Website for a Bakery or Cake Shop: Why Facebook Alone Loses Orders

It's Wednesday evening and someone needs a birthday cake for Saturday. They search on their phone, find your bakery, tap through to your Facebook page and see posts from last spring, a beautiful cake with no price, and a comment asking "Do you deliver?" that nobody answered. Thirty seconds later they are on the next result.

Your cakes may be better. That doesn't matter if the customer can't answer their questions quickly. And before ordering a cake, people have very specific questions. Here they are, what a good bakery or cake shop website does with each one, and what happened when a real cake shop in Arad fixed its online presence.

What customers check before ordering a cake

Photos, sorted by occasion

People don't look for "cakes". They look for a wedding cake, a children's birthday cake, cupcakes for an office party or a tray of pastries for Sunday. Sort your photos into clear categories so a visitor can find "their" kind of cake in two taps. Use your own photos of your own cakes, in good daylight. A stock photo of a perfect cake you didn't bake raises expectations you then have to meet.

How to order, in one sentence

"Call us", "message us on WhatsApp" or "fill in the form": say which, and make it one tap away on a phone. A short order form helps both sides, because the customer describes the occasion, the size and the date in one message instead of a long back-and-forth.

Lead time

How many days ahead must a custom cake be ordered? Can someone still get something for tomorrow? Write your real rule on the page. It saves you the same phone call every week and stops disappointed customers who discover the answer too late.

Allergens and ingredients

Parents of children with allergies check this before anything else. Under the EU food information rules (Regulation 1169/2011), allergen information must be available for non-prepacked food too, and each country decides some of the details of how. This is general information, not legal advice: ask your local food authority what applies to you. On the website, a clear note on the main allergens in each product, or at least an easy way to ask, builds trust immediately.

Pick-up hours, address and map

Show the hours when cakes can be picked up, the address and a map, and make sure they match your Google profile exactly. Different hours in different places is a reliable way to collect angry reviews.

Prices, or at least "from" prices

You don't need a full price list for custom cakes. A "from" price per kilo, per portion or per tier tells people whether you're in their budget before they write to you. Many visitors who see no price at all simply assume it's expensive and leave quietly.

Why a Facebook page alone isn't enough

Facebook is useful for news, new creations and seasonal offers. As your only home online, it has real limits:

• Posts scroll away. The cake a customer is looking for is buried under months of newer posts, with no categories and no search.
• Not everyone uses it. Some customers don't have an account and get pushed to log in.
• Google understands it less. Your own website can tell Google in structured data that you are a bakery, with your address, hours and frequently asked questions.
• You don't own it. Who sees your posts depends on Facebook's algorithm, not on you.

The most common setup I see is a Google profile whose website button points to Facebook. That's exactly where La Lavinia was.

The real example: La Lavinia in Arad

La Lavinia is a family cake shop in Arad. When I first looked, its Google profile was unclaimed, had no opening hours, showed the wrong postcode (on Google and in directories), and the website link led to Facebook.

What we did: claimed and verified the profile, corrected the postcode, and built a new site, lalavinia.ro. It has 6 product categories, a cake-order form titled "Tell us what cake you'd like", structured data marking it as a bakery plus an FAQ section, and a vector logo. Two days after launch, La Lavinia appeared correctly on Google Maps. On 12 October 2026, PageSpeed Insights scored the site 100 in all four categories on mobile. It's on monthly care, so the site stays updated and backed up.

I can't promise the same result for every bakery; every profile and town is different. But the order of the work is always the same: correct data first, then a site that answers customers' questions. You can see the full story in the La Lavinia case study.

If you run an international bakery

If you're a foreign owner running a bakery or café in Romania, Hungary or Austria, you likely have two audiences: locals searching in their own language, and expats searching in English. Machine-translation widgets usually make cake descriptions sound odd. A properly multilingual website, with each language on its own address, works for customers and for Google.

What it costs

On my English-language pages, the Essential package is 999 €: one page with up to twelve sections, texts written by me, a logo, a short video and an order calculator or booking. For a bakery with several categories, Business at 1,499 € gives you up to 10 pages and includes setting up your Google Business Profile. Monthly care is 69 € and includes hosting and backups, and with active care you can change prices, photos and texts yourself in my simple editor. Domain around 10 to 20 € a year, paid separately. All prices and options are on the website cost page.

A 10-minute check for your bakery

• Search "cake shop" or "bakery" plus your town on your phone. Do you appear, and is the pin at your door?
• Tap your website button. Does it open your own site, or Facebook?
• Can a stranger find a birthday cake photo, a "from" price and your lead time in under a minute?
• Do your pick-up hours match on Google, Facebook and your site?
• Is there a clear way to ask about allergens?

If two or more answers disappoint you, ask for my free check. Within 24 working hours you get a short PDF: how your bakery appears on Google Maps and in search, how fast your site loads on a phone, and 3 concrete fixes.