Websites for bakeries that win the work.

A bakery has two customer groups who barely overlap. The daily trade is local, habitual and early: people walking past, commuters, parents after the school run, and the Saturday queue for sourdough and pastries. They check opening hours, whether you are open on a Monday, and increasingly whether they can pre-order a loaf so it does not sell out before they get there. The second group is ordering something: a birthday cake, a wedding cake, a batch of brownies for an office, a gluten-free option for a child’s party. They search for "custom cakes" or "birthday cake" plus the town, look hard at photographs of previous cakes, want a rough price, and need to know how much notice you need. Wholesale enquiries from cafés and farm shops make up a smaller third stream that arrives by email.

When demand peaks. Christmas and Easter are the big pre-order periods. Wedding cake enquiries arrive in winter for the following summer; Mother’s Day and Father’s Day produce short spikes.

Bakery websites tend to fail at the most basic thing: the hours. Bakers keep unusual hours, close on odd days and shut for a week in January, and a website that says "open Monday" when you are not costs goodwill that is hard to win back. The second failure is the cake order process, which usually runs through Instagram direct messages - slow, easy to lose, and impossible to price consistently. A form that asks the right questions up front (date, servings, flavour, dietary needs, collection or delivery) saves hours of back-and-forth. The third is allergen information: bakeries deal with every one of the major allergens, and anything sold prepacked for direct sale needs full ingredient labelling under Natasha’s Law, so the website should be consistent with what is on the shelf.