Every Thursday, a website taken apart. This one is a café we made up for the purpose, so nobody's real business is on the slab. Example business, for illustration. The problems are real, though. They turn up in most of the checks we run.
The café
Sutling Street Café has been open five years. Good coffee, a loyal Tuesday crowd, a Facebook page with 800 followers and a website someone's nephew built in 2021. The owner thinks the website is fine, because she has not looked at it since 2021.
The score
41 / 100
Run the way our free check runs it: can people find it, can they use it on a phone, does it answer the three questions every café customer has, and is it telling the truth.
What we found
The listing on Google said the café opens on Sundays. It stopped opening on Sundays in the spring. Two one-star reviews in the last month say "turned up and it was shut", from people who drove over on a Sunday because their phone said open. On weekdays it is the other way round: the listing says closes 3pm, the café closes at 4pm, and the people who read 3pm at ten past three stay away from an open café.
The menu on the site is a photo of a printed menu from 2021, with prices that have since gone up. It cannot be read on a phone without pinching, and Google cannot read the prices in it, because it is a picture rather than words.
The phone number is there, but it is typed as plain text, so on many phones you cannot tap it. You have to remember it, go to the dialler and type it in. Most people do not.
The site says nothing about dogs, parking or whether you can book a table, which are the three things people message the Facebook page to ask every single day.
The three fixes
- Fix the hours on Google, today. Then set the special hours for Christmas and bank holidays while you are in there, so this never happens in December. Google lets you set holiday hours in advance, and may suggest the dates.
- Put the menu on the page as words, with the prices. Not a photo. Google reads it, phones show it, and the owner can change a price on a Tuesday night in two minutes.
- Make the phone number a button, and put the three answers (dogs welcome, parking on Sutling Street after 6pm, book for groups of six or more) under it, in one line each.
Those three take an afternoon and cost nothing but the afternoon. They take the score from 41 to about 80, because the biggest marks are for the things that stop people turning up, not for how the site looks.
The marks it would still lose
No photos of the actual room and the actual cakes. A home page headline that says "Welcome to our website". No way to book a table from the page. Those are the next afternoon.
If you want your own site put through the same check, with a real score and your own three fixes, the free check is here. Two working days, nothing to pay, and it is honest, which is the point of it.
Google's instructions for setting opening hours and special hours for holidays.
Dale, Pagefive