A website for your cafe
A cafe lives on people walking in, and most of the walking in now starts on a phone. This page is our honest offer to the people running one: a proper website built around your menu and your room, for a one-off price, owned by you outright, with nothing monthly behind it, ever.
Last updated July 2026
The front doorInstagram is where your regulars live. It is not where strangers find you.
Nearly every cafe we come across runs on an Instagram account, sometimes a Facebook page as well. For the people who already follow you that works, and we would not touch it. It is the right place for today's cabinet, the pastry that just came out, and the sign on the door when the power goes off.
The trouble is the person who has never heard of you. They are standing on a footpath in your suburb at nine in the morning, typing “brunch” and a street name into their phone, or “gluten free bakery” and the name of the city. That search is answered by web pages and map listings. A menu that lives inside a picture is not words to a search engine, so none of your food is in the answer, and the hours in a caption from March tell nobody whether the door is open right now.
There is a quieter version of the same problem. Somebody is handed your name by a friend and looks you up before they drive across town. What comes back is either something that reads like a real business with a real kitchen, or a scroll of photos with no menu, no hours and no address in text. Plenty of people give up at that point, and you never hear about it.
And the honest other side: if you fill every table off the street and there is a queue down the footpath by eleven on a Sunday, you may not need us. We would rather say that here than waste your evening.
What a cafe website actually needs
The menu, first, as real text on a real page. Not a photograph of the printed one, not a file that downloads. Both are everywhere and both hide your food: from search, from anyone who needs to make the text bigger, and from the person on a bus with two bars of signal. Prices in text, sections in text, the flat white and the eggs and the vegan option all written out where they can be read.
Then the plain facts people are actually checking. Your hours, written out properly, including the day you close and the fortnight you take in January, and matching what your Google listing says so the two never contradict each other. Where you are, with the detail a stranger needs: which end of the street, the entrance round the back, where the parking really is. Whether you are licensed. Whether the kitchen can do gluten free or dairy free without a phone call. Whether dogs are fine on the terrace.
Then the part that makes people choose you over the place two doors down. Who bakes at four in the morning, who roasts the coffee, how long you have been on that corner, why the room looks the way it does. Photographs of the real food and the real room, not stock pictures of somebody else's latte. That story does not fit in a caption that scrolls away by Thursday, and it is the thing that turns a first visit into a regular.
What it does not need: an online shop, a booking engine, a monthly plan, or a photo gallery that takes ten seconds to load. If you already take orders or bookings some other way, that keeps working and the site links to it. We build small, plain, fast sites on purpose. They cost almost nothing to keep online, which is why hosting is free.
The two faults we found in nearly every street
In July 2026 we went through 52 independent food businesses across Christchurch, cafes, bakeries, takeaways and food shops in Linwood, Woolston, Sydenham, Addington, Riccarton and Papanui. We were only looking. Nobody was contacted and nothing was sold. Two faults came up again and again, and both are cheap to fix once somebody notices them.
The first is menu rot. Of the businesses that had their own site, a surprising number had no menu on it that we could find at all. Others had it as a file to download, or as a photograph of a printed page, or as a link that sent you off to a different website entirely. One had the brunch menu as a download and the evening menu as an image, so neither could be read by search or by a screen reader. Several bakeries with perfectly good websites had no list of what they bake anywhere on them. A menu that is a picture is a menu that only exists for people who already found you.
The second is stranger, and worse. A business has its own web address, search engines still list it as their website, and it does not load at all. The address has no record left on the internet, so nothing a visitor types will ever reach it. In one patch of fourteen cafes and bakeries, seven had their own web address and three of those seven were dead when we checked. Elsewhere we found domains sitting behind a password-gated “opening soon” page that had clearly been that way for years, and one where a visitor's browser would throw a security warning before the front page ever appeared. In almost every case we would bet the owner has no idea.
Then the borrowed page. Where the real site is missing, something usually fills the gap: a directory that scraped your details, an ordering platform's page with your name on the front of it, a free page builder that put your shop on a subdomain of theirs. It looks like a website. It ranks. It has your address and your phone number on it, and often the wrong hours. You cannot edit a word of it, you cannot fix it when it is wrong, and it was never yours. We found that shape repeatedly, in one case as the only thing a well-reviewed takeaway had.
One more number, because it is the honest one. Only about a third of the 52 published an email address anywhere at all. If you are one of the ones who does not, that is worth changing today, website or no website.
A monthly plan is rent on your own name
The platforms built for restaurant websites nearly all charge monthly, commonly somewhere in the region of forty to fifty dollars, and the charge does not stop while the site exists. Five years of that is well over two thousand dollars, and on the last day of it the site is still theirs. Stop paying and it goes dark, usually taking your web address with it. At the budget end of the market, agencies advertise cafe sites from around five hundred dollars with hosting charged separately on top, which is fair enough for what it is, except that the hosting line never ends either.
Ours is built the other way round. One payment, and then nothing. Hosting is free, so there is no card to lapse and no invoice to forget in a quiet winter. The domain is registered in your name, never ours, so nobody can hold it over you. The whole site exports free at any time, so you are not locked to us either. If you ever sell the business, the website goes with it, the same as the grinder and the sign.
That is what the name means. In New Zealand, freehold is land you own outright rather than a tenancy on it. Your cafe's name is an asset you have spent years building on a street corner, and it should live somewhere you own.
Finished on day one, and it grows for as long as you want it to
To see what this looks like built, we made a fictional site for a bakery and café: Kōwhai Corner Bakehouse. Every real build starts from your own world, not from that one.
The site is complete when it goes live. Not a shell waiting for you to fill it in after close, and not a starting point: written, photographed, true, and ready for the person searching tonight. If you never send us another word it will keep doing that job for years, free, and nobody will chase you for anything.
It can also grow, because we stay behind it. You email us what has changed, we draft it and show you, you say yes, and it goes up. A batch of edits is $20, so it pays to save a few up. There is no account to log into, no software to learn, and nobody on the floor has to become the website person at the end of a twelve hour day.
What that looks like over a few years. The menu refreshed when the kitchen actually changes it, rather than left saying last winter's prices. Hours changed for the public holiday and changed back. A page for the function room the year you start doing birthdays, and one for the catering when that takes off. Photographs that follow the seasons, so the site in November looks like November. The story of the place deepened a paragraph at a time, until it reads like your cafe instead of a description of one.
Every build can also include a site assistant: a small helper that answers a visitor's questions using only the words already on your site, so “are you open Sunday?” and “can you do dairy free?” get a straight answer at ten at night without your phone going. It is included in the price and switched on only if you want it.
All of it stays yours. One price at the start, nothing monthly, and the whole site exportable free whenever you like.
One flat price, published, and then nothing
Our price is $800 for the whole build: the pages, the words, the menu set properly in text, the photographs sorted, the domain set up in your name, and the site live. A cafe is a working business, so the standard rate is the one we quote, and it is the same number for everybody who can pay it.
The only cost we don't carry: your domain name, about $65 a year, because it must be registered in your name and not ours. That's the deed. Changes later are $20 for a batch of edits, whenever you actually want one, and a year where nothing changes costs nothing. Hosting is free, export is free, and there is nothing monthly, ever.
There is also a $400 community rate, and we would rather tell you it exists than let you assume it doesn't. It is written for organisations where $800 would genuinely be a stretch: a volunteer-run community cafe, or a kitchen run by a charity or a social enterprise. The test is one question, could the business comfortably pay $800? Same site, same care, same ownership either way, by rule. Here is how we make that call.
Asked and answered, plainly
The sums behind the price
What the whole market charges, honestly mapped: what a website really costs in New Zealand. Why owning beats renting when your name is on the awning: owning vs renting your website. Whether the $400 rate applies to you: who qualifies for the community rate. The whole process from first email to handover: how it works.
Tell us about it in a sentence
Where you are, what you serve, and what you have now, even if that's just an Instagram. We'll be straight about whether we can help and what it would cost.