What a winery website needs: cellar door bookings, wine club and online sales

Update·5 November 2026·7 min read

A winery website has five jobs: show your cellar door hours and take tasting bookings, sign people up to your wine club, sell wine online within your liquor licence conditions, match your Google Business Profile, and load quickly on a phone. A site that does those five things well covers what most visitors come for. This checklist goes through each one in turn, in the order visitors usually need them.

Most people who land on a winery site usually want one of three things. They want to know when the cellar door is open, how to book, or how to buy the wine they tasted last weekend. If you would rather we built the site for you, our winery website design page explains how we work with wineries, and Barossa web design covers our work across the valley. This guide is for owners who want to check their current site first.

The winery website checklist

Run through these on your own phone, as a visitor who has never heard of you:

Cellar door hours: on the homepage and contact page, in plain text, matching your Google profile.

Bookings: a clear “Book a tasting” button that works on a phone, with your walk-in and group policy beside it.

Tastings: what each experience includes, how long it takes and what it costs.

Wine club: what members get, how often wine is sent, and how to pause or cancel.

Online sales: a checkout that works on a phone, freight shown before payment, and your licence conditions checked.

Google Business Profile: the right category, your business name, accurate hours and a link to your booking page.

Photos and events: current photos of your cellar door and wines, and an events page with no past dates.

Speed: the homepage shows your hours and booking button within a few seconds on mobile data.

Cellar door hours, bookings and tastings

Opening hours are one of the first things visitors look for on a winery website, and one of the easiest to get wrong. Put them in plain text rather than inside an image, so phones, Google and screen readers can all read them. When your hours change for winter, vintage or a public holiday, update the website and your Google profile on the same day. Two different sets of hours is how visitors end up at a locked gate.

For bookings, say plainly whether walk-ins are welcome, when groups must book and whether you take buses or tour operators. Link one booking tool from every page that mentions tastings. Don’t make people use an enquiry form and wait for a reply. Make sure the confirmation email includes your address, a map link and your cancellation policy.

Give each tasting experience a short section of its own. Cover what is poured, how long it takes and the price, and say whether it suits families and dogs and whether it is wheelchair accessible. People compare seated tastings, food pairings and private tours between cellar doors, so make them easy to compare on yours.

Wine club sign-up that people finish

A wine club page should answer the questions people ask at the tasting bench:

How many bottles come in each shipment, and how often. What each shipment costs, and which wines are included. What members get besides the wine. How to pause, skip or cancel.

If someone has to email to find out, many won’t bother.

Keep the sign-up form short. Name, email, phone, delivery address and payment details are usually enough to start, plus any age confirmation your licence conditions call for. Preferences can wait. Add a QR code at the bench and a link in your booking confirmation email. The moment after someone tastes a wine they love is a good time to ask. If your club already runs on a wine-specific platform, the website’s job is to explain the club well and link to it cleanly.

Selling wine online, and the licence question

There are three common set-ups: a shop on your own website, a wine sales platform connected to the site, or a link to a retailer that stocks you. A shop on your own site keeps customers and order history with you. A wine platform can suit wineries that want club shipments and online orders in one system. Whichever you choose, show freight costs and any minimum order before checkout, say which states you deliver to, and test the whole checkout on a phone.

Before you switch on online sales, check your liquor licence conditions with Consumer and Business Services (CBS) in South Australia. Ask whether your licence covers selling online, what you need to do to confirm a buyer’s age, and what applies to deliveries. Get those answers from CBS rather than from a web designer, and build the checkout around them. Many winery sites show a simple age confirmation screen when the site opens. That screen does not replace whatever your licence requires at checkout or on delivery, and it should not get in the way of someone who only wants your opening hours.

If you are moving an existing store to a new platform, keep the old product links working. When we moved My Positive Perspectives from Wix to Shopify, we set up 301 redirects for 15 old Wix URLs so existing links still led somewhere useful. Our guide to moving from Wix to Shopify covers the steps.

Your Google Business Profile for the cellar door

Plenty of visitors see your Google Business Profile before they see your website. The profile is what puts the cellar door on Google Maps and in the map box for searches like “winery near me” or “cellar door Barossa”. For most wineries the primary category is Winery. Only add secondary categories for other parts of the business you run, such as a restaurant on site.

Google’s guidelines for representing your business ask for your real-world business name and accurate hours. Use the name on your signage, not one stuffed with “best Barossa shiraz”, and set special hours for public holidays. Link the profile to your booking page, add your own photos a few at a time, and reply to reviews. Our guide to Google reviews and the map pack covers how to ask for reviews.

Then make the website back the profile up. Use the same name, address and phone number on every page. Add local business structured data so search engines can read your address, hours and contact details. Google’s documentation on local business structured data explains the markup, and schema.org includes a specific Winery type.

Photos, events and mobile speed

Photos sell a cellar door before anyone tastes the wine. Use your own: the tasting room, the view, the people pouring, the vineyard through the seasons, and clean bottle shots for the shop. Resize them before you upload them. Full-size camera files are a common reason winery sites load slowly.

Events need their own page, kept current: release days, long lunches, live music and festival weekends. Give each one a date, a price, what is included and a booking link. Archive past events. A page full of last year’s dates tells visitors nobody is looking after the site. Post the same events on your Google profile and social pages.

Then test speed where your visitors actually are: on a phone, on mobile data, often parked between cellar doors. Check how long your homepage takes to show the hours and the booking button. Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool gives a fuller report. Autoplay background videos, oversized photos and heavy pop-ups are the usual causes of a slow site.

Getting your winery website built

Our build prices are fixed and published: Starter $519, Essential $749, Business $1,099, Premium $1,599 and Signature $2,649, with online stores from $4,399. Every build includes:

A full SEO set-up, Google Search Console and local SEO. AEO and GEO, which structure the site so AI search tools can read it as well as Google. Google Analytics, business email on your domain and a monthly report.

From Essential up, you also get brand identity, a Facebook page refresh and two social reels for Facebook and Instagram, and a Shopify store set-up is available as a paid add-on. See our pricing page for the full list.

We include up to 12 months free hosting on selected builds. After that, our website care plans from $40 a month cover hosting, updates and support. Send us your current site, or tell us what your cellar door, club and online sales need to do, and we will come back with a fixed price in writing. Get in touch.