I'm opening a café next month — what do I need online?
The short answer
Three things before you open, in this order: a claimed and verified Google Business Profile, a one-page site with hours, location, menu and contact, and consistent details everywhere they appear. Everything else — bookings, ordering, loyalty, a bigger site — can wait until you know how people actually use you. Do the first three properly and you will be findable on day one.
On this page
Before you open
You have a hundred things to do and this list is deliberately short. In priority order:
1. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile
Do this first, and do it early — verification can take days, and an unverified profile is heavily limited.
It is free, and it is what puts you on the map, literally. For a café it matters more than your website, because "coffee near me" is answered from the map before anyone visits a site.
Fill in everything: hours, category, photos, attributes like outdoor seating and wheelchair access. Blank fields cannot match a filter, and filters are how people narrow a list.
2. A one-page website
Not a big site. One page that answers:
- What you are and where
- Opening hours
- The menu, as text
- A phone number and an email
- A photograph or two of the actual room
That is enough to open with. A café that has this on day one beats one that has nothing while waiting for a ten-page site to be finished.
3. Make every detail identical everywhere
Your name, address and phone should be character-for-character the same on your site, your Google profile, your social bios and any listing.
Search engines cross-check these. When they disagree, confidence drops, and confidence is part of whether you appear at all. It costs nothing to get right at the start and is tedious to fix later.
What can wait
Genuinely wait. Adding these before you know your patterns is how money gets wasted:
| Thing | Wait until |
|---|---|
| Online ordering | You know whether people actually want collection |
| Table bookings | You are turning people away |
| Loyalty scheme | You have regulars to reward |
| A blog | You have a reason and someone to write it |
| A big multi-page site | You know which questions you get asked most |
| An app | Almost always. Almost certainly not. |
The last row is not a joke. Very few independent cafés benefit from an app, and the ones that do have thousands of regulars and a specific reason.
The mistakes that are expensive to undo
Three, and they are all cheap to avoid now:
Registering the domain in someone else's name. Whoever sets it up, make sure the registrant is your business. This is the single most common regret in this whole subject.
A menu as an image or a PDF. It will not be findable and it will not be readable on a phone. Text on a page, from the start.
A site you cannot edit. Your first three months will change your hours, your menu and your prices repeatedly. If every change needs someone else, they will not get made, and your site will be wrong during the exact period when everyone is looking at it.
The week you open
Two things worth doing on the day:
Take proper photographs of the finished room, in daylight, before it fills up. You will not get another chance at an empty, clean, new-looking room, and these images will be on your site for years.
Ask your first happy customers for a review. The first ten are the hardest and matter the most — a profile with two reviews and a profile with fifteen look completely different to someone choosing.
Doing all of this at once, in the fortnight you have
Read back over that list and notice what it actually is: eight or nine separate accounts, three of which you will never log into again, and one of which decides whether you own your own name in five years.
For most people opening a café, the useful question is not which of these to do first. It is who is doing them. Anything set up in the two weeks before opening — while hiring, training, and waiting on a coffee machine that has not arrived — gets set up badly, and the parts that get set up badly are usually the ones that are expensive to undo.
That is why Helm exists as a service rather than a tool. The domain in your business's name, the site built and hosted, the menu as real text rather than a photograph, the Google Business Profile connected, and a dashboard so the hours are right on the day they change. Later, when you have the time and know whether you want them, a loyalty card and a bookings inbox are modules you switch on rather than a second system to go and choose.
Nothing on the list is difficult. Doing all of it, alone, in the fortnight before you open, is the difficult part.