How to Create a Coffee Cart Website: Step-by-Step Guide
If you’re starting a coffee cart business, creating your website is one of the most important steps, but it can feel overwhelming if you’ve never done it before. Luckily I’ve had a teeny tiny bit of experience editing the backend of websites through my previous jobs. However, I’ve never created a website on my own before so I can walk you through some of the logistics I’ve figured out on my coffee cart journey. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to create a coffee cart website, including buying a domain, building your site, setting up SEO, and getting found on Google.
How to Buy a Domain for Your Coffee Cart Website:
By now I hope you’ve picked out your coffee cart business name and if so you can now officially buy your website domain. A domain is the www.solsticecoffeeco.com that you see in the search bar above this blog. These domains are like user names for your website so they have to be unique and allow people to find your business. Oftentimes the one you want may be taken so you may have to adjust and add in additional words like “co”. You can buy a domain for around $5-15 on websites like Name Cheap (where I got mine from). It’s very easy to create a login and purchase one. You can do this way before you want to launch your website because it’s good to buy the domain you want before someone else takes it.
How to Build Your Coffee Cart Website (Beginner-Friendly):
Now it’s time to create your coffee cart website which is ~scary~ but I created mine early on so that I could start my blog page even though I don’t have a menu, professional photos, and bookings yet. It depends on what stage you want to launch your website in and what works for your business. That being said, I played around with a few different website creators and found that Squarespace was the easiest one for me to navigate and use. They even have lots of templates you can start with if you’re not comfortable building your site from scratch. I would recommend watching some Youtube tutorials and playing around with creating pages, which you can do before you launch the site of course.
SEO for Your Coffee Cart Website (How to Get Found on Google)
Aka SEO is a very important practice when creating your own coffee cart website. This is technically something that should be done when you first create your site and as you add on new pages. If you are unfamiliar with SEO and how it works, I encourage you to do some research and make sure you have appropriate meta descriptions and keywords. It basically is optimizing your website to be seen in various search engines, like Google. The better your SEO ranking, the more you will show up when people search for “Coffee Cart” for example. The very first coffee cart that comes up is simply playing the SEO game… and winning!
How to Launch Your Coffee Cart Website:
Once you’ve added in your logo, photos, pages, wording, etc and feel ready to launch you can connect your domain name to the website. This seems complicated, but is relatively easy to do by following the directions given to you by your chosen platform, such as Squarespace. Once that is connected, you can officially launch your coffee cart website by making it visible to the public!
Submit Your Website to Google (Search Console + Sitemap):
Now that you’ve launched your coffee cart website, you’re all finished right? Wrong! It’s good practice to set up a Google Search Console account and submit a Sitemap. A sitemap is basically a coded file that is sent to Google that shows the structure of your website. This will help Google “crawlers”find your website and crawl your pages more efficiently. While this is not technically required for small sites, it is still a good idea and can help speed up Google discovering your pages, and helps with future growth since your sitemap will update automatically as you add on to your website.
Set Up Your Google Business Profile for Your Coffee Cart:
I have yet to create my Google Business Profile, since I will be moving out of North Carolina soon, but once I am settled, this is the first thing that I will do. The google business profile is the profile that comes up when you search for a business in the area. It shows the business name, photos, address, hours, website, etc. Even if your coffee cart doesn’t have a consistent location, still create one! It helps your business seem legit and helps people find you!
Final Thoughts on Building Your Coffee Cart Website:
I hope this was helpful for some of you to become aware of some of the behind-the-scenes website work that I just found out about. Creating a coffee cart website might feel intimidating at first, but once you break it down into steps, domain, design, SEO, and Google setup, it becomes much more manageable.
Your website is one of the most important tools for getting bookings, building trust, and growing your business. Take your time building it, and don’t worry about making it perfect right away.