NYC Bakery Websites Study 2026: 216 Sites Checked

On October 10, 2026, we loaded 216 independent New York City bakery websites the way a customer’s phone does, and checked each one for the same things: does it work, does it say when you’re open, can you call, can you see the menu, can you order, and how long does it take to load.

The short version:

12% of the websites didn’t work at all. Dead addresses, security warnings, parked pages, and three that now show unrelated sites, two of them online gambling.
9% show opening hours on the first screen of a phone. 41% have no hours on the homepage or one tap away.
34% let you call with one tap. 19% show a phone number that can’t be tapped.
3% load their main content within Google’s 2.5-second mark on a standard phone test. The median takes 13.5 seconds.
85% let you order or buy online. Ordering is mostly solved. The basics around it aren’t.

No bakery is named in this post. The point isn’t to single anyone out; most of these problems take minutes to fix, and the list at the end shows how.

Why bakeries

A bakery customer usually decides on a phone, often on the sidewalk. The questions are simple and urgent: are you open right now, what do you have, how do I get there, can I order ahead. A bakery’s website has a few seconds to answer them before the customer walks to the next place.

That makes bakeries a good test of whether a small business website does its most basic job.

How we checked

The bakeries. We started from OpenStreetMap, the open map used by many apps, and took every place tagged as a bakery or pastry shop inside the five boroughs that lists a website: 311 listings. We kept one entry per business and removed chains (any business with more than three shops in the city, or shops across several states or countries). That left 216 independent bakeries.

The test. Each website was loaded in Chrome set up as a common Android phone (a 390 by 844 pixel screen), and every site went through the same checks:

Does it load, and does it load securely?
Does the homepage list opening hours, and are they visible on the first screen without scrolling?
If not, are hours one tap away on an Hours, Visit, Location or Contact page?
Is there an address, and a phone link you can tap?
Is there a Menu link, and does it lead to a page, a PDF or pictures?
Can you order online, through the bakery’s own ordering, a shop, pre-orders or delivery apps?

Speed. Every working site also went through Lighthouse, the free test from Google that powers PageSpeed Insights. It simulates a mid-range phone on a slow 4G connection, which is a fair picture of a customer outside on mobile data. To check the setup, we ran the same test on our own site the same day: it scored 88 and showed its main content in 3.0 seconds.

Checking our checks. Automated checks can be fooled, so we checked two random groups of 20 sites by hand. Hours were read correctly on 19 of 20 and then all 20 (we fixed one rule in between and ran everything again). Online ordering was read correctly on 17 of 20 and then 18 of 20. One blind spot remains: hours shown only inside a picture count as missing, so the hours numbers may run a little low.

Finding 1: one in eight bakery websites doesn’t work

Of the 216 websites, 26 (12%) didn’t work for a visitor:

10 addresses no longer exist.
9 show a security warning, so the browser tells the customer the site may be unsafe.
3 now show an unrelated website: two online gambling pages and one junk-removal company’s server page. The bakery let the address lapse, and someone else bought it.
1 is listed for sale, and 2 are parked placeholder pages.
1 had its server down.

All of them are still listed on the map we used. A customer who taps a bakery’s website and lands on a gambling page doesn’t think “expired domain”. They think the bakery is gone, or worse.

The rest of this post looks at the 190 sites that worked.

Finding 2: almost nobody shows their hours where people look first

Hours are the first thing most people want from a bakery’s website, and they’re the hardest thing to find:

9% (17 of 190) show opening hours on the first phone screen.
45% list hours somewhere on the homepage.
59% have hours on the homepage or one tap away.
41% have no hours on the homepage or on the page you’d tap to find them.

On a phone, “somewhere on the homepage” often means scrolling past every photo on the page. And bakery hours are unusual: many close early, sell out, or open only some days. A customer who can’t tell if you’re open at 2 PM on a Tuesday will often just not come.

Finding 3: two thirds of sites won’t let you call with a tap

34% have a phone link you can tap to call.
19% show a phone number as plain text, so the customer has to copy it or remember it.
66% give the address on the homepage.

A tappable number is one line of code. On a phone, it’s the difference between calling and giving up.

32% have no Menu link at all.
16% put the menu in a PDF or in pictures, which are slow to open on a phone, hard to read, and invisible to search engines.

Most of the sites without a menu (42 of 60) sell online, so the shop does the job of a menu. But a customer deciding whether to walk over wants a quick look at what you bake and what it costs, without starting an order.

Finding 5: ordering online is the one thing most bakeries got right

85% let you order or buy online in some form: their own ordering system, a shop, or pre-orders for cakes.
2% only link to delivery apps.
13% have no way to order online.

That’s a good sign: bakeries have invested in the part that makes money directly. The irony is that the same sites often skip the free basics, like hours and a phone link, that bring people through the door.

Finding 6: most bakery websites are slow on a phone

On Lighthouse’s phone test (189 sites measured):

The median score is 54 out of 100. Only 4% score 90 or more, which Google rates as good. 40% score under 50, rated poor.
The median site takes 13.5 seconds to show its main content. Google’s mark for a good experience is 2.5 seconds; 3% of sites meet it, and 94% take longer than 4 seconds.
The median homepage weighs 2.8 MB. A quarter weigh more than 5 MB, and 15 weigh more than 10 MB.

Pages that heavy are usually heavy because of photos. Bakeries are visual businesses and rightly lead with pictures, but a photo straight from a camera can weigh more than a whole well-built page. A 10 MB homepage on a phone with two bars of signal is a page most people won’t wait for. Our post on why websites are slow on phones goes through the fixes.

Finding 7: the smaller signs of a site nobody looks after

8% aren’t built for phones at all, so the customer has to pinch and zoom.
4% don’t use a secure (https) connection, which browsers flag as “Not secure”.
Of the 84 sites that show a copyright year, 6 show 2023 or earlier, a small sign that nobody has looked at the site in a while.
75% link to Instagram. Many bakeries clearly put their energy there, which makes sense, but Instagram doesn’t show up when someone searches for your hours.

Finding 8: the platform matters less than the setup, with one exception

The sites were built on a wide mix of platforms: Squarespace (43), custom or other (35), WordPress (32), Shopify (32), Wix (12), Square Online (12), Toast (10), GoDaddy (8) and a few others.

Missing hours showed up on every one of them. No platform had more than 3 in 12 sites showing hours on the first screen, so that problem comes from how a site is set up, not from the builder.

Tap-to-call is the exception. Fewer than 1 in 5 Squarespace sites (8 of 43) and Shopify sites (5 of 32) had a tappable phone number, against about half of WordPress sites (14 of 32) and custom-built sites (19 of 35). The groups are small, so treat this as a pattern worth checking rather than a rule, but if your site runs on a store or template builder, check your phone number first.

What to fix first

If you run a bakery, start at the top. Each of these came up again and again in this study, and none takes long to fix.

Make sure your website address works. Open it on your phone today. Check that the domain renews automatically, so it never lapses and ends up in someone else’s hands.
Put today’s hours at the top of the homepage. One line under your name is enough: “Open today 7 AM to 3 PM”. If you sell out early, say so.
Make your phone number tappable. Your web designer can do this in minutes, and most website builders have a setting for it.
Put the menu on a page, not in a PDF. Even a short list of what you bake every day, with prices, helps customers and search engines.
Shrink your photos. Most builders resize images if you upload them at a sensible size. A homepage under 2 MB is a good target.
Look at the bottom of your page. An old copyright year, a dead link or a missing https lock tells customers the site is forgotten.

None of it needs a new website.

How our concept study handles it

We design websites for small businesses, and one of our concept studies is a bakery: Sixth Hour Bakery, an imagined bakery on Staten Island, not a real business. We built it around these questions before running this study. Today’s hours sit in the bar at the very top of the page, a small board on the first screen shows what’s out of the oven and what’s still baking, and ordering ahead takes one step from the homepage.

About the data

Date: all sites checked on October 10, 2026. Websites change, so these numbers describe that day.
Source: OpenStreetMap data for New York City, © OpenStreetMap contributors. OpenStreetMap only includes businesses someone has added, so this study says nothing about bakeries that have no website at all.
Sample: 216 independent bakeries with a listed website; 190 working sites for most findings; 189 for speed.
Tools: Chrome through Playwright for the checks, and Lighthouse 13 for speed, mobile settings.
Privacy: results are reported as totals only, and no business is named.

We plan to run the same study again next year to see what changes. If you’d like the full method, or you run a bakery and want to know how your site did, get in touch.

We Checked 216 NYC Bakery Websites on a Phone. Only 9% Show Their Hours Up Front.