-gastropub split. The stack bends differently at each end. A neighbourhood sports pub's website leans hard on the fixture calendar, the game-day specials, and a "which screens show which match" page that earns its place on a Saturday morning. A destination gastropub's website leans on the kitchen (seasonal menu, the pork from a specific farm, the wine list), the reservation flow, and private-event handling for Sunday-lunch bookings and off-season chef's tables. The same builder handles both, but the emphasis is different, and publicans get into trouble when they copy the wrong end of that split. Bar Business Magazine (from Bar and Restaurant) covers the operator side, and Toast's operator blog has practical pieces on pub-specific ordering and service patterns that don't appear in generic restaurant content.

A working pub's Google Business Profile quietly matters more than most publicans realise. Hours on a bank holiday, whether the kitchen is on, which screens show which matches, and the photos sitting in that knowledge panel decide more first-time visits than the website does. Claim and maintain the profile, mirror the website, and the two surfaces start compounding for you instead of contradicting each other.

What pubs actually need from a website

Seven features do the heavy lifting. The four "must haves" separate a pub site that pulls Saturday traffic from a brochure that doesn't. Get these right and the rest is decoration.

Squarespace handles all seven with built-in blocks. Wix handles five cleanly, with event calendars and menu embeds needing extra setup time.

Which Squarespace templates suit pubs best

Every Squarespace template runs on Fluid Engine and is broadly interchangeable, so the choice is picking the right starting aesthetic rather than a permanent commitment. These four are the templates I point publicans toward most often.

Paloma

Photography-first, full-bleed heroes. Right when you have a strong photo of the room at service, the bar with taps lined up, or the Sunday roast plating. Works for most gastropubs and for sports pubs with a well-shot interior. The photo has to be genuinely good. A weak cover shot on Paloma will embarrass the site.

Bedford

Clean, commerce-ready, classic. Best when the site also sells gift vouchers, pub-branded merch, private-hire deposits, or beer-dinner tickets. Product pages behave better here than in the other three. Sensible default for a neighbourhood pub that's learning what the site should do.

Brine

Editorial, a bit more vertical, room for longer-form voice. Suits destination gastropubs whose kitchen story or supplier relationships are part of why people travel. Pair with restrained typography and the site will read closer to a food magazine than a pub brochure without losing the pub feel.

Hester

Warm, traditional, readable. Closest to the feel of an Irish or British-style local done well. Good for the pub that has been there since 1987 and doesn't want a site that pretends otherwise. Leans into the history without turning the homepage into a 2000-word family story.

All four handle the checklist above without modification. The template is the starting aesthetic, not the feature set. Pick the one that reads closest to the room, launch, refine in month three.

Common mistakes pubs make picking a builder

Five patterns show up on pub site after pub site. The first is the one I want to argue with hardest, because it's the one publicans resist the most.

Building the whole homepage around the founders' story. The family history, the grandfather who bought the freehold in 1962, the copper pans from the original kitchen. It's a lovely secondary page. On the homepage it pushes what's on tonight and the specials board below the fold and loses the regular who had one foot out the door already. Write the history. Put it on /story. Let the homepage be tonight's pub.

Leaving the tap list stale. A tap list that hasn't been updated since 2019 is worse than no tap list at all. It tells a drinker who cares that the site isn't trusted by the people who run it, and they'll assume the beer isn't either. Either commit to a weekly update, or mirror Untappd so the list maintains itself. Never leave a dated list untouched.

No game-day calendar on a pub that trades on sport. If the pub is running Premier League on Saturday mornings, the Six Nations in February, NFL playoff Sundays, and college football all autumn, the site needs a page that says which matches are on which screens at which times. Pubs that don't publish this lose the pre-commit crowd (the four friends deciding on Thursday) to the pub that does.

No private-events page, or one buried in a generic contact form. Private hire is often the single most profitable slice of the week. A dedicated page with a proper inquiry form (date, headcount, room, food or drinks, budget) routes the inquiry to somebody who can close it the same day. A generic "get in touch" form going to an unmonitored inbox loses those bookings to the pub up the road with a better-set-up site.

A food menu that lives as a PDF that crashes on mobile. A 12MB PDF menu that takes eight seconds to render on a patchy 4G connection is how you lose the walking-past-Googling-you customer. HTML menus load in a second, Google ranks them for dish names, and a kitchen manager can update the 86ed dish from their phone. If the builder pushes you toward a PDF, the builder is wrong for a pub.

St Patrick's, Six Nations, the Premier League, NFL playoffs, and the year's loud nights

Pub revenue is lumpy in ways most hospitality spreadsheets undersell. St Patrick's Day can do a full weekend of trade in a single Tuesday. College football Saturdays carry autumn. The Premier League season dictates weekend mornings from August through May. Six Nations weekends in February and March pull destination crowds for rugby-friendly pubs. NFL playoff weekends light up January. Oktoberfest in September and October earns its keep for pubs that lean into it. And December's work Christmas drinks and private-hire bookings can be a quarter of the quarter. The website has to be ready for each, in different ways.

St Patrick's Day, ten days out. A dedicated St Patrick's page with the day's running order (opening time, live music set times, food offering, whether you're taking bookings or running walk-in only) published a clear ten days before March 17. Google will rank the page for local Paddy's Day searches over the lead-up. Last-minute posts on Instagram won't.

The Six Nations and Premier League fixtures calendar, updated weekly. A simple page listing this weekend's matches, kick-off times, and which screens they're on. Updated every Monday for the coming weekend. This is the single most visited page on a sports pub's website during the season, and most pubs don't build one.

NFL playoff weekends and college football Saturdays, flagged early. For pubs with an American-sports lean, the playoff bracket and the college Saturday noon-to-midnight slate deserve their own pages. Food specials for long viewing blocks (pulled pork by the pound, wings by the bucket) that a four-hour watching group can order and share.

Oktoberfest and seasonal beer events, published before the kegs land. Oktoberfest (late September through October), beer dinners, tap takeovers, brewer visits. Publish the event before the kegs arrive, sell tickets or take RSVPs on the site, and send the ticket list a reminder 48 hours before. Squarespace handles the ticket and reminder flow in-dashboard.

December private hires and Christmas work drinks, inquiry form wide open from late October. Corporate Christmas drinks and office-team private hires for December are booked from late October onwards. The private-events page should be prominent on the site from the first of November at the latest, with a weekday-evening availability view if the pub has multiple rooms. The pubs that take the bookings are the ones that are easy to book in October.

What I'm less sure about. The thing I'm genuinely uncertain about is how much the wider shift in drinking habits (younger cohorts drinking notably less alcohol, more interest in alcohol-free beer, wine, and decent cocktails, a food-and-event-led rather than just-a-pint reason to be there) should push a pub's website toward food-forward and event-forward framing. For most traditional locals the answer is still to lead with what's on tap tonight. For gastropubs and pubs with a younger weekday crowd, I'd lean into the kitchen and the events calendar harder than I would have five years ago, and I'd make the low-and-no section of the drinks list findable rather than buried. Whether that shift deepens or plateaus is the call I'm least confident about, and it's the one I'd revisit first in eighteen months.

Get the pub site live before next Saturday

The pub website that wins the four-friends-on-Thursday decision is the one that loads fast, tells a drinker what's on tap this week, tells a hungry walk-in what tonight's specials are, and makes a private-hire inquiry feel easy. Squarespace's 14-day free trial is enough for a publican with a phone full of decent photos and a pen to sketch the site map on a coaster to get a credible version live over a quiet Sunday. Ship it before next weekend and rewrite in month two. The builder matters less than the decision to stop planning the site and start running it.

Start Squarespace free trial

Or start with Wix if the event-calendar widget and food-menu PDF handling feel slightly smoother to you out of the box without a designer's help.