Website for a Home Bakery: What to Put on It and What It Costs

A website for a home bakery is not a design project. It is one page, or a few, that answers the questions your customers already text you: what are you baking this week, how much is it, when can I get it, and does it have nuts. If your site answers those and takes the order, it is doing its job. Everything else is decoration.

This guide covers what to put on the site, the four ways to build it, and what the tools that take the payment themselves cost you on a real $30 order. It covers how to keep your home address private, what one state requires on the website itself, and how to set it all up in an afternoon. It is written for a part-time baker selling from a home kitchen, not a storefront bakery with a lease and a staff.

Does a Home Bakery Actually Need a Website?

A home bakery needs one link where customers can see the menu and place a paid order, and for most part-time bakers that link does the job of a website. What it does not need is a five-page brochure site that shows your bread and then says "DM to order." That kind of site adds a monthly bill and leaves you doing the order-taking by hand.

Here is the test. If a customer can go from your link to a paid order with a pickup time, without messaging you, you have what you need. If they cannot, you have a menu, not a website that works.

Three signs you are ready for a real ordering link:

• You get more than 5 orders a week through texts, DMs or comments.
• You have lost track of who paid, or who ordered which flavor, at least once.
• Customers ask the same three questions (price, pickup, allergens) every week.

If you are still choosing between tools, our comparison of the best platforms for selling baked goods online lines up the options side by side. If you are not sure whether you need a website, a marketplace or just an order form, this breakdown of the three walks through when each one fits.

If you want your home bakery website to take the order and the payment, not just show the menu, set up a Homegrown storefront. The plan costs $10 a month on annual billing, your menu, pickup times and payment live on one link, and you can have it live the same afternoon.

What Should a Home Bakery Website Include?

A home bakery website needs nine things, and all of them fit on one scrolling page. About half of Homegrown's bakery vendors (89 of 184 on September 29, 2026) list 4 to 10 products, and that many fits on one page. Customers do not read a bakery site like a book. They scan for the menu, the price and the pickup day, then order or leave.

1. Your bakery name and what you bake, in one line. "Sourdough, focaccia and cinnamon rolls, baked in Plano on Fridays" beats a paragraph about your journey.
2. The menu with prices. Every product, every size, every price. No "message for pricing."
3. The order cutoff. "Orders close Wednesday at 8 p.m. for Saturday pickup." One sentence, near the top.
4. Pickup days and times, and the general area. Your neighborhood or cross streets, not your full address (more on that below).
5. What is in each product. Ingredients and the major allergens, product by product.
6. Photos of the real product. One clear photo per product, taken in daylight.
7. A short about line. Who you are, in two or three sentences, and that you bake in a home kitchen.
8. How to reach you, and how to ask about custom orders, like a birthday cake or a large order.
9. A way to order and pay. The order and the payment happen on the page, so a sale does not end in a text thread.

What to leave off: a blog you will not keep up, a gallery of every cake you ever made, a "coming soon" page, and a contact form that is the only way to order. Each of those makes the page longer without making an order easier.

If you take custom cake orders, give them their own line with a starting price and a lead time. Our guide to taking custom orders as a home bakery covers how to cap and price custom work so it does not eat your week.

What Are the Four Ways to Build a Home Bakery Website?

A home bakery website can be built four ways: an ordering storefront, a pre-order tool built around timed releases, a general website builder, or a simple one-page site with a payment link. They differ less in how they look and more in who does the order-taking, you or the software. Setup runs from about 15 minutes on Homegrown, according to its signup page, to what we would expect to be a weekend or more on a website builder.

Scroll sideways to see every column.

Features come from each company's own pricing or product page, checked September 29, 2026.

Which one fits comes down to how you sell:

• You bake a set menu for pickup one or two days a week. An ordering storefront fits, because the pickup schedule and cutoff are built in.
• You sell out in scheduled releases and customers wait for the drop. A pre-order tool built for drops fits that rhythm.
• You want a designed site with several pages and a blog. A website builder gives you that, and we would expect you to spend a weekend or more setting it up.
• You only need a page that says who you are and where to order. A one-page site works, as long as the order goes somewhere that tracks it.

How Much Does Each Option Cost on a $30 Order?

On a $30 order, the baker pays $1.17 in card processing on Homegrown and on Hotplate when your customers pay its fee, $1.29 on Square Online's Free plan, and $1.77 on Squarespace Basic once its 2% transaction fee is added. The monthly plan sits on top of that. Here is the full fee stack for a bakery doing 40 orders a month at $30.

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We checked every price in this table on each company's pricing page (and Homegrown's signup page) on September 29, 2026. Card processing is figured on the $30 price; on a total that includes tips, tax or fees it runs a few cents higher. Hotplate's own pricing example, a $30 subtotal with a tip and sales tax, shows $1.27 in payment processing. Hotplate's pricing page says you can pay its fee yourself or pass it to the customer. When your customers pay the fee, they pay $984.00 in Hotplate fees over 480 orders. Squarespace's Core plan ($29 billed annually) drops the transaction fee to 0%. Carrd is not in this table because it does not take the payment itself: its Pro Standard plan ($19 a year) adds payment forms and embeds from services like Stripe and PayPal, and that service's own card rate applies to each order.

The cheapest line depends on who you want to pay. Hotplate costs you the least when your customers cover its fee, but your $30 order shows up at checkout as $32.05. Square's Free plan has no monthly bill and a higher card rate. Homegrown and Squarespace charge a flat plan, and Squarespace Basic also takes 2% of each online sale, which makes it the most expensive row here unless you choose to cover Hotplate's fee yourself. If the Squarespace fee is new to you, our explainer on the Squarespace transaction fee shows when upgrading to Core pays for itself.

Do You Need Your Own Domain Name?

You do not need a domain name of your own to sell, but a .com with your bakery's name can cost about $11 a year and is easy for customers to remember. Porkbun listed .com domains at $11.08 a year on September 29, 2026, with free URL forwarding, which sends anyone who types your domain to whatever link you choose.

How each option handles a domain:

• Squarespace: annual plans include one free domain for the first year, then it renews at Squarespace's standard rate.
• Carrd: the Pro Standard plan ($19 a year) lets you publish to a domain you own.
• Square Online: the Free plan does not connect a domain you own, according to Square's plans page; that starts on the Plus plan ($49 a month).
• Homegrown: your storefront lives at a findhomegrown.com address, which Homegrown's signup page shows as findhomegrown.com/store/your-name.

Pick a domain that matches the name on your labels and your Instagram handle. If you are still naming the bakery, check that the .com is open before you print anything. Our list of bakery name ideas includes how to check a name before you commit to it.

What Should Your Menu Page Show?

Your menu page should show every product with a photo, a price for each size, and what is in it, and you can aim for 4 to 10 products; about half of Homegrown's bakery vendors list that many. A short menu is easier to bake, easier to photograph and easier for a customer to decide from.

Most bakery vendors sit between 1 and 20 listings, and only 14 of 184 list more than 20. Sizes and flavors carry much of the menu. A loaf offered as a half and a full, or cookies sold by the half dozen and the dozen, is one listing with two prices, not two listings.

A menu page that works has these parts for each product:

• A name a customer would say out loud ("Cinnamon rolls, pan of 6").
• A price for every size, with the count or weight in the name.
• One photo of the real product.
• Ingredients and allergens.
• Whether it is available every week or only this week.

How Do You Share Pickup Details Without Posting Your Home Address?

Post your pickup days, times and general area on the site, and send the exact address only to people who have placed an order. That keeps strangers from showing up at your door on a Tuesday and still gives paying customers everything they need.

The same idea applies on Google. Google's own Business Profile rules say a business with no permanent on-site signage should be listed as a service-area business, and Google's Business Profile sign-up guide says a business with no storefront where it receives customers must hide its address. A home bakery with no sign out front that delivers, or meets customers away from home, fits that description. If customers only pick up at your door, read Google's guidelines to see which setup applies before you list your address. You can list up to 20 service areas by city or postal code instead, and Google says your overall area should stay within about 2 hours of driving time from where you are based.

A pickup section that works reads like this:

• Where: "Porch pickup near Spring Creek and Custer in Plano. Exact address in your order confirmation."
• When: "Saturdays, 9 to 11 a.m."
• Cutoff: "Order by Wednesday at 8 p.m."
• If you are late: "Orders not picked up by 11 a.m. can be picked up Sunday from 4 to 5 p.m."

For more on setting cutoffs and pickup windows, see our guide to taking pre-orders for a home bakery.

What Does Your State Require on a Bakery Website?

Some states put rules on the website itself when you sell cottage food online, and Texas is a clear example: the label information has to be on your website before the customer pays. Other states set their own rules on online sales, shipping and where the food can be handed over. Read your own state's cottage food page before your site goes live.

The Texas page also says the yearly gross income limit for a cottage food operation is $150,000, and the law behind it, Senate Bill 541 (in effect since September 1, 2025), says DSHS adjusts that figure each year for inflation, so check the page for the current number. It lets you put a registration number from the DSHS Online Licensing Registry on the label instead of your home address, and it says the address or that number goes on the label after the customer pays. That is how Texas squares with keeping your street off the website: register, use the number, and if you are unsure what your website statement must include, ask DSHS or your local health department before you launch. If you sell baked goods that need refrigeration, like cream or custard pies and cakes, the law calls them time and temperature control for safety (TCS) foods, and registration with DSHS is required, not a choice. Those foods also need the date they were made on the label, plus this statement in at least 12-point type on the label or the receipt: "SAFE HANDLING INSTRUCTIONS: To prevent illness from bacteria, keep this food refrigerated or frozen until the food is prepared for consumption." SB 541 says the statement you post before payment must carry the labeling information from that TCS section, so the safe handling statement goes on your website too.

For a Texas baker, that means your website needs:

• Your bakery name, exactly as it appears on the label.
• Each product's name and its major allergens.
• The private-residence statement, word for word.
• If you sell cream or custard pies, cakes or anything else that has to stay cold, the DSHS safe handling statement, word for word.

After the customer pays, your address or your DSHS registration number goes on the label that goes out with the order.

Texas also requires the in-person delivery described in the callout above for every online order. If you plan on porch pickup like the Plano example above, ask DSHS or your local health department whether a customer collecting an online order at your door counts before you take online payments.

How Do You Set Up a Home Bakery Website in One Afternoon?

You can set up a working home bakery website in one afternoon, about 3 hours by our estimate, if you have your menu, prices and photos ready before you start. The order below keeps you from redoing work.

• Write the menu first. List 4 to 10 products, each with sizes and a price. Do this in a notes app before you open any website tool.
• Take the photos. One photo per product, near a window, on a plain surface. Shoot them all in one session so they match.
• Write the allergen and ingredient line for each product. Copy it from your labels so the site and the label say the same thing.
• Pick your pickup days, times and cutoff. Write the one-sentence version: "Order by Wednesday 8 p.m. for Saturday 9 to 11 a.m. pickup."
• Choose your tool and create the account. Use the fee table above to pick. Homegrown's signup page puts its setup at about 15 minutes; a website builder takes longer because you design the pages yourself.
• Add every product, then the pickup schedule. Enter sizes as options on one product, not separate products.
• Place a test order yourself. Check the confirmation, the pickup time and what the customer sees. Fix anything confusing.
• Share the link in three places the same day. Your Instagram bio, a text to your regulars, and a printed QR code for your next market or porch pickup.

If you already have a following, step 8 is where the site starts to pay off. Send the link to the 10 or 20 people who order most, not just a post to everyone.

How Good Do Your Bakery Photos Need to Be?

Your bakery photos need to be clear, well lit and of the real product, and a phone near a window is enough. In the Homegrown catalog pull, 150 of 1,436 bakery listings (10.4%) had no photo at all, and 143 of 184 bakery vendors had a photo on every bakery listing. A listing with no photo asks a customer to guess.

What makes a photo work on a bakery site:

• Daylight from the side, not an overhead kitchen light.
• A plain background: a cutting board, parchment or a clean counter.
• The product at the size you sell it: the whole pan of 6, not one roll.
• A cut or torn shot for bread, so customers see the crumb.
• The same angle and surface across the menu, so the page looks like one bakery.

A second photo helps on products people cannot picture, like a filled cookie or a layered bar. 458 of the 1,436 bakery listings (31.9%) had two or more photos.

What Should Each Product Description Say?

Each product description should say what it is, how many or how big, what is in it, and how to store it, in two to four short sentences. In the same catalog pull, 451 of 1,436 bakery listings (31%) had no description at all, so a short one already puts you ahead of about a third of the bakery listings on Homegrown.

A description that answers the usual questions:

• What it is: "Country sourdough, 36-hour ferment, crackly crust."
• Size or count: "About 2 pounds, sliced on request."
• What is in it: "Flour, water, salt. Contains wheat."
• How to store it: "Keeps 3 days in a paper bag, or freeze sliced."
• When it is available: "Every Saturday. Order by Wednesday."

Write it once and reuse the ingredient and allergen line from your label. When the website and the label match, customers trust both. Update the description the same day you change a recipe, because a customer with a nut allergy reads the website, not your recipe card.

A Storefront Link That Takes the Order, Not Just Shows the Menu

If what you really want is one link that shows this week's menu and takes a paid order for a set pickup time, Homegrown is built for that. It costs $10 a month billed annually ($12.50 billed monthly), with no percentage fees beyond standard payment processing of 2.9% + $0.30, which you pay and your customer does not.

How it compares for a home bakery:

• Squarespace Basic gives you a designed multi-page site for $19 a month billed annually, but it adds a 2% transaction fee on online sales, and you set up pickup and ordering rules yourself.
• Hotplate has no monthly plan and is built around drops. Its 5% + $0.55 fee is passed to your customer or paid by you, your choice, so a $30 order reads as $32.05 at checkout or costs you $3.22.
• Square Online's Free plan costs nothing a month, but online card payments run 3.3% + 30¢.

What Homegrown has that matters for a bakery site: sizes and flavors under one listing, each with its own price; an allergens and ingredients field on every listing; a pickup schedule with set days and time windows, including pickup from your home; order prep time, so nobody orders Saturday bread on Friday night; and a built-in QR code for your boxes and booth sign. It also calculates and remits sales tax.

What it does not do: it will not connect your own domain today, it has no drops feature, and it is not a full website builder with a blog or extra pages. Customers create a Homegrown account to place their first order. Your storefront is listed on the Homegrown marketplace, but plan on most orders coming from people you send to your own link.

How Do Local Customers Find Your Bakery Website?

Local customers find a home bakery website through the places you already are, not through search at first. For the first few months, expect most visits to come from the link you share, not from Google.

Five places to put your link:

• Your Instagram or Facebook bio. Put the ordering link there, and say "order link in bio" on every bake post.
• Your regulars' phones. A weekly text with the menu and the link to your top 20 customers is the most direct channel you have.
• Your boxes and bags. A QR code sticker on every box turns a gift into a new customer.
• Your farmers market booth. A sign with the QR code lets people pre-order next week's bread while they wait in line.
• Google. A Business Profile with your link, set up as a service-area business if your bakery fits Google's service-area rules, can put your bakery and your link on Google Search and Maps for neighbors who look you up.

Put the same link in all five places. If you change tools later, you only need to update five spots, not fifty old posts.

What Mistakes Do Home Bakers Make With Their Websites?

A common mistake is building a site that shows the menu but cannot take an order, so every sale still ends in a text thread. It costs you a monthly bill and saves you no time.

Other mistakes to avoid:

• "Message for pricing." Some customers who cannot see a price will not ask. Put a price on every size.
• No order cutoff. Without one, orders arrive the night before bake day and your plan falls apart.
• The full home address on the page. Share the area on the site and the address in the confirmation.
• A menu that does not match what you bake this week. Hide sold-out or off-season products the day they stop.
• Allergens only on the label. Customers decide before they order, so put the allergen line on the site too.
• Paying for pages nobody visits. A $25-a-month site with a blog you never update costs $300 a year.

What Do Experienced Home Bakers Do Differently?

Bakers who run this well treat the website as the place where the week gets decided, not a brochure. They set the menu and the cutoff before the week starts, send the link, and bake to the order count. That one habit is what turns a website from a cost into a tool.

They also keep the menu short on purpose. A baker who offers 6 products well can photograph them in one session, keep ingredients in stock, and bake in fewer batches. When a new flavor goes on, an old one comes off.

Finally, they check their site on a phone every week. A customer who taps your link in a text or on Instagram sees it on a phone first, so if the menu is hard to read on a phone screen, fix that before anything else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a website for my home bakery?

You need one link where customers can see your menu, prices and pickup times and place a paid order. For most part-time home bakers, an ordering storefront or a free Square Online plan does that job. A full custom website is optional and makes sense when you want several pages and have time to build them.

How much does a website for a home bakery cost?

A website for a home bakery costs from $0 a month (Square Online's Free plan, with 3.3% + 30¢ per online card payment) to about $19 to $25 a month for a website builder like Squarespace Basic, which also takes a 2% transaction fee. Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 2.9% + $0.30 card processing and no platform fee. A .com domain can add about $11 a year. These prices were checked on September 29, 2026.

What pages should a home bakery website have?

A home bakery website can be a single page with the menu and prices, the order cutoff, pickup days and area, ingredients and allergens, photos, a short about line and a way to reach you. Add a separate page only for something with its own questions, like custom cakes. Fewer pages means fewer things to keep up to date.

Should I put my home address on my bakery website?

No. List your neighborhood or cross streets and your pickup times, and send the exact address in the order confirmation. Google's Business Profile rules also say a business with no storefront where it receives customers must hide its address and list service areas instead. If customers pick up at your door, check Google's guidelines to see which setup fits.

Can I sell baked goods from my website under cottage food law?

In many states you can, but the rules differ. Texas allows online sales when the customer buys online from you and you, an employee or a household member delivers in person, and it requires the label information, everything except the address, to be posted on your website before payment. Read your own state's cottage food page before you take online orders.

Is Squarespace or an ordering storefront better for a home bakery website?

Squarespace is better if you want a designed site with several pages and are willing to set up ordering and pickup yourself. An ordering storefront is better if your main need is taking paid orders for set pickup days. On a $30 order, Squarespace Basic costs the baker $1.77 in fees plus the plan, and Homegrown costs $1.17 plus its $10 monthly plan (billed annually).

Related Reading

These guides pick up where a home bakery website leaves off, from the startup steps to the order rules that make the site work on bake day:

• How to Start a Home Bakery: the full set of startup steps, from your state's cottage food law to your first ten customers.
• Best Platforms for Selling Baked Goods Online (Not Etsy): the platforms compared side by side, with what each one costs per order and who it fits best.
• How to Take Pre-Orders for a Home Bakery: order windows, batch caps, payment at ordering and the pickup handoff that keep bake day calm.
• Bakery Name Ideas: names for a home bakery and how to check one before you print labels.
• How to Create a Farm Stand Website: the same build-it-yourself approach for produce, if you sell both.
• Linktree vs a Storefront for Food Vendors: why a link-in-bio page of buttons is not the same as a place to order.

Put This Week's Menu Online Today

A home bakery website needs the nine things in the checklist above, all on one page, starting with your menu with prices, a cutoff, pickup times, what is in each product, and a way to order and pay. Write the menu first, take the photos in one session, check your state's cottage food page, and pick the tool whose fee stack fits how you sell. On a $30 order, the per-order fees in this guide run from $1.17 to $3.22, a gap of about $2, so pick for how you sell, not for the fee alone.

Once it is live, give it four weeks before you judge it. Send the link every week, keep the cutoff the same, and count how many orders arrive without a single text message. That number tells you whether the site is working.

If you want that as one link your customers can order from, start your Homegrown storefront for your home bakery. Add this week's menu, set your Saturday pickup window and cutoff, and send the link to your regulars tonight.