Web Hosting for Bakeries

Where web hosting for bakeries loses the photographs

Here is the failure, in the order it happens. A customer picks three inspiration photos. Modern phones shoot large, so each one is several megabytes. The form on your site has an upload limit set lower than that, often much lower. She presses send, the page hesitates, and either nothing happens or she gets an error she does not understand. She does not email you instead. She goes to the next bakery.

You never see any of this. There is no bounce, no warning, no entry in a list of failed orders. The enquiry simply does not exist as far as you are concerned, and you carry on believing the website does not bring in much work.

Where the limit actually lives

This is not usually a plan problem, which is the useful part. It is a configuration value on the server, and on ordinary shared hosting you or your developer can normally change it yourself in the control panel. Your form software then has its own limit on top, and both have to be raised. Raising one and not the other is the most common reason a fix does not take.

• The server has a maximum upload size, and a separate maximum for the whole submission, which has to be larger again because three files travel together.
• There is also a time limit on how long a request may run. A slow phone connection uploading large photos can hit that even when the size limits are fine.
• Your contact form plugin or script has its own allowed size and its own list of permitted file types.
• HEIC, which is what an iPhone shoots by default, is often not on that permitted list. The customer sees a bare rejection and no explanation.

The control panel is where the server side of that gets changed. It is a ten minute job for somebody who has done it before. It is also worth actually testing afterwards, from a phone, with a photo you have just taken, rather than assuming.

Whatever the limit ends up being, say it on the form in plain words, along with what to do if the photos are too big. A line reading "if your pictures will not upload, email them to orders@ and mention your name" recovers orders that would otherwise vanish.

Holiday ordering, and the traffic that comes with it

Bakery traffic is not steady. It is flat for weeks and then it is Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mother's Day, and every one of those has a cut-off date that people are checking at eleven at night.

The worry is usually that the site will fall over. It almost never does, because the pages people are hammering are ordinary text. What does struggle is a page doing unnecessary work: a gallery of two hundred full-size photographs straight off a camera, a site rebuilding every page from scratch on every visit, or a form that has to process a large upload while a hundred other people are reading.

The fix is nearly always weight rather than plan size. Resize the photographs before uploading them. Turn on caching. Take the ordering deadline out of the gallery page and put it somewhere small and fast, near the top.

The deadline needs to be findable and current

The cost of getting this wrong is specific. Somebody orders a cake for the twenty-fourth on the twenty-second because your page still shows last year's cut-off, and then either you do it at a loss or you have an unhappy customer with a phone in her hand. Put the year in the wording. "Christmas orders close Friday 19 December" cannot be mistaken for a leftover from last season the way "orders close two weeks before" can.

Have a plan for the day after the deadline as well. Leaving the ordering form live once you have stopped taking orders generates a queue of enquiries you have to disappoint one at a time.

Who should not spend more than the minimum

A good number of bakeries, and it is worth saying so directly.

If you sell over the counter and you do not take custom orders, your website needs a menu, your hours, your address and a photograph or two. That is one of the lightest things anybody puts on a server. An entry shared plan covers it comfortably and always will.

• You do not need a managed plan for five pages that change a few times a year.
• You do not need extra storage. Photographs that are correctly sized for the web are measured in kilobytes, and the ones that are not should be fixed rather than stored.
• You do not need an online shop if you are not shipping. A form and a phone number outperform a checkout nobody completes.
• You do not need a security product for a site with no logins and no payments. Sensible backups matter more, and cost less.

Where spending more genuinely earns its place: you ship nationally and take payment on your own site, you run several locations from one website, you have a wholesale side with account customers logging in, or you carry a real gallery of hundreds of cake photographs that you add to weekly. Those are load. Volume of walk-in customers is not.