Morphos / Journal
A café website that does one thing
Four questions, answered fast, on whatever phone the customer is holding. Everything beyond that is a cost.
Cafés are usually sold websites they do not need: a blog nobody updates, a gallery of latte art, a newsletter signup with four subscribers. What a café's website has to do is narrow, and doing it well costs a fraction of the site most end up with.
The four questions, in the order they get asked
- Are you open right now? — today's hours, stated plainly, updating automatically. Not "Mon-Fri 8-5" which requires the customer to know what day it is.
- Where are you? — an address that opens a map in one tap, plus the thing that actually helps: what it is next to.
- What do you serve? — the menu, as text, current. Not a photo of a chalkboard taken in 2023.
- Can I work here / bring a dog / book a table? — whichever of these is asked most. One sentence each.
What to leave out
The story of the founder's trip to Guatemala. The gallery. The blog. The newsletter. If the founder's story is genuinely the reason people come, that is a different business and this advice does not apply — but for most cafés, none of these are why anyone arrives, and every one of them costs money to build and maintain.
Why this is the right size
A café site that answers four questions can be built quickly, hosted for almost nothing, and updated by whoever is on shift. It also loads in under a second on mobile data, which is the only condition under which a hungry person standing on a pavement will wait.
The one thing is usually the thing you already know
Most café owners can answer the question in a sentence. It is the sandwich, the coffee, the garden, the fact that you can sit for three hours without being moved along. The problem is never that the answer is unknown — it is that the site was built to look like a café site rather than to say the thing.
So the test is simple. Cover the logo. Read the homepage. Can you tell what this place is for? If the answer is 'a café', the page is doing no work. If it is 'the one with the garden and the flat white', it is.
Everything else follows from that sentence. The photography, the order of the sections, what goes above the fold and what can be deleted entirely. A site with one clear claim is easier to build, faster to load and much easier to remember than one that tries to cover every reason somebody might walk in.