A cafe website gets about five seconds of attention, usually from someone standing on a wet pavement two streets away with one thumb free and a toddler pulling at their coat. They are not reading your story. They want to know if you are open, whether you do a proper breakfast, and how far they have to walk. Answer those three things fast and they turn up. Make them scroll, pinch and zoom and they tap back to the map and go to the chain on the corner.
That is the whole brief. Everything else on the site is a bonus.
The Five Second Test Every Cafe Website Has To Pass
Open your own site on your phone. Not your laptop. Your phone, on mobile data, standing outside. Start a timer.
Before five seconds are up, can you see today’s opening hours, a line that says what sort of food you serve, and the street you are on? If any of those needs a scroll, the page is failing the only test that matters. Roughly three quarters of the people looking at a cafe website are on a phone, and a decent share of them are within a mile of your door with a decision to make in the next two minutes.
The fix is rarely a redesign. It is usually moving four lines of text up the page and deleting a photo carousel.
Opening Hours Are The Whole Job
If you only get one thing right, get this. Wrong hours cost you more than a bad logo ever will, because someone who walks to a shut door in February does not try again in March. They tell two people. That is the end of it.
A few rules that hold up in practice:
- Write the hours as text on the page, not inside an image or a poster you exported from Canva. Google can read text. It cannot read your poster, and neither can someone using a screen reader.
- Put them in the header or the first block of the home page, not on a separate contact page three taps in.
- Say what happens on bank holidays. “Open bank holiday Mondays, 9am to 3pm” saves you thirty messages.
- If your kitchen stops before the counter does, say so. “Hot food until 2pm, cakes and coffee until 4pm” prevents the worst conversation in hospitality.
- Seasonal changes need a home. A tea room that shuts Mondays and Tuesdays from January to March should have that written down somewhere permanent, not just announced in a story that vanished a fortnight ago.
Whoever builds your site should show you how to change one line of hours in under a minute, from your phone, in the back office at 6.40am. If they cannot, that is the wrong setup for a cafe.
Put The Menu On The Page, Not In A PDF
A PDF menu is the single most common mistake on a cafe website. It opens in a separate viewer, the text comes up the size of a grain of rice, and the customer has to zoom around a page designed for A4. Half of them give up.
Type the menu out as ordinary web text. Sections, item names, one line of description where it helps, prices next to them. It loads instantly, it works on any phone, and Google can actually read the words, which is how you start turning up when somebody searches for vegan breakfast or gluten free cake near them.
And yes, put the prices on. Cafes agonise over this. The worry is that £3.40 for a flat white looks steep in print. In reality, leaving prices off does not make anybody assume you are cheap. It makes them assume you are expensive and slightly evasive. Prices on a cafe website also filter out the person who was going to grumble at the till.
If you change the menu with the seasons, do not build a system that makes that painful. A short core menu on the page plus a specials board photographed weekly is fine. Nobody expects Tuesday’s soup to be listed online. They do expect to know that soup exists and roughly what it costs.
Photos Of Your Actual Cafe, Not A Stock Coffee Cup
Stock photography kills trust in hospitality faster than in any other trade. People recognise the same latte art heart they have seen on forty other sites, and it tells them nothing about whether your place has a table big enough for a pram.
What people actually want to see: the room, the counter, the cake display, the front of the building from the pavement so they recognise it when they get there. Two of those five matter more than the rest. Get someone to take twenty photos on a decent phone at about 9am when the light is good and the tables are set but not full, then use six.
One picture of the exterior is worth more than three of avocado on toast. It is the one that tells a stranger they have arrived.
What A Cafe Website Should Say About Allergens
You already handle allergen questions at the counter every day. Online, the sensible approach is to be clear and to point people to a conversation rather than pretend a web page can cover everything a member of staff can.
A short, plain line under the menu works: “Please tell us about any allergies when you order. Full allergen information for every dish is available at the counter.” If you sell prepacked items to take away, the labelling rules are stricter, and it is worth reading the current guidance from the Food Standards Agency rather than relying on what another cafe has written on theirs.
Do not publish a detailed allergen matrix you cannot keep accurate. An out of date chart is worse than no chart, because somebody may rely on it.
Your food hygiene rating is worth showing too, assuming it is a four or a five. It is a small green sticker on the page and it settles a question people are too polite to ask.
Google Business Profile And Your Cafe Website Do Different Jobs
Plenty of cafe owners are told they do not need a site because they have a Google listing. That misreads what each one does.
The Google Business Profile is what shows in the map pack when someone searches for coffee near me. It carries your hours, your reviews, your photos and your directions, and for a cafe it is genuinely the more important of the two on any given Tuesday morning. Claim it, fill it in properly, keep the hours accurate, and post to it now and then.
The cafe website is what the profile links to, and it is where you say the things Google’s form has no box for. Your Sunday roast. The function room upstairs that seats twenty. That you do wholesale sourdough for three pubs and would happily do a fourth. That dogs are welcome, that there is step free access, that you take the little card machine outside to the two pavement tables in summer.
A cafe website also gives you somewhere you control. Reviews, listings and social accounts sit on land you rent. The site is the one asset with your name on the deeds, and it feeds the listing rather than competing with it.
Bookings, Cakes And The Money Pages
Most cafes do not need a table booking system. If you turn tables over in forty minutes and take walk-ins all day, a booking form creates admin and disappointment in equal measure.
Where booking does earn its keep is afternoon tea, private hire, tasting evenings and Christmas. In those cases the simplest thing is to embed a tool you already trust rather than have a bespoke system built for you. A form that emails you, or an embedded diary from a booking provider, does the job at a fraction of the cost and does not break when the site is updated.
The pages that quietly make money for small food businesses are usually the boring ones:
- Celebration cakes, with a price band and a lead time. “From £45, two weeks’ notice” saves an hour of messages a week.
- Buffets and platters for local offices, with a per head price and a minimum order.
- Wholesale, if you bake. One page saying what you supply, in what quantities, with a phone number.
- Private hire, with capacity, rough cost and what is included.
A bakery taking two extra £120 buffet orders a month from one page has paid for the site several times over. That is the argument for a cafe website that does more than sit there looking pretty, and it is the part most cafes never build.
Instagram Is Not A Cafe Website
Instagram is excellent for cakes and useless for hours. The grid shows your best croissant from last April above the post announcing you are shut for a refit. Nobody can search it. Nobody over sixty five is looking at it. And the reach you get depends entirely on decisions made by a company that does not know you exist.
Use it. Post the specials board, the new machine, the queue on a Saturday. Then link the profile to a cafe website that holds the facts steady while the feed does the flirting.
What To Leave Off
A short list of things that make a cafe website slower and worse:
- A full screen photo with the name written across it and nothing else above the fold. Beautiful on a 27 inch monitor. On a phone it is a wall.
- Music or video that plays on its own. Someone is opening this at the school gate.
- A rotating slider of six images. People rarely wait for slide two, and each image slows the page.
- The history of the building as the first thing on the home page. Put it further down, where the people who care will find it.
- A contact form as the only way to reach you. A phone number that dials when tapped beats a form for a cafe every time.
Speed matters more here than in almost any other trade, because the customer is standing up, on 4G, and hungry. Two seconds to load is the target. Six huge unoptimised photos will take you well past that.
When A Cafe Website Is Not Worth The Money
We would rather say this than pretend otherwise. If you run a takeaway hatch with a queue out the door at lunchtime, you sell one thing, and you have no ambitions beyond that, a well maintained Google listing plus a single page with hours and a menu is genuinely enough. Spending £2,000 on a bespoke build would be a waste.
The same goes if you are three weeks from opening and the fit out has eaten the budget. Get the listing live, get a one page holding site up with the opening date and the address, and revisit it once you know what actually sells.
A cafe website starts to pay when you have something to sell beyond a coffee and a scone: cakes to order, a room to hire, a wholesale round, a catering side, or a second site. That is when the page stops being a business card and starts being a member of staff.
If you do want one built and kept current without a large bill in month one, spreading the cost is a reasonable way to do it, and our website design for cafes page sets out what that covers. It is also worth looking at some examples of finished sites before you decide what you actually want, because it is much easier to react to something real than to describe it from scratch.
So What Should A Cafe Website Actually Have?
Hours at the top, in text, kept right. A menu with prices, typed out, not a PDF. Your address with a tap to open maps and a phone number that dials. Photos of your room and your frontage. A line about allergens. Then, underneath all that, the pages for cakes, buffets, hire or wholesale, if you sell them.
That is a small site. Five pages, sometimes three. A cafe website does not need to be clever, it needs to be right by 7am on a Saturday when someone is deciding between you and the place with the queue.