Every comparison of website builders reads the same way: a grid of ticks and crosses about templates, storage and "advanced design flexibility". For a cafe, nearly all of it is noise. Wix can build a perfectly good cafe website. So can Squarespace. So can an agency, so can we. The tools are not the question.
The real comparison is whose time gets spent — building the site, and then keeping it true for years afterwards. Once you price the options in hours as well as pounds, the decision gets much simpler, and the right answer genuinely differs from cafe to cafe. Full disclosure before we start: we sell the done-for-you option. The arithmetic below is straight anyway, and where DIY wins, we say so.
The true cost of DIY
Wix and Squarespace cost £15–30 a month for the plan a cafe needs — custom domain, no ads. Between the two, the differences are smaller than the marketing suggests: Squarespace templates are prettier out of the box and harder to break; Wix gives you more freedom and therefore more ways to make a mess. Either can produce a perfectly good cafe site. Neither will produce it quickly the first time.
The subscription is the visible cost. The invisible one is the build: a first-timer typically spends 20–40 hours getting from blank template to something presentable. Choosing a template, fighting it, choosing another. Cropping photos. Typing the menu, then retyping it when the spacing breaks on mobile. Working out why the map is showing Slough.
Those hours are real money. At even £15 an hour, the build costs £300–£600 of your time on top of the subscription — and they're not just any hours, they're evening-and-Sunday hours, the ones cafe owners have least of. But the build is the cheap part. The expensive part is the next five years: every price change, seasonal menu, and bank-holiday closure is a trip back into an editor you use four times a year. This is why the internet is full of DIY cafe sites showing the 2023 menu — not because the owners are lazy, but because "update the website" loses to literally every other task on a cafe's list. A wrong website is worse than no website; it confidently tells customers things that aren't true.
Where DIY genuinely wins
Two big things, and they're worth taking seriously. Control: nobody between you and your site. Change a photo at midnight on a whim, redesign the whole thing in a weekend, owe nobody an email. If you're the sort of person who enjoys this — and some owners honestly do — DIY isn't a cost, it's a hobby that pays for itself.
Zero trust required: you don't have to believe anyone's promises, check anyone's contract, or wonder what happens if a supplier disappears. The account is yours, the login is yours, the responsibility is yours. For an owner who's been burned by a web person before — there are many — that self-reliance has real value.
DIY is the right answer if: you have a slow season to build in, you actively enjoy tinkering, your menu rarely changes, and you'll honestly do the updates. That's a real group of people. It's just smaller than the number of people who believe they're in it.
Where done-for-you wins
The done-for-you subscription model — a specialist builds the site, then a flat monthly fee covers hosting, security and every update — wins on exactly one axis, but it's the axis that matters for most working owners: your time spent is roughly zero. The build costs you the length of one form. The updates cost you the length of one message: photograph the new chalkboard, send it, done. Nothing to learn, nothing to relearn in November, no login to lose.
The second-order win is that updates actually happen. When changing the menu costs one WhatsApp message, the site stays true — current prices, current hours, current photos. That currency is worth more to Google, and to the customer at the bus stop, than any amount of design flair.
The honest weaknesses: you're trusting a supplier, so check the exit terms — who owns the domain (you should), what happens when you cancel (site comes down, content yours), whether there's a contract (there shouldn't be). And you can't fiddle at midnight; changes go through a human. For some owners that's the feature. For the midnight-fiddlers, it's a dealbreaker, and they should be on Squarespace.
On price, the models converge more than you'd expect: £20 a month done-for-you versus £15–30 a month DIY is roughly a wash on cash — the real difference is those 20–40 build hours and every update hour afterwards, which one model charges you and the other doesn't. You're not choosing between cheap and expensive; you're choosing which currency to pay in.
What about an agency?
The traditional route: pay £500–£3,000 once, get a professionally built site. For a cafe, it's usually overkill in a specific way — agencies price by the page, so quotes drift toward five- and ten-page sites when a cafe's whole job fits on one. Then the ongoing reality: hosting billed separately, updates billed per change (£30–75 a time is common), and the site slowly fossilising between invoices. Restaurant-specific platforms like BentoBox (from $49/month plus per-order fees) and Popmenu (from $179/month) sit in the same bucket for cafes: built for ordering-heavy restaurants, priced accordingly, wrong shape for a counter-service cafe.
An agency makes sense when your needs genuinely exceed one page — you're a cafe that's also a venue, a roastery with wholesale, multiple locations with different menus. At that point you're buying a proper multi-page build and the price is justified. Below that threshold, you're paying for the agency's office, not your website. The full arithmetic on all four routes lives in what a cafe website should cost.
Side by side
The honest grid — same one we publish on our pricing page, because it doesn't change depending on the audience:
| DIY (Wix/Squarespace) | Local agency | Restaurant platforms | Done-for-you (us) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | £0 | £500–£3,000 | £0–£500 | £0 |
| Monthly | £15–£30 | £0–£50 hosting | $49–$179+ | £20 |
| Who builds it | You (20–40 hours) | They do | Templates | We do |
| Menu updates | You, in their editor | Billed per change | You, in their dashboard | Message us — done |
| Contract | None | Often 12 months | Often 12 months | None |
| Built for cafes | Generic | Generic | Restaurants (ordering-first) | Yes — only |
The decision, as a flowchart
Answer these in order and stop at the first yes:
- Do you need online ordering, bookings, or multiple locations? → Agency or platform. Pay properly for it, once, from someone who's done it before.
- Do you honestly enjoy building websites, and have 20–40 spare hours plus the will to do your own updates forever? → Wix or Squarespace. Genuinely. Enjoy it.
- Do you want the site to exist, be right, and never think about it? → Done-for-you. Whether it's us or someone like us, check three things: domain in your name, no contract, updates included.
- Still unsure? → Get a done-for-you mockup built free, since that costs nothing, and compare it against a weekend of template-wrangling before you commit either way.
See yours before you choose anything
That last flowchart step is a real offer, not a rhetorical one. Send one photo and your Instagram link and we'll build a free mockup of your cafe's website in 48 hours. If it's not obviously better than what you'd build in those 20 hours, take the Squarespace route with our blessing — you'll be choosing with both options actually in front of you.