Do I need a website for my café if I am on Instagram and Google Maps?

Take the two things you already have. Instagram shows the room, the light through the window at nine in the morning and the flat white, and it does that better than any paragraph could. Your Google Maps pin tells somebody standing two streets away that you're open, where the door is and what people think of the place. Both of them are good at the job they were made for. Neither was made to reach the person who doesn't know your café exists.

That person types coffee shop near me, or brunch in your town, into Google on a Saturday morning. What Google gives back is a stack of cafés in one card each: a photo, a rating, the hours, a row of buttons. One of those buttons says Website. The whole listing is built to send somebody somewhere, and the somewhere is meant to be a page of your own. Inside that stack you're ranked against the café round the corner on distance, rating and photos, which is what Maps is for and is fair enough. The result they open instead is a website belonging to somebody else.

Why your own site finds new customers

Search and AI read the open web. Google, ChatGPT and Claude fetch pages at addresses like yourcafe.co.uk. A social profile inside an app is mostly not something they can fetch. If the only description of your café out there is a caption under a photo, that's the version anything reading about you has to work from.

With a site of your own you own the exact words people type. Brunch. Oat milk as standard. Dog friendly. Somewhere to sit with a laptop on a Tuesday morning. The beans you pull and who roasts them. Each of those can be a page written in the language of the person searching for it, and it stays there. Instagram is a feed you scroll past, and the post about your new menu is gone by next week. A page answers the question at the moment somebody asks it.

Which is a different sort of visitor from a follower. Someone searching for brunch near you at half nine on a Sunday has already decided they're going out for breakfast. They're picking the place, and they'll pick it off whatever page tells them the most: what's on the menu this month, what it costs, whether the two of them will get a table without booking. That's a decision made in a minute or two on a phone, and the café that answers those three things wins it more often than the café with the nicer grid.

How we make it simple

We build from your Google Business Profile. The hours, the phone number, the address, the photos and the reviews Google is already showing become the site's foundation, so your bank holiday hours can't be right in one place and wrong in another.

From the listing and your menu we make a page for the things you sell, and an FAQ out of the questions your reviews keep raising: whether there's wifi, whether you take dogs, whether there's room for a buggy, what time the kitchen stops doing eggs. If there's a page you want for the laptop crowd or for Sunday mornings with a pram, that's the kind of page a site of your own can carry.

The technical work you'd otherwise pay an SEO person for is included. The site is written to be indexed by Google and read by ChatGPT: pages of real text, structured data describing the café, a sitemap, and the lot submitted to Google and Bing when it goes live. Google can show a page at your address, under your café's name, and that page is about one café.

The first version is up a couple of minutes after you type the name in, with no brief to fill in and nothing to write beforehand. After that, when your Google listing changes, so does the site, which means the hours are correct on a bank holiday because you already fixed them in the one place you were always going to fix them.

How they work together

Maps carries on putting you on the map. The difference is that the Website button on your listing now has somewhere to go, so the person who found you on the map lands on your menu instead of a login screen for somebody else's app, and the pin does the job it was designed to do.

Instagram carries on being Instagram: the daily photo, the new cake, the people who already love the place. Point the bio link at your site and those followers arrive somewhere you control, where the menu is a page rather than a photo of a chalkboard from March. Both of them feed one thing that belongs to you, rather than sending everybody off in different directions.

If you take bookings for a table or run a coffee subscription, the link for it sits behind a button on the site and works exactly as it does today. Nothing you already use has to be replaced.

What you pay

£30 a month. A real multi-page site, the menu and the room and the hours, built from your Google listing and sitting on your own .co.uk or .com, with hosting and updates in the price. The first version takes a couple of minutes and you read the whole thing before you pay a penny. Cancel any month and keep the domain.

Put your café's name into our café page and we'll build one from your Google listing. It costs nothing to read what comes out.