A site that shows up when
someone nearby Googles "lunch".

What usually goes wrong

The four things we see every time we audit a local café's site.

None of these are anyone's fault — they're just what happens when the site gets built cheap, built by a friend, or built once and never touched again. Worth knowing before you commission anything, from us or anyone else.

1. 01

   The PDF menu on mobile

   Roughly six in ten restaurant searches in the UK happen on a phone. A PDF menu — the kind most cafés email their designer and say "use this" — opens at about 20% zoom on an iPhone. Customers pinch, squint, get a headache, close the tab, order from the café two doors down that has a proper mobile menu.

   Every month you keep a PDF menu on your site is money leaving the door. The fix is a proper HTML menu — sections, prices, dietary tags, one-tap phone links — that you can edit yourself in about thirty seconds.

2. 02

   Google Business Profile quietly decaying

   A café opens its GBP once, fills in the basics, gets twenty reviews in the first year, then forgets about it. Reviews slow to one or two a month. After eighteen months, Google's local pack starts favouring cafés with fresher activity. Your ranking drifts. You notice fewer walk-ins. You can't figure out why.

   The signal Google is actually watching isn't total reviews — it's recent reviews and how quickly you respond to them. We set up a review request flow on day one and teach you the response template that neutralises most one-star damage.

3. 03

   The nephew-built site that breaks in two years

   Someone's nephew sets it up on their personal hosting account, registers the domain in their name, picks a password they'll forget. Two years later the nephew moves to Manchester and stops replying. The café can't log in, can't renew the domain, can't change the hours. When renewal lapses the site 404s. Google penalises sites that 404 repeatedly — your ranking takes a hit that takes six months to recover.

   Everything we build is registered in your name. We manage the hosting, but if you leave we hand you the code and the export, no lock-in, no hostage-taking. This should be table stakes — it isn't.

4. 04

   A hero image where a reservation button should be

   The first screen someone sees on your site is a full-bleed photo of steam rising from a cappuccino. It's atmospheric. It's also the only thing above the fold. There's no "Book a table", no "See menu", no phone number, nothing the customer can tap to commit. They scroll once, get distracted, leave.

   The hero can be beautiful and functional. We put the reservation or phone-call CTA above the fold on every café site we build — upper-right on desktop, sticky at the top on mobile. Most cafés see enquiries double in the first fortnight after that change alone.

Why this is harder than it looks

The five things most agencies don't know to check.

None of this is obvious from looking at a finished site. You can have a café website that looks good and is invisibly losing you customers every day. Here's what we test on every site before we hand it over.

• Core Web Vitals

  Since June 2021, Google uses three page-speed metrics as a ranking signal: Largest Contentful Paint (under 2.5 seconds), Interaction to Next Paint (under 200ms), and Cumulative Layout Shift (under 0.1). A café site with a 4-second LCP ranks measurably below an identical site with 2-second LCP, even when the content is the same. Most WordPress-theme sites we audit score 3-5 seconds. Every site we build ships in the green.

• Restaurant schema (JSON-LD)

  The machine-readable version of your restaurant info — menu, price range, opening hours, geo coordinates — lives in a structured-data block most developers never touch. Present: Google shows menu items, price range, and hours directly in the search result. Missing: you're a plain blue link competing with restaurants that get the rich treatment. We include full Restaurant schema on every site, auto-generated from your portal.

• Review velocity

  A café with 47 reviews and six this month beats a café with 312 reviews and zero this year in Google's local pack. Recency weight compounds. The signal Google wants is "is this business still open and active". We build a review-request flow into day one: at the end of every checkout, a subtle prompt to leave a review. One prompt per customer, lifetime. Most cafés that use it see three to five fresh reviews a month without asking face-to-face.

• Photo compression

  A typical photographer's JPEG is 3-6MB. Your hero image, if it's uncompressed, means an 8-second blank white screen on 3G — which is half the customers who ever visit you. We ship every photo in WebP with a JPEG fallback, max 500KB per hero, auto-srcset for resolution. Your site looks just as good on a 4K MacBook and a budget Android from 2019.

• Mobile-first indexing

  Since 2019, Google builds its search index from the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. That sounds obvious until you notice that most café sites are designed desktop-first and the mobile layout is a cramped afterthought. We design the mobile version first, then expand to desktop. Pages render in an order that makes sense on a six-inch screen at arm's length in a queue.

What we measure

Before we hand your site over.

Every café site ships with a one-page report of these numbers for your records. If any metric fails, we fix it before launch.

Largest Contentful Paint

Under 2.5s on simulated 3G

Core Web Vital — ranking signal

Cumulative Layout Shift

Under 0.1

Core Web Vital — measures content jumping

Structured data

Restaurant + LocalBusiness schema

Unlocks rich Google snippets

Mobile Lighthouse

Above 90 on Performance, SEO, Accessibility

Three of the four Lighthouse categories

Image weight

Under 500KB per hero, WebP with fallback

No 8-second blank screens on 3G

Time to first launch

48 hours from paid order to live site

From checkout to subdomain

What's included

Every café website, baseline.

• HTML menu with live editor

  Sections, prices, dietary tags, photos. Edit from the dashboard, changes go live in seconds. No more PDFs.

• Opening hours + holiday override

  Hours render on every page and in your Google snippet. Close for a bank holiday in two taps; visitors see it immediately.

• Reservation or phone CTA above the fold

  The first thing a customer can tap — not buried under a photo. Links to OpenTable, Tock, your direct email, or a built-in form.

• Google Business Profile setup

  We claim, verify, and optimise the profile on day one. Photos, hours, categories, attributes — the lot.

• Review request flow

  Post-checkout prompt for review on Google. One-prompt-per-customer, lifetime. Typical result: three to five fresh reviews a month.

• Photography-ready

  Upload whatever sizes your photographer gives you. We compress to WebP with JPEG fallback, cap at 500KB per hero.

• Full Restaurant schema

  Structured data with menu items, price range, cuisine, geo, hours. Unlocks rich Google snippets most competitors don't have.

• Hosting, SSL, domain renewal

  We handle the boring, breakable infrastructure. Domain registered in your name. Leave any time, we hand you the export.

Pricing

Two tiers. Fixed prices. No contracts.

One-off build fee. £15/month hosting after the free period. Cancel any time and we send you the code — no lock-in.

Prefer to scope it before paying? Start a five-minute brief instead →

Accepted payment methods

Questions we get most weeks

What café owners actually ask before they start.

If yours isn't answered here, email hello@pacavita.com — reply inside a working day, most weeks inside an hour.

• How long does a café website take to build?+

  Essential sites go live within 48 hours of your brief and menu arriving. Pro sites take 5 to 7 days because of the blog, booking integration and print kit. We ship a preview link first; nothing goes live until you've seen it.

• I'm a café — do I need Pro, or will Essential do?+

  Most independent cafés start on Essential (£349) and add pieces later. If you take reservations, have more than one location, or want a blog and social pack from day one, Pro (£749) is the calmer choice. We'll tell you honestly — if Essential is enough, we'll say so.

• Can I update my menu myself, or do I have to email you?+

  You edit it yourself. Every café site ships with a live HTML menu editor — sections, prices, dietary tags, photos, specials. Changes publish in seconds. No email threads, no PDFs, no waiting for us.

• Do you set up my Google Business Profile as well?+

  Yes. GBP setup is included in both tiers — claim, verify, categories, opening hours, photos, attributes, the lot. We also wire in a review-request flow so your recent-review count keeps climbing without you having to ask face-to-face.

• What if I don't have good photos of my food yet?+

  We ship with a clean typography-first layout that works without photos, so you're never blocked on launch. When you're ready, we do a 90-minute on-site shoot (£150) — food, team, interior, finished drinks — landscape and portrait of every frame, sized and compressed for web automatically.

• I already have a café website — can you take it over?+

  Yes, most weeks. We migrate your content, keep your existing domain and email, set up proper redirects so you don't lose Google rankings, and turn off the old site cleanly. The 48-hour window still applies once we have access.

• Do you handle online ordering or just reservations?+

  Both. Reservations are included in Pro via OpenTable, Tock, a built-in form or Stripe-backed deposit bookings — your call. For click-and-collect or delivery, we integrate Square, Stripe or a dedicated ordering tool. We don't build full delivery infrastructure from scratch — that's what Deliveroo and Square exist for.

• What happens if I need to change a dish or price urgently?+

  You edit it yourself in the menu editor. Your own live site, in front of you, ready in 30 seconds. If you want us to handle it for you, message on WhatsApp — we answer within working hours, usually inside 20 minutes.