Opening a coffee shop is hard. If you’re looking for the best hosting for coffee shop websites, check out this list so you can focus on making good coffee.
As someone who loves to shop online for coffee, one of the things I look for is an easy-to-use and fast website to help me make orders. Sadly, not all coffee shops take this into account, and there’s been many a time when I left my coffee in the cart because the website is just too unorganized and slow.
If you run a coffee shop, it’s important to keep your customers happy and find the best hosting for coffee shop websites! Below is a list of some of the best hosting sites to give you more bang for your buck. You might also be interested in our round-up of the best accounting software for a coffee shop.
1. Bluehost
Bluehost is by far one of the most popular hosting platforms for websites. Bluehost currently hosts over two million sites. It has an easy user interface that makes even the most novice coffee shop owners experts at creating a high-quality website. Some of the best features of Bluehost that make it one of the best hosting services for coffee shop websites include:
- Affordability: A month-to-month subscription is the price of a cup of coffee. For a little more for the choice plus subscription, you can host unlimited websites, have 40 GB of storage, and access 24/7 customer support!
- Popularity: If you’re new to hosting, you might need a little help with looking at reviews and online tutorials. Fortunately, there are lots of resources out there to help you get started on Bluehost, considering it already hosts millions of websites.
- Free Domain: All Bluehost packages come with a free domain for one year, meaning you can create a custom website and snag that catchy domain name you need without shelling out more money on top.
- Free SSL Certificate: SSL certificates are vital for coffee shops and other online retailers. They are used to assure customers that their private information and data are protected. Bluehost makes it easy to have an SSL certificate on your website to help attract customers and help you make sales.
2. GoDaddy
GoDaddy is another highly popular hosting company that has an incredible 4.7 out of 5-star rating on TrustPilot, with a whopping 54,377 reviews to date. GoDaddy is known as one of the best hosting for coffee shop sites as well as for other small and large businesses. With GoDaddy, you can experience a number of benefits, including:
- WooCommerce Integration: GoDaddy’s WooCommerce plugin is made specifically for those that want a hosting platform integrated with their eCommerce store, making it perfect for coffee shop owners. With the plugin, you can have a one-stop shop for everything related to your coffee shop, including a single dashboard that allows you to review all online orders, payments, refunds, and deposits.
- Low Transaction Fees: If you plan on selling anything online, be aware that you’ll need to pay a transaction fee if you’re using a hosting site. This transaction fee is a sort of tax you will pay on anything you sell online. Fortunately, GoDaddy has some of the lowest transaction rates, a few cents per transaction, plus another 2.3% of the sales price.
- Affordability: While GoDaddy is a bit more expensive than Bluehost for its single website hosting platform, this is still pretty darn good for hosting a website, having access to 24/7 support, an unmetered bandwidth, and standard high performance.
- Daily Backups: GoDaddy is also one of the best hosting for coffee shop sites since it includes free daily backups. When running your website, the worst thing that can happen is you lose content on your blogs or other similar content on your website. With daily backups, all of your hard work and templates are saved, so you never have to start from square one.
3. Shopify
For most coffee shop owners, Shopify is enough to get their website started and help them create an online shop that is beautiful and easy to use for customers. Shopify, as the name suggests, is a hosting platform designed specifically for e-commerce, with over 500,000 sites managed and a high 4.6 out of 5 overall rating by Website Builder Expert. Some of the best features of Shopify include:
- Easy to set up: Shopify is incredibly easy to use, with minimal coding required to set up your website. Shopify features click and drag features, as well as easy captioning and templates that give you a basic setup with little to no web hosting experience.
- Free web hosting: Shopify allows you to not only host your website for free but also integrates eCommerce features that will enable you to sell items online. While it isn’t the best to host a lot of content, like blogs and newsletters, it’s perfect for coffee shop owners that want to focus on selling their inventory while having free web hosting on the side.
- Shopify POS: Shopify allows coffee shop owners to integrate their online store with brick-and-mortar shops using their point of sale system. You can keep track of orders, accept payments, and receive payment updates all from a single dashboard!
You might also be interested in our round-up of cheapest coffee shop tables.
4. DreamHost
DreamHost is one of the best hosting services for a coffee shop due to its ease of use with WordPress. When it comes to designing your own coffee shop website, WordPress is the gold standard for web development. However, WordPress is notoriously complicated for novice users. DreamHost makes it easy by offering:
- Quick-Start Wizard: Quick-Start Wizard combines the power of WordPress with usability, integrating drag-and-drop features so you can design a website without any coding.
- Over 200 Starter Sites: Whether you run a coffee shop or want to venture into another business, DreamHost has over 200 templates to help you get started and find a template that suits your industry.
- Real-Time SEO Recommendations: SEO, or search engine optimization, is vital to help attract customers to your coffee shop. SEO recommendations will optimize your website so it lands on the first search results page, helping guide customers to your store.
5. Squarespace
If you’ve been shopping as a customer yourself, you might have noticed lots of coffee shops use Squarespace for their POS and online hosting. There’s a good reason for this! Squarespace might not have tons of customization options, but it does boast features perfect for coffee shops, including:
- Built-In Inventory Management: You’ll never have to worry about keeping track of your inventory when selling online since Squarespace tracks your sales and keeps track of your inventory as you go.
- Ease of Payment Setup: If you’re selling coffee online or need to integrate your website with your store, Squarespace makes it easy by allowing you to connect to a payment processor easily. You can use Stripe or PayPal and accept credit and debit cards with Squarespace, making it easy for customers to purchase online and in-person.
- Email Campaigns: One of the best ways to attract customers to your online store is through email campaigns. You can create a custom list and send out newsletters and discounts through email with Squarespace.
6. Hostgator
Hostgator is another incredibly popular hosting option and one of the best hosting for coffee shop sites if you’re on a budget. Features on this platform include:
- Maximum Affordability: The monthly plans are among the lowest compared to competitors, which is why over two million sites are hosted currently.
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee: Nothing is worse than having your site go down unexpectedly. Hostgator guarantees your website will remain up and running almost 100% of the time!
- One-click Plug-ins: Plug-ins allow you to amp up your website and add tons of other features, from SEO to WordPress plug-ins. Hostgator allows you to add plug-ins with a single click on their cPanel dashboard.
7. Wix
Wix is perhaps the best-known drag-and-drop style hosting platform out there. As a business owner, Wix is perfect for small shops that want to create a website fast and sell a handful of products, like your best-selling coffee bags. If you liked this post, you might enjoy our reasons why you should open a coffee shop.
Features from Wix include:
- SSL Protection: DDoS protection offered by Wix ensures your online payments and other private information is well protected from potential hackers.
- Built-in SEO Tools: From link redirection to Google integration, Wix users experience a high level of visibility online, which translates to more sales, thanks to its built-in SEO tools.
- Visitor Analytics: See how many people are visiting your online store and continue to gain more clients by improving your site using their analytics tool.
