Guides
Does your café need a website if you already have Instagram and Google?
Probably, and a small one is enough. On 16 September 2026 I read fourteen independent Dublin cafés through the Google Places API. They hold close to four thousand Google ratings between them and not one has a website on its Google listing: seven have nothing in the field at all, five point it at Instagram, two at Facebook.
What I found on fourteen Dublin cafés
These are fourteen independent cafés in central Dublin, off my own outreach list. To be exact about what they are and are not: I researched each one and built it an unpaid sample site nobody asked for, which is how this studio works and the only reason I had a list of fourteen to count. Not one of them is a customer, not one has paid anything, and I am not naming which is which, because none of them has agreed to be written about. The aggregate is the useful part anyway.
| Of fourteen cafés | How many |
|---|---|
| Website field on the Google listing is empty | 7 |
| Website field points at an Instagram profile | 5 |
| Website field points at a Facebook page | 2 |
| Website field points at a website of the shop's own | 0 |
| Google ratings between them, on the day | 3,991 |
The method, so you can repeat it or dispute it: one call per shop to the Google Places API, set to Ireland, reading the single field that holds a listing's website. No judgement in it and no sampling, in the sense that it is the whole of that outreach list on the day rather than a selection from it. Two limits worth saying out loud. You cannot see my list and I am not publishing the rows, because they name shops that never agreed to be written about, so this is one person's count and should be weighed as one. And fourteen is a small number: enough to say the pattern is common in central Dublin, nowhere near enough to say what share of Irish cafés put a site on their listing. Nor does it tell you whether any of them has a website elsewhere that the listing simply does not point at, because the one field is all this method reads. The ratings total drifts by a few between runs, which is what a live number does; the rest has not moved.
What it does not prove is that any of them is losing money, or even that none of them has a site somewhere. It proves that sending a customer to one is not something these fourteen do. If you have been feeling behind for not having a site to send people to, that is not what the shops nearest this list look like either.
So what is the argument for having one
It is not traffic, and anybody selling you a café website on traffic is selling you something. My assumption, and you know better than I do whether it holds for your room, is that most of your trade walks past the door. So the argument has to be narrower and duller than "you will get found", and here is the one I would actually make.
- One place you control that answers the four questions. Are you open, what do you sell, where are you, what is it like inside. Your listing answers the first and third, if it is current. The rest is a phone call or a guess.
- Somewhere for your own prices to live. A price a customer cannot check before they order is a row waiting to happen, and it is the one thing a listing has nowhere to put. A menu page costs nothing to keep and settles it.
- An address that is yours. Instagram, Facebook and your Google listing are accounts on somebody else's system, and the terms of each are theirs to change. A domain is not untouchable either, since you rent it from a registrar under their terms. What it is, and the others are not, is portable: fall out with your host and you take the address to another one, where falling out with Instagram means starting again at a new handle and telling everybody your new name.
What your Google listing already does, and where it stops
Your listing is doing most of the work already, and on the evidence above it is the only address plenty of Dublin shops give out. Hours, the map, the phone number, the photographs, the reviews: my view is that this is most of what a customer is after, and it is free.
Where it stops is anything longer than a field. A full menu with prices, an explanation of what you do differently, a note about the room, the story of where the beans come from. The listing has a menu section, but it is Google's form rather than your page, and you have to supply what goes in it.
What Instagram does well, and where it stops
For the job it does, showing the place to people who already follow you and putting something in front of people who do not, I would not try to replace Instagram with a website and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
Where it stops is a stranger at four o'clock on a Wednesday who wants to know whether you are open and what a flat white costs. That answer is somewhere in a grid, in a story that expired, or in a bio link. Go and look for those two facts on your own profile, signed out, the way a stranger would. Whatever you find is the real answer for your shop, and it is a better answer than mine.
The honest case against
- A site you do not update is worse than no site. My view: wrong hours on your own page are worse than no hours at all, because that page is the one a customer will believe. If nobody in the shop will keep it current, do not have one.
- It will not fill the room on its own. Ahrefs, who study this at scale, put 1.74% of newly published pages in Google's top ten inside a year, and most of those took between 61 and 182 days. A café is not competing for "coffee" anyway. Expect the site to serve the people who already know your name, and treat anything beyond that as a bonus rather than the plan.
- The money is small but it is not nothing. On the Irish prices I could find published, a café site runs from web60's €60 a year at the bottom to the €5,000 top of Digimark's published range. The full table is here, six sellers, with the date each price was read. Spend it on the espresso machine if the espresso machine needs it more.
What the site actually has to be
Small. Six pages is the whole of it: home, your menu, your hours, where to find you, something about the place, and a way to reach you. No shop, no booking engine, no blog.
The one thing that decides whether it is worth having is whether you can change it yourself. Hours change and prices change, and my view is that a site needing an email to somebody else before a closing time can be corrected will drift out of date fast. That is the whole test, and it is worth asking any builder to show you rather than describe.
Questions
- Do coffee shops need a website in 2026?
- Not to survive: not one of the fourteen Dublin cafés I counted puts a site on its Google listing, which is where a stranger looks, and all fourteen are trading. It is worth having when you want your hours, your menu and your prices in one place you control and can correct yourself in a minute.
- I'm already on Instagram and Facebook. Do I need a website too?
- They do different jobs. Instagram shows the place to people; a page answers the two questions a stranger has at four on a Wednesday, which are whether you are open and what things cost. Keep both, and have the social accounts point at the page.
- Can you have a Google Business Profile without a website?
- Yes, and half the shops I counted do exactly that: seven of the fourteen have nothing in the website field at all. The listing works without one. The field is there for when you have somewhere worth sending people.
- Will a website bring me new customers?
- Not by itself, and I am not going to tell you it will. A café's trade is footfall and word of mouth. What a page changes is what happens after somebody hears your name and looks you up, which is a smaller claim and a truer one.
- Is a one-page site enough for a café?
- It can be, if the one page carries your hours, your address and your menu. The reason for six instead is that a menu with prices and a set of opening hours are both long, and burying them under a photograph is how they stop being read.
- What if I already have a domain I never used?
- Type it into a browser and see what comes back. If it is a parked or placeholder page, that is what anybody who types your name and lands there is seeing, which is worse than nothing. Pointing a domain you already own at a real page is a smaller job than starting from scratch, and you keep the address.
- Who is going to keep it up to date?
- The honest answer decides whether you should have one at all. If the answer is "nobody", do not build it. If it is "whoever is on the till", the site has to be editable from a phone in under a minute, and you should make somebody prove that before you pay.
- Is there a grant for it?
- Possibly, and the scheme most people name closed to applications on 13 December 2024. What replaced it, and whether a café site qualifies, with the terms quoted.
What this looks like here
Cupán Studio, spelled Cupan Studio when the fada is a nuisance to type, builds the site for a Dublin coffee shop first and sends the live link before asking for anything. That is why there was a list of fourteen Dublin cafés to count in the first place. What that is and what it costs.