A website for your café or restaurant. Built to fill tables.
Nobody books a table because a website was beautiful. They book because they found the menu, believed the opening hours, and could see the room they would be sitting in.
The short version
A café site has one job: answer the three questions somebody asks before they walk over. What is on, whether you are open, and what it looks like inside. Everything else is decoration.
Most people reach a café website already half-decided. They are standing somewhere else, hungry, with a friend waiting on an answer, and they have given themselves about as long as it takes to cross a road.
Everything below is what we build into a café or restaurant site for that reason, and why. It is also a fair checklist for the site you already have - most of these you can fix yourself this week.
Opening hours somebody can trust.
Wrong hours are worse than no hours. Somebody who walks over on a Monday to find you shut does not check again, and they tell the person they walked over with. It is the one error a café website makes that actively loses you a customer rather than failing to win one.
So the hours go where they are read, near the top, with the kitchen time beside them if that closes earlier. Bank holidays and the week between Christmas and New Year are the two that catch everyone out, and they are worth a line of their own.
The same hours belong on your Google listing, and the two have to agree. Most people never reach the website at all - they see the listing, and it is the listing that says open or closed. We connect them so you change it once.
Photographs of the actual room.
Not a stock photograph of a cortado. Somebody choosing between you and the place across the road is trying to picture sitting there: whether it is loud, whether there is a table for four, whether they can bring the dog or the pushchair.
A phone is fine. Shoot in daylight, shoot the room empty before service and full during it, and include the front of the building from the pavement - that last one is what people match against when they are looking for your door.
Nobody has ever walked past a café because the website was not beautiful enough.
What a café’s site comes with.
4 to five pages, built for the way your customers actually arrive - written for this trade, not adapted from a template someone else used. The pages we would build are Home, Menu, Find us and About.
- Menu and today’s hours, up top
- Book a table in two taps
- Directions that open in Maps
- Photos of the room and the food
- Your Google listing kept in sync
All of it for €640, paid once. Analytics, Search Console and your Google listing connected, hosting free, and you own the site. There is no monthly fee and nothing here is an upgrade.
What to have ready.
None of this has to be polished. It has to be current, and it is what lets a build start rather than stall for a fortnight on emails asking whether you still do the Tuesday roast.
0 of 5 checked
Anything left unticked is a question we would have asked anyway. Sending it up front is what turns a three-week build into a one-week one.
Questions cafés and restaurants ask.
I already pay for a booking system. Does this replace it?
No, and it should not. If you are on a booking platform your staff know, the site sends people into it rather than competing with it - the button is on every page instead of buried on a contact form. If you have no system, a form that reaches your inbox is usually enough to start.
My menu changes every week. Am I going to have to pay for that?
No. Changing a dish or a price is something you do yourself in a minute, and it is the whole reason the menu is a page rather than a document you have to re-export. Nothing about a menu change involves us.
Does a small café really need a website when it has a Google listing?
The listing is doing most of the work and it should be set up properly either way. What it cannot do is show a full menu, say what the room is like, or take a booking on your terms - and it is rented. The site is the one you own, and the listing points at it.
When you pay, why hosting is free, what happens if you want changes later - those are answered on the home page.