How to make a brewery website that fills the taproom

TL;DR: How to make a brewery website

This guide covers building a brewery website from scratch: the domain, a starting template, the pages people look for first, including Our beers, Taproom and Events, and a what's pouring list you keep current yourself. Yola website builder gives you ready-made Menu, Services and Pricing blocks, so the tap list, tasting flights and tour prices sit on the page in a layout you can edit in two minutes when a line changes. No code and no developer at any point.

The second half covers photographing the taproom and the brewhouse, a form that takes tour requests, table reservations and private hire inquiries, the licenses and hygiene ratings you are entitled to show, a what's on page for tap takeovers and release days, and local search for phrases like "brewery in [city]". Work through all ten steps and you end up with a site that answers what's on tap before anyone has to call you.

What to include

Top features of a brewery website

How to make a brewery
website in 10 steps

Your domain is what somebody reads off a can label, a chalkboard or a festival banner and types in three days later. Use the brewery name, and add the city where the plain version is taken or where your name is a common word. Take the .com if it is free. It is still what people type by reflex, and it reads as the real one when a visitor has three tabs open.

Leave hyphens and numbers out. Anyone repeating "oak-street-brewing-2" over a noisy bar drops both and lands somewhere else. Breweries get named after streets, hills and dead local industries, so check what else in town already uses that word before you commit to it.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Whatever you register, use the same name on your Google Business Profile, your cans and the sign over the door, so the three never disagree.

Nobody here needs to write code. You edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the way you would edit a document, which matters more for a brewery than for most trades: the person who knows what went on tap this morning is the person who should be able to change the page.

Answer a few questions about the brewery and Yola's AI Website Builder puts together a first draft to work from. The full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans and the free plan has basic AI, so treat the draft as a starting layout and write the beer descriptions yourself. Nobody else can describe your saison.

Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site, so there is nothing else to set up. Start from a template that already has a menu layout, a gallery and a contact form rather than a blank page.

Start from a template

Brewery templates to start from

Six pages do most of the work. Keep the set small on purpose, because every extra page is another page somebody has to remember to update when the hours change for a holiday weekend.

A separate Tours page earns its place once tours run every week and sell out. Until then the Taproom page carries the times and the contact form takes the requests, which keeps the tour details in one place instead of two that drift apart. Build these six first and add the rest once they are live:

The what's pouring list is the page. Somebody deciding where the group goes on Saturday checks it before they check anything else, and if it is a month old they assume the rest of the site is too. Give it a page of its own, or a block high on the home page, and put the beer name, the style, the ABV and one honest line on what it tastes like against each line. Say whether it is available in the taproom, in cans to take away, or both, because that is the next question.

Split the list in two so keeping it current stays a two minute job. A core range section that changes a few times a year sits on top, and under it a rotating list of the four or five lines that actually move, with an "updated" date beside it. When a keg blows you edit the short half from a phone behind the bar. Marking a beer as nearly gone is worth doing too, since it brings people in this week rather than next.

Then price the rest of what you sell. Tours get a price per person, a duration, what is included at the end and the group size you can take. Flights get the number of pours and the measure. Growler and can fills need the container policy spelled out, including whether you fill another brewery's growler, because every taproom answers that one at the door. Private hire and wholesale are quote work rather than list work, so give the minimum you need to respond and let the form do the rest.

Yola's ready-made Menu, Services and Pricing blocks handle all of this: a name, a short description and a figure sitting together, editable by whoever is on shift. A beer that has been off for three weeks and is still listed costs you more than a plain page would, so build the layout around how fast you can change it.

Photograph the room the way it looks at seven on a Friday, not empty at ten in the morning. Tables full, the tap wall lit, the light through the roller door. A group choosing between two places is picking a room to sit in, and the empty-room shot every brewery starts with tells them nothing about the one they will walk into.

Shoot the beer in your own glassware, straight on and in daylight, with the tap wall or the tanks behind it. Get the brewhouse, the canning line mid-run, the patio, the food, and the staff who will actually be pouring. Real photos beat stock here by a distance, because a stock pint could be anyone's. Name the files for what is in them, like riverside-brewing-taproom-patio.jpg rather than IMG_4417.jpg, and put the same description in the alt text so the photos can turn up in a local image search.

Yola's ready-made Galleries block holds a set like this, and on a paid plan the Custom code block lets you build a gallery laid out exactly how you want it. Short video earns its place on a brewery site, especially a twenty second clip of the canning line or a pour, but that is footage you shoot and host elsewhere and then embed, not something the builder makes for you.

Tours, tables for eight and private hire all arrive the same way: somebody wants a date held. Yola has no booking system of its own, so those requests come in through the contact form, which is customizable rather than fixed, and you pick the fields. Name, phone or email, the date and time, how many people, and which of the three they want is enough to reply properly. Add one open box for the things that change your answer, like a wheelchair user in the group, a birthday cake, or a coeliac who needs to know what you can pour them. The Forms block help article walks through setting the fields up.

Be clear on the page that a submission is a request and not a confirmed reservation. Yola sends an automatic confirmation so the sender knows it landed, and the wording of that confirmation is worth a minute of thought: say you will come back to confirm, and give the phone number for anyone who needs an answer today. A group that turns up believing a table is held when it is not is a bad Saturday for everyone.

If you already run a third-party reservation or ticketing tool for tours, keep it and link it from the same page, or integrate it. Either way, answer requests the next morning at the latest. A group asking about Saturday on a Wednesday has asked two other places as well.

A brewery carries more paperwork than almost any other food business, and some of it is worth putting where people can see it. Which pieces apply to you depends on where you brew: federal, state and county rules all land differently, and a license that is standard in one state does not exist in the next. Show what you actually hold, worded the way the issuing body words it, and leave the rest alone.

The footer and the taproom page are the right homes for this, with the hygiene rating repeated beside the tour form where a group is deciding. None of it is a marketing claim, so state it plainly and move on.

A taproom runs on dates. Tap takeovers, the guest brewery night, live music, trivia, which food truck is parked outside on Thursday, release days for a beer people have been waiting on, and the times tours go out. One what's on page covers all of it, and it is the page people check second after the tap list.

This is a page you keep current by hand rather than a scheduling tool, and editing it takes a couple of minutes. Every entry needs the date, the start time, where in the building it happens, what it costs if anything, and how to reserve a place, which points at your request form. Write the whole quarter in one sitting while the bookings are in front of you, then edit as things move.

Leave past dates up rather than deleting them. A list of takeovers and release days that actually happened proves the room is busy, and it is the first thing a brewery looking for a guest slot will read before they get in touch.

Almost nobody searches for a brewery by name unless they already know it. They type a place and a category on a Saturday afternoon, which puts the map pack, those three listings with the pins at the top, ahead of everything else you could do. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability covers the technical side of your pages. The rest of this is work you do on Google and in your own headings.

Before you announce it, go through the site on a phone the way a customer would on a Saturday. Tap the phone number and check it dials. Submit the tour form yourself and confirm the automatic confirmation lands, and that it reads the way you want it to. Open the tap list on mobile data rather than the taproom wifi, since big photos that load instantly in the building can crawl on a bad signal.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts between phone, tablet and laptop on its own, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. That leaves you the content, which for a brewery means the tap list above all. Set a standing time each week to update it, put holiday hours in on the day you decide them, and clear finished events off the what's on page.

Give more than one person a login. A tap list that only the owner can change is a tap list that goes stale the week they are at a festival, and a site kept current holds its search ranking better than one left alone since launch.

Common brewery website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of mistakes show up on brewery sites, and each one costs a table, a tour or a trade order.

How much does a brewery website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo when you want your own domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year, and the domain renews at its own rate after that. For a single taproom, that is the whole software bill.

Paying somebody to build it costs a good deal more than the software does. A freelancer or a small agency putting together a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, and the monthly retainer that usually comes with it is the part worth thinking hardest about. On a brewery site, the content changes every week, and every change becomes an email and a wait.

That is the real argument for building it yourself. Yola suits a brewery owner who wants a working site up quickly, with no coding, and who needs to be able to change the tap list from a phone behind the bar at four on a Friday. Once it is live it stays yours: the beers, the hours, the events page and the photos are all things you edit in a couple of minutes, without asking anyone.