Glasgow café website checklist: what it actually needs

A Glasgow café’s website has a small job: tell someone on a phone what you serve, when you’re open, whether they can eat safely and how to get a table or an order. This Glasgow café website checklist covers what does that work, including the Scottish rules a generic template won’t mention.

The Glasgow café website checklist, short version

• Menu: typed on the page, not a PDF or a photo of the board.
• Hours: identical on your site and your Google Business Profile, with Scottish holidays set in advance.
• Allergens: beside each dish, or a clear line telling people to ask staff — and available before the order is placed if you sell online or by phone.
• Ordering and booking: one route you chose on purpose, linked from Google.
• Speed and photos: your own photos, sized so the page loads quickly on a phone.
• Accessibility: readable contrast, no sideways scrolling, buttons big enough to tap.
• Food hygiene: your FHIS result, pointing at the official record.
• Structured data: CafeOrCoffeeShop markup with your address, hours and menu link.

1. Put the menu on the page as text

The PDF menu is the habit most worth breaking. When the Government Digital Service explained why GOV.UK moved away from PDFs, its point was that information in a PDF is harder to find, use and maintain than the same information on a web page. PDFs don’t reflow on a small screen, they’re awkward to update, and people keep old copies — all bad news for a menu read on a phone that changes with the seasons.

Write it as headings and lists — breakfast, lunch, cakes, drinks — with a line per item and dietary notes beside the item, not in a key at the bottom. When the soup changes, you edit a line instead of re-exporting a file.

Google Business Profile has its own menu editor for food and drink businesses and a separate menu link field. Google says editor changes can take 24–48 hours to show on Maps and Search, so the link to your own menu page is the version you control day to day.

2. Make your hours match Google, Scottish holidays included

Google’s guidelines ask for your regular customer-facing hours — when a customer can walk in and be served, not when the baking starts. Put exactly the same hours on your site.

Holidays are where cafés slip. Google lets you set special hours, recommends confirming hours for official holidays even when they’re unchanged, and suggests marking the business temporarily closed for seven or more days in a row. Scotland’s bank holidays differ from England’s, and an English template won’t remind you. Still to come this winter, from GOV.UK’s list for Scotland:

• St Andrew’s Day — Monday 30 November 2026
• Christmas Day — Friday 25 December 2026
• Boxing Day (substitute day) — Monday 28 December 2026
• New Year’s Day — Friday 1 January 2027
• 2nd January (substitute day) — Monday 4 January 2027

Set each on Google and on your site in the same sitting, so both give the same answer. Our Google Business Profile guide for Glasgow covers the rest of the listing.

3. Allergen information, the Scottish way

Food Standards Scotland’s technical guidance is the reference. For food served unwrapped, you can give allergen information in writing upfront, for example on the menu, or tell customers to ask staff. If you rely on staff, a written notice, menu, ticket or label must be clearly visible where the customer chooses their food, saying the information is available from a member of staff.

Your website is another place customers choose food. The cleanest option is allergens beside each item on the web menu, kept in step with the counter; the minimum is a clear line on the menu page saying who to ask.

• Selling online or by phone. The FSS guidance says the mandatory allergen information must be available to the customer, free, before the purchase is concluded and at the moment of delivery — for example an online menu showing allergens at the point of order, and a label on the container or a copy of the allergen matrix with the food.
• Food you pack before it’s sold. Sandwiches or salads you wrap on the premises ahead of time are “prepacked for direct sale”. Since 1 October 2021 each pack needs the food’s name and a full ingredients list with allergens emphasised. Food packed at the customer’s request isn’t covered by that rule; it follows the unwrapped-food rules above.

FSS also consulted from February to May 2026 on making written allergen information for non-prepacked food more consistent. If the rules change, a text menu is the easiest thing in the business to update.

4. Ordering and booking: your own route, or a platform

Google Business Profile lets food businesses choose a preferred ordering provider or add their own ordering link from the Food ordering section. Choose deliberately: that choice decides where someone lands when they tap to order.

For tables, a phone number and a short request form suit most small cafés. Say on the site whether you take bookings at all.

5. Speed on a phone, and photos that earn their place

Google’s Core Web Vitals give a practical target. Largest Contentful Paint — when the largest image, text block or video in view has rendered — should come within 2.5 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint should be 200 milliseconds or less, and layout shift 0.1 or less, judged at the 75th percentile of page loads.

If your page opens with a big photo, that photo is likely to be the largest thing in view. Resize it to the size it’s shown at, compress it, and skip the slideshow of full-size images above the menu. Use real photos — your food, your counter, your room — and give each a short text alternative, so a screen reader announces “flat white and carrot cake on the window bench”, not a file name.

6. Accessibility basics

Four points from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) cover most of a café site:

• Text alternatives for images (success criterion 1.1.1).
• Contrast of at least 4.5:1 for normal text (1.4.3). Pale grey on cream is hard to read in daylight.
• Reflow: content works at 320 CSS pixels wide without sideways scrolling (1.4.10). A wide price grid often breaks this.
• Target size: tap targets at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels (2.5.8), so Call, Directions and Order are easy to hit.

A text menu helps here too: it can be enlarged, read aloud and translated. A photo of a chalkboard can’t.

7. Your food hygiene result (FHIS)

Scotland doesn’t use the 0–5 ratings seen in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Under the Food Hygiene Information Scheme a business gets Pass (it meets the legal requirements for food hygiene) or Improvement Required; a new business or new owner shows as Awaiting Inspection. Display is voluntary in Scotland, and Food Standards Scotland publishes every result on its website either way.

If you have a Pass, say so near your address and hours, linked to your entry on the FSS search. It points at the official record rather than a badge anyone could copy.

This may change. Petition PE2217, published in June 2026, asks the Scottish Parliament to press for a graded scale and mandatory display. In August 2026 the Scottish Government replied that the power to require display already exists and that new ways of telling consumers about compliance, including mandatory display, will be explored; the petition is still under consideration. Our note on food hygiene ratings in Scotland covers appeals, re-visits and showing your result online.

8. Structured data: tell search engines what you are

Structured data (JSON-LD in Google’s examples) states your business details in a form machines read reliably. Schema.org has a specific type — CafeOrCoffeeShop, a kind of FoodEstablishment and LocalBusiness — and Google’s local business documentation says to use the most specific subtype you can.

Google requires only name and address. It recommends a telephone number with country code, url, geo, openingHoursSpecification and, for food businesses, servesCuisine and menu, the address of your menu page. On Schema.org, hasMenu supersedes menu, and acceptsReservations takes true, false or a booking link. Keep the hours identical to your page and Google: section 2 again, in code.

Leave out review and star-rating markup for your own café; Google reserves review markup on local businesses for sites that collect reviews about other businesses.

Where to start

If you only do three things this week: replace the PDF menu with a text page, set your Scottish holiday hours on Google and your site together, and add a clear allergen line to the menu page.

To see a café site we built, look at the Artrez Cafe page. For neighbourhood lists across the city, browse our Glasgow Top 10, and if you run something other than a café, the trades we work with are on the home page.