A new catering website in 7 days: what actually happens when you stop putting it off

By now you know the shape of the problem: the site that isn’t landing bookings, the office manager who found a competitor with real pricing on the homepage, the wedding lead who scrolled past your stock photos. None of that is news to you anymore.

What’s kept you from acting is the picture you carry of what a rebuild involves. Months of calls. A designer who wants you to draft your own “about us” copy. An invoice that starts as an estimate and ends somewhere else entirely. That picture describes the old agency model, not this one. Here’s the real breakdown of a 7-day catering website build, including the part that actually needs your attention. It’s less time than one full-service event.

Day 0: one hour, mostly stuff you already have

You send what’s already sitting in your files and your phone:

• Sample menus by event type: corporate lunch, wedding, cocktail hour
• Per-person pricing, or the ranges you’re comfortable publishing
• Photos from real events, plated food and full setups, not stock trays
• Your best reviews, tagged with the venue name if you have them
• The number and inbox that should get the inquiry

Text it over, drop it in a folder, forward the photos straight from your phone. We take it from there. Nobody hands you a blank page and asks you to write your own service descriptions. Turning a 40-person office lunch into a booked line item in plain words is the part we do.

Days 1 through 5: the build happening without you

Days 1 and 2 build the skeleton and the words. Every page answers one question: what does someone need before they hand you their event date and their budget? A page per event type, real pricing ranges, proof stacked wherever someone might hesitate, an instant-quote path that doesn’t demand a phone call to get started. It’s the same conversion approach covered earlier in this series, built around your menus and your market specifically. Then it’s written the way an office manager or a bride actually talks, not “passionate about food since 2009” filler.

Days 3 through 5 are the build itself, mobile-first, with a bride comparing three caterers from her phone in a parking lot as the working assumption. No plugins bolted onto an aging platform that needs constant patching, no database choking under a Saturday traffic spike. Here is why that matters. Google’s 2016 research found 53% of mobile visitors abandon pages slower than 3 seconds, and Portent’s 2022 analysis found 1-second pages converting about 3 times better than 5-second ones. A slow menu page isn’t a minor annoyance. It’s a lead who never filled out the form.

None of this touches your calendar. Keep running events.

Days 6 and 7: review, then flip the switch

Day 6 brings the live preview link. Check it on your own phone, send it to your event manager, click through the quote form yourself. Whatever needs changing, say it directly: “put the corporate pricing higher up,” “swap that dessert photo,” “add the plated-dinner package.” Changes land within 24 hours. It’s also a preview of what owning this site is like going forward, which beats the hours currently sunk into website upkeep between event weekends.

Day 7, your domain points somewhere new. Same web address on your proposals and your van, different page loading underneath. From that point every “corporate catering near me” search, every venue referral, every inquiry flows through a site built to close instead of one built to just exist.

What it costs and what you keep

No discovery call needed to get a number. It’s published: $2399£1,899 one-time for the Standard website, $7500£5,900 one-time for the Growth website with lead routing that sorts wedding from corporate inquiries, and deeper SEO. Set that next to what’s actually running through your head:

Everything built is yours outright: domain, site, copy, in your name. There is no contract and no monthly fee, so nothing ties you to us after launch. A new per-person price or a seasonal menu is live within 24 hours of a message.

The first 30 days

Nobody should tell you a new site is instant, so here’s the straight version. Rankings build over several weeks as Google works through the faster, deeper site. What changes immediately is what happens to the demand you already get: a corporate lead sees pricing instead of a contact form and books same-day, a bride finds real event photos instead of stock trays, and referrals land somewhere worth sending them. The leaks stop on day one. The ranking gains show up after.

Someday, or next booking season?

Every month this sits on someday, the leaks from this series keep running: the office manager who found a competitor’s pricing first, the bride who never called back, the referral who assumed you were fully booked because the site never said otherwise. Seven days and one hour is what it takes to shut that off.

Before you commit to anything, watch the free video walkthrough of a live catering site and see what day 7 actually looks like for a company your size. Then decide whether someday finally gets a date.