The Website Tools Behind Restaurant, Venue, and Festival Brands

Yes, and the people who say otherwise are usually arguing about the wrong thing.

The real question is not whether the platform can hold a beautiful site. It is whether your team can run it on a Tuesday when the chef changes the menu and nobody wants to call a developer. Squarespace wins that question, and it is the reason I build on it for hospitality.

What it does natively: menu blocks that search engines can actually read, which PDFs cannot, so your dishes show up in search. QR codes straight to your digital menu. Gift cards, event calendars, announcement bars for a changed service, and commerce if you sell anything that ships.

What it does through partners: reservations through OpenTable or Tock, both of which drop into a page as a block. Online ordering through ChowNow for commission free pickup and delivery, or Allday Ordering, which embeds an orderable menu right on your page instead of sending guests somewhere else.

Festivals, conferences, and event brands run on it too, including sites I have built and sites you would recognize ( like the buildout I did for CultureCon Collective).

The platform is not the ceiling. The stack around it is, and that is a strategy decision before it is a design one.

Eventbrite charges 3.7% plus $1.79 per paid ticket as a service fee, then 2.9% per order for payment processing on top. Free events are free.

Here is what that is on a real ticket:

• On a $25 ticket: $2.72 service fee plus $0.73 processing, so $3.44 in fees

• On a $50 ticket: $3.64 service fee plus $1.45 processing, so $5.09 in fees

• On a $100 ticket: $5.49 service fee plus $2.90 processing, so $8.39 in fees

One thing most people get wrong about this, and I would rather you hear it straight: by default the buyer pays those fees, not you. So it is not money coming out of your pocket. It is money coming out of your guest's pocket, which shows up as a higher price at checkout and a worse conversion rate.

You can choose to absorb the fees instead, at which point it does come out of your pocket.

Either way you are paying a marketplace for discovery. Which is worth doing if your guests come from Eventbrite. If they come from your own email list and your own Instagram, you are paying for something you are not using.

It depends on whether the event is free or paid, and the answer is genuinely different.

If the event is free, use a form. A registration form on your own site costs you nothing, captures the email addresses, and does not need a ticketing tool at all. People overcomplicate this constantly.

If you are charging, Eventually is where I would start. It is a Squarespace first ticketing extension, so ticket pages match your site and checkout runs through your own Squarespace Commerce rather than a marketplace. The thing that matters: Eventually takes no per ticket cut. You pay a flat monthly subscription, and your normal Squarespace payment processing applies the way it does on anything else you sell.

That is the whole difference. Eventbrite's $3.64 service fee on a $50 ticket is a cut on top of processing. Eventually does not charge one.

Be aware of the free plan, because it is easy to misread. Eventually's free tier is free forever, but it covers free events and RSVPs only, up to three events a month with twenty five guests each. Useful for a workshop or an RSVP list. It will not sell a paid ticket.

To sell paid tickets, here is the real ladder:

• Free, $0 forever: three events a month, twenty five guests each, free tickets only

• Essentials, $16 a month billed annually or $190 a year: ten events, fifty guests each, three seats

• Growth, $41 a month billed annually or $490 a year: fifty events, one hundred guests each, five seats

• Pro, $140 a month billed annually or $1,690 a year: unlimited events and guests, ten seats

Annual billing gets you two months free, so paying monthly runs higher. Every plan covers one site.

My honest advice: run one small paid event on it before you move anything else. One event tells you more than any comparison chart you see out there.

No. Designs you have applied stay on your site after you cancel.

That is a deliberate decision by SquareKicker and it is a large part of why they are in my stack. Plenty of tools hold a client's site hostage to keep the designer's work alive. I will not put a client in that position, and I noticed which company decided they should not have to be.

Two things worth knowing so you are not surprised:

You keep what is already applied, but you cannot make further changes until you reactivate. The design stays, the editing does not.

This applies to paid subscriptions. If the work was done inside a free trial and the trial ends without upgrading, those changes are removed. If a designer builds your site, make sure it was built on a real subscription, not a trial.

When I hand off a build, the customizations are yours. There is no ongoing fee you have to carry just to keep your own website looking the way it looks.

For most things, no. For a few things, you should call me first, and I will tell you honestly which is which.

Swapping a menu, changing hours, adding an event, updating a photo, posting a new offer. That is all you, and it should be. A website only the designer can touch is a dependency with a nice homepage, and I have watched beautiful custom builds go stale in six weeks because nobody on staff could update them.

So every site I hand off comes with how-tos for the things you will actually need to change. If you are not keeping me on retainer, you should still be able to run your own site.

Where it is worth a conversation first: anything custom built for your brand experience. Animation, a custom layout, an effect that was coded specifically for you. Those pieces are doing a job, and changing one without knowing what it connects to is how a site quietly stops feeling like your brand.

The rule I give clients: if you are changing content, go ahead. If you are changing how something behaves, send me a message first. It is usually a five minute answer and it saves the thing we built.

Squarespace as the foundation, SquareKicker for the custom design layer, and then a hospitality stack chosen around what the business actually does.

For the hospitality layer specifically:

• Reservations: OpenTable or Tock. Both add to a Squarespace page as a block. Tock also handles ordering and prepaid experiences

• Online ordering: ChowNow or Allday Ordering. ChowNow is commission free for pickup and delivery. Allday embeds an orderable menu on your own page

• Menus: Squarespace menu blocks. Search engines read them. A PDF menu is invisible to search, and I will argue about this one

• Ticketed events: Eventually. Flat monthly, no per ticket cut, checkout on your own site

• Email: Flodesk. Flat rate regardless of list size

Here is the part that matters more than the tool list. Every one of these integrates fine. The question is never whether it is possible. It is which three you actually need, in what order, and who is going to run them after launch.

A venue that does forty covers a night and six ticketed dinners a year needs a different stack than a festival. Picking wrong is expensive, not because the tools cost much, but because your team ends up working around a system that was never built for how you operate.

That is the work. Strategy first, design second, tools third, and in that order every time.

Squarespace as the foundation, and then a ticketing and audience stack picked around one question: do you already have the people, or do you have to go find them?

That question matters more for event brands than for almost anyone else, because a ticketing fee is really a fee for discovery. But discovery is not one thing, and this is where most advice gets lazy.

There are two kinds, and they behave completely differently.

Marketplace discovery is someone browsing the platform who has never heard of you. Posh and Eventbrite have it. Eventually does not, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Search discovery is someone googling your event name, or your city plus the thing you do, or asking an AI where to go this weekend. That one is not something a platform hands you. It is something you build, and you build it on your own domain.

Here is the part nobody mentions. When you list on a marketplace, that marketplace's page for your event frequently outranks your own page for your own event name. You are handing them the search equity for something you created. Host the event on your own site and that equity stays with you, and it compounds across every season instead of resetting.

So the ticketing side, honestly:

• If your audience already follows you, Eventually. Squarespace first, so ticket pages match your site, checkout runs through your own site, no per ticket cut, flat monthly fee. The event page lives on your domain

• If you need to reach people who have never heard of you, Posh. Around ten percent plus ninety nine cents a ticket with card processing included. That buys a discovery feed, unlimited SMS campaigns and affiliate links, which is a real marketing engine rather than just a checkout

• If you want the biggest marketplace, Eventbrite. 3.7 percent plus $1.79 a ticket, then 2.9 percent processing on top

On a fifty dollar ticket, Posh and Eventbrite land within about a dollar of each other. Eventually costs you nothing per ticket and brings no marketplace audience. That is the real trade, and it is a strategy decision rather than a budget one.

What people miss is that choosing Eventually does not mean giving up on being found. It means the finding happens on your side of the fence:

• Event schema markup on each event page, so Google can show it as an event result with the date and location rather than a plain blue link

• A real indexable page per event on your own domain, which keeps working for you after the event and builds authority for the next one

• Links you control, pointing back to your site, so every share on social or in an email grows your domain instead of someone else's

None of that happens by itself. A ticketing extension gives you a checkout. The schema, the page structure and the SEO are build decisions somebody has to make on purpose, and that is the difference between an event site and an event site that sells.

Most festivals I have worked on end up using more than one platform across a season, which is fine and often correct. A sold out members night and a first year public event are not the same sales problem.

The rest of the stack:

• Email: Flodesk or Mailchimp. Flodesk is flat rate no matter how big your list gets, which matters when a festival list grows fast. Mailchimp if the team already lives in it and you are not going to win that argument

• Automation: Zapier. This is the piece people skip and then regret. Form fills into the email list, ticket buyers into the CRM, RSVPs into a spreadsheet the team actually checks, all without anyone copying and pasting at eleven at night

• The schedule itself: Squarespace event pages for the lineup, dates and locations, with each event getting its own page that search engines can index

So yes, all of this gets built on Squarespace. The platform is not the limit.

The limit is whether someone sequenced it properly, because an event site that is beautiful and does not connect the ticket buyer to the email list is a site you rebuild next season.