Answers
Is it normal for a café to have no website?
I sell café websites, so weigh this accordingly. Yes: in Dublin it was the majority case when I counted. On 20 September 2026 I read the Google listing of 77 independent cafés, roasters and coffee carts holding 24,599 Google ratings between them, and 62 of the 77 had no site of their own in their listing's website field. A Dublin café whose Google listing points at no site of its own is in the ordinary case, not behind.
Where the question came from
A second-year engineering student posted it on r/smallbusiness on 29 April 2026. He had been building demo café websites and wanted to know from owners whether one actually helps. Thirty replies when I read it on 22 September 2026, all of them opinion, not one of them a number. That is the gap this page fills.
To repeat the line at the top, because it matters more than any number on this page: I build websites for Dublin coffee shops and I sell them. The count below argues against buying one about as often as for it, which is why it is worth publishing.
The count
| What the listing's website field held, 20 September 2026 | Shops | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing at all | 35 | 45.5% |
| An Instagram profile | 15 | 19.5% |
| A Facebook page | 12 | 15.6% |
| A site of the shop's own | 15 | 19.5% |
| No site of their own | 62 | 80.5% |
The full count, the method and its limits are here, and the aggregate is a CSV you are welcome to reuse.
Three things the number does not say
It does not say the 62 shops with no site of their own on 20 September 2026 are losing money. Most of a café's trade walks past the door. A shop with 400 ratings and no website is doing fine on the evidence of the ratings.
It reads one field. A shop with a website its Google listing does not point at is counted here as having none. To a customer looking for your hours that is the same thing. It is not the same claim.
It is Dublin independents, not a national figure. The list was assembled by hand, skews to the city centre, and excludes chains. The 77 read on 20 September 2026 are enough to say four in five is common among shops like these. It is not a statistic about Ireland and nobody should quote it as one.
So when is a website worth it
The honest version, from doing this for a living: not for discovery. Google Maps and Instagram do that, and the shops in this count carrying hundreds of ratings with nothing in their website field are the evidence for it. Where a site earns its keep is the narrow bit that Instagram is bad at. Somebody at four on a Wednesday wants to know if you are open, what a flat white costs, and whether you do oat milk, and they want it in one screen without scrolling a grid.
The second reason is control. A Google listing and an Instagram profile are both somebody else's property, and their rules change without asking you. Your own hours, on your own domain, are the one version you can correct in a minute.
If neither of those is a problem you actually have, keeping your Google Business Profile current beats buying a website. That advice costs me money and it is still the right advice.
Questions
- What percentage of cafés have no website?
- Of 77 independent Dublin cafés, roasters and carts read on 20 September 2026, 80.5% had no site of their own on their Google listing. On the same 20 September 2026 count, 45.5% had nothing at all in the field, 19.5% pointed it at Instagram and 15.6% at Facebook.
- Is Instagram enough for a café?
- On 20 September 2026 fifteen of these 77 shops pointed their listing straight at an Instagram profile, and another twelve at Facebook, so it is clearly survivable. What it does not do is answer a stranger who wants your hours at four on a Wednesday. The longer answer is here.
- Will a website bring a café more customers?
- On this evidence, not on its own. On 20 September 2026 the 15 shops with their own site carried a median 279 ratings against 191 for the ones with an empty field, but shops with more ratings may simply be bigger shops, which are likelier to have both. That is a correlation and I would not let anyone sell it to you as a cause.
- What should a café do first, if not a website?
- Claim the Google Business Profile and keep the hours right on it, including bank holidays. It is free, and on 20 September 2026 it was the only thing 35 of these 77 shops' listings linked at all.