How people find a bakery before they walk in
In a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults that Menufy commissioned and Dynata ran in April 2026, 34% said they search Google first when deciding where to eat. The survey asked about restaurants in general, not bakeries.
The same survey found that 59% of people had decided not to order from a restaurant because they could not find basic information online. If the hours or the menu are hard to find, the order goes to the next place on the list.
Most of that business now happens away from the table. The National Restaurant Association said on April 16, 2025 that nearly 75% of restaurant traffic happens off-premises, so almost 3 out of 4 orders are taken to go. The same release said 57% of adults had recently used mobile ordering, including 74% of millennials and 65% of Gen Z adults.
For a bakery, that points at three pages: the menu, the hours and the pre-order. Each one has to read well on a phone, held in one hand, in a line or a parked car.
The menu page: real text, prices, and one address
Put the menu on the page as text, not as a photo of the chalkboard or a PDF of the printed menu. The W3C's accessibility guidance explains that real text lets people with low vision change the font, the size and the color so they can read it, and a picture of text does not allow that. Text is also easier for you to change when a price goes up.
Each item needs a name, a short line about what it is, and a price. Group the items the way your case is laid out, so bread, pastries, cakes and drinks each get a heading. If something sells out by mid-morning, say so next to it.
Keep the menu at one address on your site and point everything at it. Google Business Profile has a menu editor where a food business can build a menu with sections, items, descriptions and prices, and it can also set the link to the menu page. Google's structured data for local businesses has a field that tells Google the address of a food business's menu page. When the profile, the site and that field all point at the same page, you have one menu to keep current, not three.
The hours page: regular, pickup and holiday
A bakery often runs on more than one set of hours. The door might open early, cake pickup might start later and end sooner, and the counter might close when the bread runs out. Google Business Profile lets a food business set separate hours for services like pickup and takeout, apart from its regular opening hours. Put the same split on your site, in the same words, so the two never disagree.
Holidays are where hours go wrong. Google suggests confirming your hours for official holidays in your Business Profile, even when they are the same as your regular hours. Do it before each holiday, and add a line to your hours page for the busy baking weeks.
Wrong or missing hours cost real orders. In the Menufy survey, not finding basic information online was enough for 59% of people to skip ordering from a restaurant. Hours are about as basic as information gets.
The pre-order page: dates, notice and a cut-off
Cakes, party trays and holiday pies need time. The pre-order page should say how far ahead to order, the last time to order for the next day, and when pickup happens. Then the ordering tool should hold people to those rules, so you are not sorting it out by phone.
Square Online is one example of how those settings look. An item can be sold as a preorder with a pickup date set anywhere from 24 hours to 365 days ahead. The pickup settings let you set how many days in advance customers must place pickup orders, under Require orders in advance. The setting called Cut off time moves any order placed after that time to the next day.
Other ordering tools have their own versions of these settings under other names. Look for the same three things: how far ahead someone can order, how much notice you need, and when the day closes.
What a bakery site can leave off
The three pages carry the weight. Most of the rest can go, or move lower on the page.
- A menu as a photo or a PDF. Text works for people who need to resize it, and a picture does not.
- A long welcome paragraph above the hours and the order button.
- Pop-ups that cover the menu on a small screen.
- Anything that pushes the hours, the address or the order link out of sight.
What to do
- Open your site on your own phone and find the hours, the menu and the order link. If any one takes more than a couple of taps, move it up.
- If your menu is a photo or a PDF, retype it as text with prices.
- In Google Business Profile, build the menu in the menu editor and set the menu link to your menu page.
- Confirm your hours for the next official holiday in your Business Profile, even if they don't change.
- In your ordering tool, set how many days ahead a custom order must come in, and the cut-off time for next-day orders.
- Place a test pre-order for next week and check the pickup date and time it gives you.
For more, see websites for bakeries and ordering systems. Every site we build ships with its search and answer-engine baseline.