Yes, your Detroit restaurant needs its own website, even if you are already on DoorDash. The apps are useful for delivery reach, but they rent you the customer and tax every order. A website you own wins the pickup, call-in, and regular customers at card-processing cost, and 84 percent of diners say they would rather order from a restaurant’s own site than a third-party app (National Restaurant Association, 2024). Keep DoorDash for what it is good at. Just stop paying it a cut of the orders you could own outright.
Isn’t being on DoorDash enough?
DoorDash and Grubhub are discovery and delivery tools, not a home base. When an order comes through an app, the platform owns the relationship: the customer data, the reorder, the email, the loyalty. You get the ticket minus a commission, and you never learn who ordered. That is a fair trade to reach a brand-new delivery customer once. It is an expensive way to serve the regulars who already know your name.
Your own website flips that. The customer lands on your page, sees your menu the way you designed it, and orders or calls you directly. You keep the margin and the relationship. The app becomes one channel instead of your entire online presence.
What does DoorDash actually cost you?
More than most owners realize, because the commission has to be measured against your margin, not your menu price. The big apps charge roughly 15 to 30 percent on delivery and about 6 percent on pickup, straight from DoorDash’s own pricing page. Meanwhile a full-service restaurant nets only about 3 to 5 cents on the dollar overall (National Restaurant Association operations data). So a single app order can cost several times the entire profit on it.
| How the order comes in | Typical cost to you | Who owns the customer |
|---|---|---|
| DoorDash / Uber Eats delivery | 15 to 30% commission | The app |
| App pickup order | About 6% commission | The app |
| Direct order on your own site | Card processing only (~3%) | You |
| A phone call from your site | $0 | You |
The point is not that delivery apps are evil. It is that paying a third of the ticket makes sense to reach a brand-new delivery customer, and no sense at all for the regular who would have called you anyway.
Do people even look at restaurant websites anymore?
They look before they ever walk in. Roughly 77 percent of diners check a restaurant online before dining in or ordering out (MGH, 2019), and about 71 percent use Google to find and evaluate local businesses (BrightLocal, 2026). Google sends them looking; your website is where they land to decide.
And the menu is the moment. In a national survey, 49 percent of people said they would pick a different restaurant if they hit a clumsy PDF menu on their phone (Popmenu, 2023). A menu that is a real, tap-to-browse web page, not a blurry PDF you pinch and zoom, is one of the highest-return things a restaurant site can have.
So should you cancel DoorDash?
No, and any web designer who tells you to is not being straight with you. Delivery apps are genuinely good at one thing: putting you in front of someone across town who wants delivery tonight and does not know you yet. Keep them for that.
The honest move is to stop overpaying on the orders you already earned. Send your pickup, call-in, and repeat customers to a site you own, where a direct order costs card processing instead of 15 to 30 percent. Even shifting a handful of orders off the apps each week can cover the cost of the website itself.
What should a Detroit restaurant website actually include?
You do not need a huge site. For most independent spots, from a Corktown counter to an Eastern Market stall to a neighborhood coney, two pages do the job: a fast homepage and a real menu. What matters is that the essentials are one tap away on a phone:
- A real, mobile-friendly menu (an actual web page, not a PDF).
- Tap-to-call and tap-for-directions, right at the top.
- Hours that are correct, including holidays.
- A clear way to order direct, or an obvious link if you route ordering elsewhere.
- A few good photos of the food and the room.
- A link to your Google Business Profile so reviews and Maps stay connected.
We built a demo for a Detroit smash-burger concept, Chubbys, to show exactly this feel: a quick homepage and a menu you can actually read on a phone. You can see it and our other work on our work page. If you want the same for your spot, that is the core of our web design and Detroit web design work.
What does a restaurant website cost, and how do you start?
A simple, professional restaurant site (a homepage plus a full menu) is one of the most affordable projects we take on, and it is built to pay for itself in saved commissions. You can see current starting rates on our pricing page. Every project starts with a free homepage mockup, so you see the design on your own screen before you spend a cent.
