Guides
Do Dublin cafés have websites? I counted 77 of them
Four in five do not. On 20 September 2026 I read the Google listing of 77 independent Dublin cafés, roasters and coffee carts holding 24,599 Google ratings between them. Fifteen of the 77 point the website field at a site of their own. The other 62 send you to Instagram, to Facebook, or nowhere at all.
The count
| What the listing's website field holds | 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 aggregate as a CSV, if you want to put it in something. Cite it as: Cupán Studio, Dublin café website audit, 77 shops, 20 September 2026.
Where my own earlier count was wrong
In a guide published on 16 September I counted fourteen Dublin cafés and reported that not one of them had a website of its own on its listing. That was true of those fourteen and it was a biased sample, which I did not know at the time and which this larger count makes obvious.
| Group | Shops | With a site of their own |
|---|---|---|
| Shops I had already built a sample site for | 16 | 0% |
| Shops I had never contacted | 61 | 24.6% |
The reason is not mysterious once it is written down: I build unpaid sample sites for shops that do not appear to have one, so of course none of them had one. A quarter of the shops I had not gone near do. So the honest figure for Dublin independents is about one in five with a site of their own, not none, and any number that comes out of a list assembled for a sales pitch should be read the way you would read a survey run by somebody with a stake in the answer.
The 16 September page has been corrected to point here.
The method, so you can repeat it or dispute it
One call per shop to the Google Places API, region set to Ireland, reading the single field that holds a listing's website, then classifying that field as empty, Instagram, Facebook, or the shop's own domain. No judgement in the classification beyond reading the hostname.
What it is: every independent café, roaster and coffee cart on my own Dublin list on the day, counted, not a selection from it. What it is not: a random sample of Dublin. The list was assembled by hand, it skews to the city centre and to independents, and it excludes chains. Seventy-seven is enough to say four in five is the common case among shops like these; it is not a national statistic and nobody should quote it as one.
Two limits worth naming. The field is all this reads, so a shop with a website its Google listing does not point at is counted as having none — from a customer's point of view that is the same thing, but it is not the same claim. And I am not publishing the row-level data, because it names shops that never agreed to be written about; the aggregate above is the whole of what goes out.
What the number does and does not mean
It does not mean 62 shops are losing money. Most of a café's trade walks past the door, and a shop with 400 ratings and no website is doing fine on the evidence of the ratings.
What it does mean is that if you run a Dublin café without a website, you are in the ordinary case rather than behind. And if you have one, you are in the fifth of shops that do, which is worth knowing before somebody tells you everybody has one.
One correlation, stated as a correlation and nothing more: the fifteen shops with their own site carry a median of 279 ratings against 191 for the shops with an empty field. Bigger, longer-established shops are likelier to have both more reviews and a website. That is not evidence the website produced the reviews, and I would not let anyone sell it to you as such.
Questions
- What share of Dublin cafés have a website?
- About one in five of the 77 independents I counted point their Google listing at a site of their own: 15 of 77, or 19.5%. Another 27 point it at Instagram or Facebook, and 35 leave it empty.
- Is Instagram enough for a café?
- Twenty-seven of these 77 shops are trading on exactly that, so it is clearly survivable. What it does not do is answer a stranger who wants your opening hours and the price of a flat white at four on a Wednesday. The longer answer is here.
- Where did these 77 shops come from?
- A hand-assembled list of independent Dublin cafés, roasters and carts, skewed to the city centre, no chains. It was built for outreach, which is exactly the bias the second section of this page measures and reports.
- Can I use these numbers?
- Yes, and the CSV is here. Cite it as Cupán Studio, Dublin café website audit, 77 shops, 20 September 2026, and please carry the sampling caveat with it rather than rounding it to "80% of Irish cafés".
- How often is this repeated?
- The intention is quarterly, and the date on each figure says when it was read. Google listings change constantly, so the ratings total in particular drifts between runs.